The civic management was a strange, incongruous muddle of overlapping and conflicting authorities, each jealous of its own influence and envious of its neighbour’s. The authority of the gilds had now become crystallized into a corporation of more or less definite form, the Mayor and Bailiffs, who exercised the controlling influence over the major part of the city. When exactly a ‘Mayor’ first came into existence is unknown. The civic records go back, indeed, to a certain Florence de Lunn in 1184, though he can hardly be accepted as a ‘mayor’ in the technical sense, but the Mayor only exercised authority over the population within the walls, and ‘the Liberties,’ as they were called, were excluded from his jurisdiction. Of these there were two, the Liberty of the Soke, the region, that is, beyond the walls to the east and north, over which the Bishop had supreme jurisdiction, and which he entrusted to the care of a special officer, the Bailiff of the Soke, and the Liberty of Godbiete, the little manor within the city granted by Queen Emma to the Convent of St. Swithun, from the church tower of which curfew rang, and within whose ‘liberties,’ as already stated, no officer bearing warrant, whether of king, mayor, or bishop, might enter. This tripartite division of authority, in which the civic, episcopal, and monastic powers were mutually confronted, formed a cunningly devised preserve, in which the dexterous fisher in the troubled waters of the day might ply his angle with rarely successful result. The dominating commercial interest was the Wool Trade. England was famous for wool, and to this trade Winchester, as a natural centre with Southampton as her port, owed her prosperity. North of the High Street, not far from the Westgate, stood the great Hall where the wool was brought and sampled, and here the great Tron or weighing machine was kept on which the wool was weighed. In Edward III.’s time the Winchester wool trade was at its height. His wars with France, really undertaken to enable him to control the Channel, and so to keep the trade with Flanders in his own hands, had prospered, and when he introduced his famous wool-stapling measure, by which ‘staples’ or exclusive wool markets were set up in ten towns in England, of which Winchester was one, the commercial prosperity of the city increased by leaps and bounds. But, alas! Edward’s policy was only too successful. The Flanders trade was considered more important than local English [Illustration: BREWHOUSE, WINCHESTER COLLEGE College Brewhouse, adjoining College Street, is one of the oldest portions of the College buildings. Over the archway one of the turrets of Outer Gateway is to be seen.] interests, and when, some years after, he appointed Calais as the staple town, and removed the staple from Winchester, the days of the commercial prosperity of our city were numbered.