Hitherto, we have regarded the town mainly on its constitutional side. Let us now look at its daily life; and here again Cambridge will give us a fairly typical country borough before we come to London.

We must take care to enter before dark, or we shall find the Trumpington and the Barnwell Gates closed in our faces. Cambridge, it is true, never had town walls, but only a ditch and palisade which may still be traced in the lay-out of its streets, and which was crossed by two gated bridges. Here is an admirable example of the superior orderliness of English life, both civil and religious, as compared with any district of equal extent on the Continent of Europe. I have already suggested that this comparative order is due to the effective though slow fusion between Normans and Saxons, and to the fact that we have never been seriously invaded since those days. But, whatever the cause, the fortunate superiority is in itself unquestionable. In a letter received from the late Dom Ursmer Berlière not long before his death, he alluded casually to the greater orderliness of English Church life as a thing that needed no proof. In the civil domain it suffices to consider that Lynn was scarcely better defended than Cambridge, though it was perhaps the richest town in England per head of population in the Middle Ages, somewhat analogous to Frankfurt a/M. in modern Germany, or Hartford in America.