Read Ebook: Town Life in the Fifteenth Century Volume 1 (of 2) by Green Alice Stopford

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Nor was the growth of manufacturing enterprise confined to the making of cloth. For a couple of centuries the iron trade had made of the Weald the Black Country of those days, and had stirred the Forest of Dean with the din of its seventy-two moveable forges; and now, what with the metals and what with the coal of the country, "the merchants of England maintain and say that the kingdom is of greater value under the land than it is above." In the reign of Edward the Fourth when there was a riot among the Mendip miners, and the Lord Chief Justice went down to "set a concord and peace upon the forest of Mendip," it is said ten thousand people appeared before him at the place of trial. But for all this miners could no longer keep pace with the demands of the country, now that new industries on all sides required metal that had once gone to supply the wants of the farmer only; and though stores were brought from Sweden and Spain, the price of iron increased to double what it had been before the Plague. Shipbuilders at the end of the fourteenth century were fitting out vessels for foreign as well as for English buyers. English gunsmiths began to send out of their workshops brazen guns and bombards superior to anything made in France, and which were said to have given England its success in the French war under Henry the Fifth. A number of towns, big and little, boasted of their bell-foundries, as for example London, Salisbury, Norwich, Gloucester, Bridport, and others. The copper-workers of Dinant had traded with England since the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth century had an entrep?t at Blackwall; but in 1455 the founders set up their industry in England, stealing away secretly from Dinant to profit by the cheaper labour and ready sale in this country. Flemish experts taught to Englishmen the art of brickmaking, and native builders were setting up throughout the country the first brick houses that had been seen in it since the departure of the Romans. A whole series of industrial experiments proclaimed the enthusiasm with which the people accepted the challenge to secure for themselves the profits of foreign manufacturers. Artificers often more ambitious than skilful tried to establish a native industry of glass painting. Instead of fetching from abroad carpets and the tapestry used for churches, manufactories were set up at Ramsey, whence came perhaps also some of the "counterfeit Arras" which adorned the humbler tradesmen's homes. Frames "ordained and made for the making of silk" were at work; lace-makers and ribbon weavers begged the protection of the government; and English workers sent into the market large quantities of the linen called Holland from its first home. The export of raw material fell altogether out of fashion. Traders no longer carried skins over sea undressed to be prepared by foreign labour, but had the work done by English artizans at home. And whereas at the beginning of the fifteenth century merchants brought beer from Prussia to England, at its close they were carrying beer from London to Flanders.

What with the inland and the outland trade, riches gathered into the hands of the merchants with bewildering rapidity, and with results which alarmed good conservatives. A statute of Parliament passed in 1455 lamented the good old days when Norfolk and Norwich used to employ only six or eight attorneys at the King's Court, "in which time great tranquillity reigned in the said city and counties." This "tranquillity" was broken by the manufacturing and export trade, for now a body of eighty or more lawyers busily frequented every fair and market and assembly, moving and inciting people to lawsuits, and while having nothing to live on but their attorneyship yet prospered so well that a wise legislature had to order that Norfolk should henceforth as of old have only six attorneys and Norwich two. Nor does it seem that Norwich was exceptionally wicked, even though in Piers Ploughman Covetousness is represented with a "Norfolk nose," for about the same time we read in Nottingham of twenty-four rolls written within and without with the pleas concerning trading questions of a single year. The whole country in fact shared in traders' profits from king to peasant. It is calculated that in the reign of Henry the Eighth English exports so far exceeded imports as to bring about ?50,000 yearly into the country, and the balance of trade inclined yet more strongly in favour of England under Henry the Seventh. Not only did the king lay up vast treasure, but the very goldsmiths' shops in London were reported by a foreign traveller to contain more precious metals than all those of Rome, Milan, Florence, and Venice taken together. So far as the middle class is concerned evidence of accumulating wealth is to be found on every side, and the masses of the people in spite of the drain of war taxation shared in the general prosperity. In the middle of the fifteenth century Chief Justice Fortescue contrasts their state with that of the French commons. "These drink water; they eat apples with bread right brown made of rye. They eat no flesh, but if it be right seldom a little lard, or of the entrails and heads of beasts slain for the nobles and merchants of the land. They wear no woollen but if it be a poor coat under their outermost garment made of great canvas and called a frock. Their hosen be of light canvas and pass not their knee, wherefore they be gartered and their thighs bare. Their wives and children go barefoot; they may in none otherwise live.... Their nature is wasted and the kind of them brought to nought. They go crooked and be feeble, not able to fight nor to defend the realm; nor they have weapon nor money to buy them weapon withal.... But blessed be God, this land is ruled under a better law; and therefore the people thereof be not in such penury, nor thereby hurt in their persons but they be wealthy and have all things necessary to the sustenance of nature." "In France the people salt but little meat except their bacon, for they would buy little salt" unless the king's officers went round and forced every household to take a certain measure, such as they thought reasonable. But "this rule would be sore abhorred in England, as well by the merchants that he wont to have their freedom in buying and selling of salt as by the people that use much to salt their meats."

