abbey-stream

Updated: May 14, 2025

It is only by glimpses that we catch sight of the first steps towards civic life, of market and market-toll, of flax-growing and women with distaffs at their door, of fullers at work along the abbey-stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of town-meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast of horn. It is the Great Survey of the Conqueror that gives us our first clear peep at the town.

John Richard Greene - Stray Studies from England and Italy