The Coventry merchants, like their fellows in other towns, had plentiful dealings with the outside world. The Botoners, whom tradition credits with the building of S. Michael's spire and chancel, held intercourse, it seems, with the men of Bristol, for they married a daughter of their house to a native of those parts, and she became the mother of the chronicler, William Worcester.[572] As the traders of a later generation, the Botoners, most likely, conveyed their wine and wax in vessels towed up the River Severn, a journey beset with difficulties, as the towing-path was overgrown with brushwood, and private landowners and corporate towns on the river bank demanded tolls from the passers-by.[573] The Bristol men, too, were not averse from straining a point in the matter of tolls, and in spite of the grants of freedom the Coventry men possessed, demanded "cayage" from them,[574] when their goods were upon the landing stage. Many times did Adam and William Botoner serve in the mayor's office, and their donations to the church, to town guilds, murage funds, and the like are numberless. As for the great tower of S. Michael's steeple that the brothers built, tradition credits them with spending £100 every year for twenty-one years upon the work.[575] In the early part of the fifteenth century the family entered the ranks of the country landowners by the purchase of an estate at Withybrook. Not only at Bristol, but at Southampton, the chief port of the south, where French dyes were sold, did Coventry men carry on a great part of their trade. And William Horseley, mayor in 1483 and member of the dyers' craft, brought about an agreement between the men of this port and his fellow-citizens in 1456, whereby mutual freedom of tolls was secured.[576]