An industrial revolution on such a scale as this brought a political revolution in its train. The English population, says a writer of about 1453, "consists of churchmen, nobles, and craftsmen, as well as common people." It was a novel and significant division. Traders and manufacturers took their places somewhat noisily beside their fellow politicians of older standing, filling the whole land till it seems for a moment as if nothing counted any more in English life save its middle class--a busy, hard, prosperous, pugnacious middle-class. Slowly emerging from its early obscurity, in this century it had arrived at power definitely, ostentatiously, carrying a proud look and a high stomach, intent on its own affairs, heedless of the Court, regardless of ministers save when it had to bribe them, irreverent to the noble, the "proud penniless with his painted sleeve," tolerant of ecclesiastics and monks only so long as they could be kept rigidly within their allotted religious functions. Henceforth in the workshop and the market-place home politics and foreign affairs were discussed from a new point of view--the interest of the trader and the manufacturer; and the middle and working classes presently began to fling to the winds the old statecraft whose maxims had done service before their advent among the makers of the national policy.

In the matter of our foreign relations we see the drift of public thought and discussion reflected in a pamphlet by which one of the King's ministers, Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, sought to appeal to the popular imagination and define our right attitude to continental peoples. His Libel of English Policy, published about 1445, was clearly designed for the vulgar use. Written, as the common taste of the day demanded, in rhyming form where the absence of poetic art and the inspiration of a plain common-sense constituted a double claim on public attention, it made its frank appeal to the prejudice of the stall-holder in the market and of the craftsman who lived by making his homely English wares--men who saw in foreign products articles whose sinful extravagance could only be matched by the worthlessness that distinguished all work not turned out by an Englishman. With vigorous strokes the Bishop sketched the outlines of England's trading interests with every nation in Europe, and at the end of each paragraph passionately drove home his moral. Laying hold of the fundamental axiom that the sole and undivided concern of England in all her foreign relations was the protection of her commerce, he maintained that so long as she kept a firm hold on the narrow seas between Dover and Calais, she might rule the trade of the world. For there all commerce from north to south or south to north had to pass through the strait gate held by her sentinels on either side; so that while an inexorable fate drove the nations into her net, England safely hidden behind her wall of defence, the stormy Channel, need have no care so long as she looked well to her navy and kept it swift to seize her prey and strong to drive her enemies back from looking over the wall. At its very outset the commercial society had thus its Cobden to preach after his kind the doctrine of non-intervention and the kingdom of the seas.

The exponents of a new home policy pressed hard on the heels of the founders of a new diplomacy. About thirty years after the Libel of English Policy, another "Libel" was composed in imitation of the first tract. Less pretentious and elaborate than the first, the new poem was probably the work of some person of less exalted rank, whose converse had been with the working men of the country rather than with merchants of London or peers of the realm and ministers of the King, and who was far more troubled about our industrial policy at home than our commercial policy abroad. His view of our position was also finely optimistic. For, seeing that foreign traders were bound, whether they would or no, to come to us either for wool or for cloth, and thus depended on England for one of the first necessaries of life, we, who were put in this happy position of universal provider, were clearly "by God's ordinance," destined first to satisfy ourselves, and then "to rule and govern all Christian kings," and make paynims also "full tame"; and so "of all people that be living on the ground" were most bound to pray and to please God. The recognition of these inestimable blessings should bring of course its corresponding sense of our duty to sell our goods as dear as we could; to "restrain straitly" the export of wool so that "the commons of this land might have work to the full"; and in any case to export only the coarsest wool, on the working of which the margin of profit must be small--but a fifth in fact of what might be made on good material. "The price is simple, the cost is never the less; they that worked such wool in wit be like an ass." Above all, the working men must be protected by law in the conditions of their labour, so that "their poor living and adversity might be altered into wealth, riches, and prosperity," and that for the profit of the whole realm. The growth of industry was already bringing in its train a modern theory that "the whole wealth of the body of the realm riseth out of the labours and works of the common people.... Surely the common weal of England must rise out of the works of the common people."

