fairs; their officer, the high bailiff, was the returning officer at
elections for parliament; they regulated the markets; they appointed the
coroner. Professor Freeman contrasts an Abbot's town with a Bishop's
town, when speaking about the city of Wells.[1] "An Abbot's borough
might arise anywhere; no better instance can be found than the borough
of S. Peter itself, that Golden Borough which often came to be called
distinctively the Borough without further epithet." And again, "the
settlement which arose around the great fenland monastery of S. Peter,
the holy house of Medeshampstead, grew by degrees into a borough, and by
later ecclesiastical arrangements, into a city, a city and borough to
which the changes of our own day have given a growth such as it never
knew before."

Situated on the edge of the Fens, some miles to the east of the great
north road, without any special trade, and without any neighbouring
territorial magnates, it is hardly surprising that the place seemed
incapable of progress, and remained long eminently respectable and
stagnant. In one of his caustic epigrams Dean Duport does indeed speak
of the wool-combers as if there were a recognised calling that employed
some numbers of men; but he is not complimentary to those employed, for
he says that the men that comb the wool, and the sheep that bear it, are
on a par as regards intelligence:

"At vos simplicitate pares et moribus estis,
Lanificique homines, lanigerique greges."

In another epigram he derides the city itself, calling it contemptuously
"Urbicula"; and he suggests, with a humour that to modern ideas savours
of irreverence, that this little city of S. Peter's, "Petropolis,"
unless S. Peter had the keys, would run away through its own gates.