settled days, and it suffered also from violent acts of military license, such as the rebellion of 1101, when Ivo de Grantmesnil "first introduced the horrors of private warfare into England." Still more devastating was the awful catastrophe of 1173. All the historians agree in emphasising the spirit of ruin and desolation which then swept over Leicester. "The houses were never afterwards rebuilt; the streets became lanes, and the sites of the buildings were in time converted into orchards." The inhabitants who survived the fire and slaughter of this great sack were allowed to leave the town on paying 300 marks or pounds of silver, and sought refuge at St. Albans, or at St. Edmondsbury. Polydore Vergil says that Leicester would have been razed to the ground, "if the besiegers could have taken the castle." For some years the town was almost deserted, and the inhabitants must have dwindled to a mere handful.
It was not long, however, before members of the old families began to return, and settlers from other towns were also attracted to the place. The earliest rolls of the Guild Merchant, which date from 1196, give some evidence on this point. We find men registered there, as entering the Guild at the end of the 12th century and later, whose names betray their foreign origin, such as "Brete" (the Breton), and "Voncq" (from the Ardennes); or else their names show that they were strangers to Leicester who came from other parts of the island, as in the case of "de Anglia," and "Norreis" (the Northerner). Many have come from villages of Leicestershire and Rutland; others from Warwickshire, and the Forest of Arden; others from towns like Northampton, Peterborough and Lincoln; from Stratford, Wenlock, Winchester, Carlisle and Lichfield.
By the beginning of the thirteenth century the town was evidently recovering from its grievous wound, but the population was probably far smaller than it had been a hundred years earlier.
It was not, indeed, until the thirteenth century had fully dawned, that the Boroughs of England began to obtain such a measure of independence and freedom as rendered possible the gathering of wealth and the growth of population. The full stream of prosperity did not set in for many a year, but even before
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