to the throne, confirmed to the citizens of London all the privileges which they enjoyed under his grandfather, with some others in addition, none of which, however, have any particular reference to the commerce of the city. The fullest and most curious account we have of London at this period is that given in the introduction to a Latin life of Becket by a monk of Canterbury, of Norman descent, named William Fitz-Stephen, or Stephanides, as he calls himself in Latin, which appears to have been written about 1174. He says that no city in the world sent out its wealth and merchandize to so great a distance; but he has not recorded either the descriptions of goods that were thus exported or the countries to which they were sent. Among the articles, however, which were then brought to London by foreign merchants, he enumerates gold, spices, and frankincense, from Arabia; precious stones from Egypt; purple cloths from India; palm-oil from Bagdad; furs and ermines from Norway and Russia; arms from Scythia; and wines from France. The citizens he describes as distinguished above all others in England for the elegance of their manners and dress, and the magnificence of their tables. It was in this reign, it may be observed, that London first became decidedly, what Fitz-Stephen calls it, the capital of the kingdom of England (regni Anglorum sedes), Winchester, the ancient royal seat of the West Saxons, although it was the place where the early Norman kings kept their treasury, had begun to decline even before the Conquest, and had sustained such calamities in the civil wars of the time of Stephen that it was never afterwards in a condition to dispute the ascendancy of its rival on the Thames. At this time, according to Fitz-Stephen, and his account is confirmed by Peter of Blois, writing a few years earlier, there were, in the city and suburbs, thirteen large conventual churches and 126 parochial ones. Peter of Blois says, in an epistle to Pope Innocent II., that the population was only 40,000; but this is not absolutely inconsistent with the statement of Fitz-Stephen, that in the reign of Stephen there issued from the city, of fighting men, no fewer than 60,000 foot
