It is a point often neglected that the Norman Conquest, though of course it introduced a new and much more developed culture than Saxon England had possessed, did not find an impoverished land which the newcomers might “develop.” It found an exceedingly wealthy country according to the standards of the time; and the extent and variety of that wealth stands out very clearly in the narrative of contemporaries. Four centuries later, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, foreign observers make precisely the same comment. It is the packed wealth of South England filling its comparatively small area which the foreign envoy notes. We have a striking piece of evidence surviving before our eyes in the number, decoration and amplitude of our churches to which I have already alluded. To continue the proof after the Tudors would be superfluous. There was even a phase, the beginning of which is to be found in the seventeenth century, the close of which we have unhappily seen in our own generation, when the wealth of England was so superior to that of any other rival that the material circumstances of life among the wealthier classes of the country seemed to belong to a different world from that of neighbouring nations, and when the economic supremacy of England was translated into a credit, a command of money, and an almost contemptuous security to which no other European people could pretend. London, then, for all these centuries has enjoyed the two political conditions necessary to the establishment of a chief market, security and a productive area in the hands of a race by its genius inclined to exchange. There remain the two natural conditions: ease of approach from without and “draining power” from within. Now when we turn to these natural conditions we find that in the matter of ease of approach the Thames was unrivalled. London was, of course, far from the sea--a point with which I will deal in a moment--but there was no haven north of the Mediterranean which called so readily for commerce upon a large scale. Given the political conditions for a market--security and active powers of production and exchange--the Thames was as good a highway to that market as any that could be found. No vessels until quite modern times had to consider their draught or fear the entry of the river (at least, through channels which the pilots commanded), and once within the inland water a swinging tide was at the service of the ships. There were, within that inland stretch, no obstacles, no high intervening hills to becalm, no narrows or islands. In this ease of access, again, must be reckoned the position of the Thames relatively to opposing ports. The wide funnel opened at a few hours’ sail from all that line of ports which begins with the mouth of the Seine and ends with the northernmost mouths of the Rhine. What we now call the coasts of Normandy, Picardy, Flanders, Belgium, and Holland lay, even at their extremes, within one double tide of the Thames.