The struggle of the boroughs with their feudal lords was however a matter of little significance in England, where since the Conquest feudalism from the point of view of the noble had so unsatisfactory a record. Fallen from the high estate of his brethren on the Continent, despoiled of his might by one strong king after another, he saw himself condemned to play in England a comparatively modest part, and from his less exalted plane was even constrained to assume in his relations to burghers and traders a conciliatory, almost at times a deprecating tone, not because he was lacking in “a high and pompous mind,” but simply because his fortunes had sunk low. Hence the conflict in England was of a very different character from the conflict abroad. Fashions of careful ceremonial indeed long preserved the traditional sense of impassable barriers set between the dignity of the great whose daily needs were supplied by the labour of others, and the low estate of those who had to depend upon their own toil. “Whensoever any nobleman or peer of the realm passed through any parish, all the bells were accustomed to be rung in honour of his person, and to give notice of the passage of such eminency; and when their letters were upon any occasion read in any assemblies, the commons present would move their bonnets in token of reverence to their names and persons.” Burghers and journeymen with an irreverent laugh at men “evermore strutting who no store keep,”[475] gathered to see the noble go by “in his robe of scarlet twelve yards wide, with pendent sleeves down on the ground, and the furrur therein set amounting unto £20 or better,” while a train of followers crowded after him anxiously holding up with both hands out of the filth of the mediæval streets the wide sleeves made to “slide on earth” by their sides, and eagerly watching lest the ladies should forget to admire “the plaits behind;” and the busy mockers of the market-place guessed that tailors and skinners must soon carry their cloths and skins out into the fields if they would find space enough to cut out robes like these.[476] But the fine garments and leisurely state of the great folk, the hollow ornaments of a vanquished feudalism, were matters of little significance; the forces of the future lay rather with the crowd of workers to right and left—with the men who watched the brave procession sweep by, and then gathered in their Common House to decree that any burgher who put on the livery of a lord, or accepted his maintenance and protection, should be blotted out of the book of burgesses, and driven from their market-place and assembly hall, and “that he come not among them in their congregations.”[477]