The city of Gloucester had six smiths’ forges in the days of Eadward the Confessor, and paid its tax to the king in iron rods.  Lead was found in Derbyshire, and was largely employed for roofing churches.  Cloth-weaving was specially carried on at Stamford; but as a rule it is probable that every district supplied its own clothing.  English merchants attended the great fair at St. Denys, in France, much as those of Central Asia now attend the fair at Kandahar; and madder seems to have been bought there for dyeing cloth.  In Kent, Sussex, and East Anglia, herring fisheries already produced considerable results.  With these few exceptions, all the towns were apparently mere local centres of exchange for produce, and small manufactured wares, like the larger villages or bazaars of India in our own time.  Nevertheless, there was a distinct advance towards urban life in the later Anglo-Saxon period.  Baeda mentions very few towns, and most of those were waste.  By the date of the Conquest there were many, and their functions were such as befitted a more diversified national life.  Communications had become far greater; and arts or trade had now to some extent specialised themselves in special places.

A list of the chief early English towns may possibly seem to give too much importance to these very minor elements of English life; yet one may, perhaps, be appended with due precaution against misapprehension.

The capital, if any place deserved to be so called under the perambulating early English dynasty, was Winchester (Wintan-ceaster), with its old and new minsters, containing the tombs of the West-Saxon kings.  It possessed a large number of craftsmen, doubtless dependant ultimately upon the court; and it was relatively a place of far greater importance than at any later date.

The chief ports were London (Lundenbyrig), situated at the head of tidal navigation on the Thames; and Bristol (Bricgestow) and Gloucester (Gleawan-ceaster), similarly placed on the Avon and Severn.  These towns were convenient for early shipping because of their tidal position, at an age when artificial harbours were unknown; They were the seat of the export traffic in slaves and the import traffic in continental goods.  Before AElfred’s reign the carrying trade by sea seems to have been in the hands of the Frisian skippers and slave-dealers, who stood to the English in the same relation as the Arabs now stand to the East African and Central African negroes; but after the increased attention paid to shipbuilding during the struggle with the Danes, English vessels began to engage in trade on their own account.  London must already have been the largest and richest town in the kingdom.  Even in Baeda’s time it was “the mart of many nations, resorting to it by sea and land.”  It seems, indeed, to have been a sort of merchant commonwealth, governed by its own port reeve, and it made its own dooms, which have been preserved to the present day.  From the Roman time onward, the position of London as a great free commercial town was probably uninterrupted.