Merchants and the Steelyard will understand the position and meaning of the _Domus Anglorum_. The Englishmen in Bruges, just as the Germans in London, lived separate and apart, a community by themselves, in their own house, which was surrounded by a wall, contained offices, warehouses, sleeping chambers, a common hall, and perhaps a chapel (I say perhaps, because a chapel belonged to every great house). The people of the London Steelyard, whether they had a chapel or no, worshiped in the Church of All Hallows the Great, just outside their walls; and very likely the English merchants observed the same practice. They lived separate from the Flemings; they were never allowed by the citizens of Bruges to consider themselves otherwise than as strangers and foreigners; they had certain privileges and rights jealously accorded, jealously watched, by the Duke of Burgundy and by the worthy burghers of Bruges; jealously guarded and resolutely claimed by the foreign merchants themselves. In order to avoid, as much as possible, the ever-present danger of a popular rising against strangers, the Englishmen lived by strict rule: abroad they walked with circumspection; they kept as much as possible within their own walls. It is not likely that the prejudice against foreigners was so strong in any European country as it was in England; certainly not at Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp, whither foreigners flocked from every port. At the same time, to be a foreigner anywhere invited curiosity; and mediæval curiosity was the mother of hostility; and hostility too often took a practical and an active line. The English factory, therefore, lived under rule, like the Germans of the Steelyard; they lived in a college; they observed hours of closing the gates; they had a common table; save for vows and midnight prayers the life was monastic; on no pretense were women to be admitted, and all the residents were unmarried. These factories or foreign stations of English merchants were continued into quite modern times. In the seventeenth century, and perhaps later, there was an English factory at Aleppo; the Indian Empire sprang out of English factories; the establishment of a factory was the first step toward a footing in foreign trade.