358 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE 'OSS . tween Egypt and England, which went overland acros France by way of Toulouse to Bordeaux, until early in the fourteenth century, when its harbor silted up, and it expelled its large Jewish colony, and the Italian cities began to send their fleets around Spain to England and Flanders. Bor- deaux and Bayonne on the southwestern coast of France belonged to England from the twelfth to the fifteenth cen- tury and carried on an extensive trade with it, especially in wine. They also traded both with Spain and with Flan- ders. They did not have the consuls of most southern French towns, but were communes with mayors like the towns of the north which we shall presently describe. In central France the chief channel of trade was the river Loire, although the boats of merchants were often halted Privileged to pay tolls and customs duties to the feudal central° lords along its banks, and although, to-day at France least, the river is full of shoals and quicksands and keeps changing its channel. Central France was a fer- tile plain for whose agricultural products the numerous scattered towns furnished markets. As a rule these towns did not attain to sel f-gov ernment, but merely to freedom from many of the feudal and manorial restrictions under which they had previously labored. To distinguish towns with such charters from the consular cities of the south and the communes of the north we may call them " privileged towns. " Towns of this sort were sometimes found in the north and south too, but in central France they predomi- nated. In northern France a few communes were formed in the late eleventh century, but the twelfth was the great period The com- of their rise. They were governed by a mayor, munesof u i_ 111 , northern who, however, had less power than the mayor of a modern American city, and by a council of from a dozen to a hundred members. In the north most of the feudal nobility lived outside the towns, and the towns- men were a class distinct from the knights and hitherto reckoned quite inferior to them. In fact the townsmen had come up from serfdom, and their acquisition of the right of