From this time therefore the policy of England was to be the policy of a great industrial state. But the new way on which its people were thus striving to enter was not to be a way of good-will at home or of harmony with the nations. Merchant and burgher might remain, as they did, absolutely indifferent to all schemes of mere military aggrandizement such as the conquest of France, so that after the taking of Bordeaux by the French in 1445 not a single cry was raised for the recovery of our lost possessions; and they might rather look for the extension of their trade to the bold enterprising genius of trading companies and pirates exulting in freedom from royal interference and military restrictions, and only calling on the State for diplomatic aid in the case where this proved convenient for the winning of a commercial treaty. But the secret of peace was not yet found, nor was the settlement of industrial frontiers to prove simpler than the definition of military borders.

For as yet England had wakened no jealousies simply because she had never been a competitor with other nations; but obvious trouble lay in wait for her people so soon as they were fairly swept into the commercial struggle of the Continent, and introduced by their manufactures to their first real trade disputes. The weaver of the Netherlands, for example, had gladly welcomed the English trader as the inexhaustible provider of his raw material; but it was another matter when the Englishman came as a rival manufacturer laden with bales of cloth, grudging the old supply of wool, and setting up stalls in Flemish markets to seduce away his ancient customers. The Flemish towns had seen an end to their prosperity, and towns in such a case were bitter in negotiations with their rivals. Bruges which in the thirteenth century had 40,000 looms, was at the end of the fifteenth century offering citizenship at a mere trifle to draw back inhabitants to its deserted streets; Ypres, which in 1408 had a population of from 80,000 to 100,000, and from 3,000 to 4,000 clothworkers, had in 1486 only from 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, and twenty-five to thirty cloth-factories; and in Ghent matters were little better. Against all the misery of a century of slow death in Flanders--a misery on which the English weaver throve and fattened--the doomed manufacturers set up hasty barriers on this side and on that, taxes and tolls and municipal ordinances and State decrees to shut English cloth out of Flanders, which were met by angry English rejoinders forbidding Flemish cloth in the English markets. Similar difficulties followed everywhere the appearance of the English trader with his goods. The Hanseatic League drove him out of Denmark, and the Teutonic Order banished him from Prussia. Moreover while disputes of manufacturers kept the North in a tumult, commercial quarrels disturbed the South, and English merchant vessels met the Genoese or the Venetians in the seas of the Levant to fight for the carrying trade of the Mediterranean. No limit was set to the pirate wars that raged from Syria to Iceland till a great statesman, Henry the Seventh, made his splendid attempt to discover through international treaties the means of securing a settled order for the new commercial state.

Nor was the question of home politics more easy of solution. Under the steady pressure of public feeling the government was gradually forced out of the early simplicity of its view of regulating commerce as a financial expedient in aid of the Treasury, and began to concern itself anxiously about the protection of industry in the interests of the community. Cloth manufacturers in particular entered on a period of protected security such as the Staplers had never known, when kings became the nursing fathers of their trade, and its prosperity was considered an absorbing charge to the government. But when Parliament began in 1463 to concern itself very actively with industrial problems, the question of trade legislation had already become extremely complex and difficult. As soon as the village weaver began to make cloth for the Prussian burgher or the trader of the Black Sea instead of for his next door neighbour, the old conditions of his trade became absolutely impossible. The whole industry was before long altogether re-organized both from the commercial and the manufacturing side. The exporting merchants, as we shall see later, drew together into a new and powerful association known as the Merchant Adventurers. Meanwhile the army of workmen at home was broken up into specialized groups of spinners, weavers, carders, fullers, shearers, and dyers. The seller was more and more sharply separated from the maker of goods. Managers and middlemen organized the manufacture and made provisions for its distribution and sale. The clothier provided the raw material, gave out the wool to be made up, and sold again to the draper. And the draper "lived like a gentleman," and sold to the big public, despising the lower forms of trade. Old-fashioned economists and timid conservatives looked on aghast at the accelerating changes, and declared that the country was being brought to certain ruin by the reckless race of its people to forsake handicrafts or the production of wealth, and press wholesale into the ranks of merchants or mere distributors.

