The example of generosity set by William was followed more or less closely by all his successors except Matilda, who offended the citizens by suppressing their chief liberties, and owed her final failure mainly to the steady support which they therefore gave to Stephen. The prosperity of London reacted on many other cities, which were gradually enabled to buy themselves charters after her model. Writing before 1200 A.D., Fitzstephen boasted that London traded "with every nation under heaven"; and Matthew of Westminster, a generation later, gives an even more glowing picture of English commerce; "Could the ships of Tharshish" (he exclaims), "so extolled in Holy Scripture, be compared with thine?" Our fortunate insularity, the happy balance of power between King and barons, and sometimes the wisdom of particular sovereigns, had in fact enabled commerce to thrive so steadily that it was rapidly becoming a great political power. Michelet has painted with some characteristic exaggeration of colour, but most truly in the main, the contrast between English and French commerce in the half-century preceding Chaucer's birth. French sovereigns failed to establish any uniform system of weights and measures, and were themselves responsible for constant tampering with the coinage; they discouraged the Lombards, interfered with the great fairs, placed heavy duties on all goods to be bought or sold, and at one time even formally forbade "all trade with Flanders, Genoa, Italy, and Provence." All roads and waterways were subject to heavy tolls; "robbed like a merchant" became a proverbial saying. Meanwhile, our own Edward I., though he banished the Jews and allowed his commercial policy to fluctuate sadly, if judged by a purely modern standard, yet did much to encourage foreign trade. Edward III. did so consistently; he may, as Hallam says, almost be called the Father of English Commerce; we have seen how he sent Chaucer's father to negotiate with the merchants of Cologne, and our poet himself with those of Genoa. When, in 1364, Charles the Wise proclaimed freedom of trade for all English merchants in France, this was only one of the many points on which he paid to English methods the compliment of close imitation. But, though foreigners were welcome to the English Government, it was not always so with the English people. Chaucer's grandfather, in 1310, was one of sixteen citizens whose arrest the King commanded on account of "certain outrages and despites" done to the Gascon merchants. The citizens of London specially resented the policy by which Edward III. took foreign traders under his special protection, and absolved them from their share of the city taxes in consideration of the tribute which they paid directly to him.[133] The Flemings, as we have seen, were massacred wholesale in the rising of 1381; and the Hanse merchants were saved from the same fate only by the strong stone walls of their steelyard. But the most consistently unpopular of these strangers, and the most prosperous, were the Lombards, a designation which included most Italian merchants trading abroad. These, since the expulsion of the Jews, had enjoyed almost a monopoly of usury--a hateful term, which, in the Middle Ages, covered not only legitimate banking, but many other financial operations innocent in themselves and really beneficial to the community.[134] Usury, though very familiar to the papal court, was fiercely condemned by the Canon Law, which would have rendered impossible all commerce on a large scale, but for the ingrained inconsistency of human nature. "He who taketh usury goeth to hell, and he who taketh none, liveth on the verge of beggary"; so wrote an Italian contemporary of Chaucer's. But there was always here and there a bolder sinner who frankly accepted his chance of damnation, and who would point to his big belly and fat cheeks with a scoffing "See how the priest's curses shrivel me up!" Preachers might indeed urge that, if the eyes of such an one had been opened, he would have seen how "God had in fact fattened him for everlasting death, like a pig fed up for slaughter"; but there remained many possibilities of evasion. For one open rebel, there were hundreds who quietly compounded with the clergy for their ill-gotten gains. "Usurers' bodies were once buried in the field or in a garden; now they are interred in front of the High Altar in churches"; so writes a great Franciscan preacher. But the friars themselves soon became the worst offenders. Lady Meed in "Piers Plowman"--the incarnation of Illicit Gain--has scarcely come up to London when--