58 THE RATE OF PRODUCTION IN THE 



of monasticism must have been at least as effectual in checking 

 the natural increase of the people as emigration on a large 

 scale is now. We do not indeed know what was the number 

 of professed monks and nuns, but, reckoned along with the 

 parish clergy, it could not have been much short of thirty or 

 forty thousand. Nor is it just to the monastic orders to ignore 

 their great merit as industrial bodies. Industry formed part 

 of the rule of most western orders. Many parts of England, 

 once waste and uninhabited, owed their first settlement to 

 monks who obtained grants of uncultivated land ; and modern 

 agriculture had its first beginnings under the shelter of con- 

 ventual discipline. And if any reliance is to be placed on 

 the statement that Oxford contained thirty thousand students 

 before the outbreak of the pestilence, the number assigned 

 to the secular and regular clergy must have been larger than 

 I have suggested. 



The question may be asked, How far was the population of 

 this country increased in the time before us by foreign immi- 

 gration ? Very little positive information can be given beyond 

 the facts of the settlement of Flemings in Pembrokeshire 

 (mi), and Norfolk (1351), and the fluctuating, often preca- 

 rious, residence of the trading communities in the great cities, 

 such as London, Bristol, and Southampton. In the Southampton 

 rental, vol. ii. p. 648, many of the names are manifestly foreign, 

 and in the margin of the original some later hand has desig- 

 nated many of these as Gives Flandrise. Similarly in another 

 rental of the tenants at Granchester and Cambridge, occupying 

 lands under Merton College, I find the names Walter 

 Schnestat, John Eigenhale, Alice de Baumgered, John Schapp- 

 man, John Henkel, Adam Fitzkauf, words evidently of German 

 origin. But I feel persuaded that we need not seek for the 

 fact, that there was a very free communication between this 

 country and the Continent during the thirteenth and fourteenth 

 centuries, in settlements created on a large scale only. The 

 immigration was probably gradual, though naturally confined to 

 the towns. 



