the following June Lord Rivers came to know if the number could be increased, the mayor called a "Hall" of divers out of every ward to know what the common will was in this matter, and it was finally ordained that the citizens should equip and pay forty additional men, bringing up the number to 100. As all the recruits could not be drawn from the ranks of the townsfolk, the worthy men enlisted the service of strangers, and these had to be kept together, housed and fed, at great trouble and cost[726] until the time for departure. In the end, however, the levy was countermanded, and the troops thus laboriously collected were merely dispersed;[727] a statement of facts the town clerk may be pardoned for recording in a murmuring and discontented spirit. But however onerous these duties may have been, the Coventry men were loyally proud of their city and citizenship. Albeit a traveller, the mediæval merchant loved, as he loved nothing else on earth, the small stretch of land enclosed by the walls of his native town. He or his ancestors had won and maintained at great cost the city's liberties, and he and they spared no pains to make it beautiful. Historians are wont to despise the English burgher of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by reason of his insignificance and poverty, and his neglect of the highest forms of art, and pointedly contrast his small achievements with those of the merchant princes of Italy, or the proud and daring members of the Hanseatic League. It is true he was a commonplace person, living in what was for his country a commonplace age; nevertheless his doings are worthy of remembrance. If the English townsfolk never produced a Van Eyck or a Da Vinci, a Peter Fischer or a Donatello, they patronised all the local forms of art they knew. They had the same great delight in the common possession of a beautiful object as the people of the Italian republics. Though they lacked wealth to build themselves tall and stately houses like their brethren on the Continent, the English burghers could raise tall steeples, build vast churches, adorn their common halls, and rear exquisite crosses in the market place. The fifteenth century glass in S. Mary's Hall, Coventry, still attests the skill of John Thornton, a native of the city, and one of the first acts of the council of Forty-eight was to decree that a cross should be set up in the Cheaping, which was done, though at a cost of £50.[728] In Coventry, as elsewhere, the rich merchants and craftsmen set carvers to carve the miserere seats--enjoying the grim humour these sometimes display, a quality which crops up everywhere in the fifteenth century, even now and then in legal documents--and bade the engraver commemorate the dead by tracing their effigies on brass, or the mason by fashioning their portraits in stone.