With this division of labour and the quickened contest for profits, there started into life rival interests more than enough to break up the whole community into groups of warring factions. The "upper classes" generally, statesmen, treasury officials, nobles, the greater proprietors lay and ecclesiastical--in fact all the wealthy owners of flocks who could enter the company of the Staplers and share their profits--desired an abundant export of wool; while the small farmers and the yeomen, shut out by poverty from the association, and bitterly hostile to the wealthy monopolist, sided with the townsfolk to whom visions of wealth had first dawned in the manufacturing industries and the export of cloth, and who would gladly have kept all the wool of the country at home. Merchants and manufacturers had their own special controversy, for while the foreign trader was boasting of his energy in raising the price of cloth, the middlemen and makers at home, whose whole interest lay in rapid sales, complained that people in the Netherlands would no longer buy English goods owing to the increased cost, and that the English towns were thus brought to destitution. Moreover the great London merchants were making a determined effort to force the whole foreign trade of England through their warehouses in London, and to shut all channels of commerce save those provided by themselves; and demanded that all cloth for the Netherlands, that is practically one-third of all the cloth then exported, must be carried by the maker to London, and there sold, as was averred, to the exporting merchants either for credit or below cost price. Here of course they came into conflict with the local dealers who wanted frequent and convenient markets for their wares, and liberty to make their own bargain with foreign buyers visiting their town; for to the clothier this question of distribution was all-important, since it was in vain for him to increase production by machinery, or by the improved organization of labour, or by division of toil among groups of skilled artizans, unless he could find his profit in a corresponding developement of the means of sale. The exporting merchants had also a quarrel with the artizans, who naturally desired to keep the dressing and finishing of cloth in their own hands, while the merchants insisted on the advantages of a free trade in undressed cloth; in their judgement the cloth-dressers, seeking but their "singular and private wealth," forgot that more men lived by making and selling cloth than by dressing it, and that therefore the rapid developement of exports by carrying out material in the rough to be finished in the Netherlands was really for the enriching of the whole realm. These same dealers, however, looked more leniently on the "singular and private wealth" that went into their own pockets through the profits of the export trade, and also found themselves set at variance with the big public of consumers who were always anxiously on the watch against the raising of prices. At times the manufacturer had his grievances against the municipal authorities, whenever he found himself worried and fettered by the traditional wisdom of Town Councils, who for a variety of reasons of their own wanted to keep the ultimate control over his trade so as to draw a profit for the town. Lastly, the working class had begun to feel difficulties springing from the new methods of industrial organization, and troubles about wages and prices and the relation of employer to employed assailed the authorities both at Westminster and in the municipal councils. Artificers of all kinds, it was constantly declared, could no longer live of their occupation and were in great misery; in fact, to judge by preambles to Statutes, and the loud complaints as to his condition, the working man believed himself to be in such bad case as to need all the aid of the State to keep him supplied with employment.

This old industrial revolution in short brought with it difficulties which bear to us the familiar look of our own constant and persevering visitors--visitors that force their entrance at every breach in the accustomed order by which trade is fenced round, and that appear as the unwelcome escort of every new form of industrial competition. Moreover, to add to the troubles of the mediaeval legislator, the consumer of those days was always insisting on his vested right to the first consideration of the government, as the ultimate dictator for whose benefit the whole colossal structure of trade had been reared, and by whose approval alone it was allowed to remain at that ambitious elevation. With every fresh enterprise of manufacturer or merchant, the problem with which the law-makers had to deal became more subtle and complex. Driven hither and thither by the new conflict of public opinion and the passion of rival interests, baffled by the insoluble problem of how to frame laws which should benefit equally all the claimants for its aid, the government hesitatingly felt its way along an ill-defined path, veering from side to side according to the direction of the last impelling force. Even Edward the Fourth had no fixed policy of protection, and passed laws now on this side, now on that, as the imperious necessity of the moment seemed to demand.

But with a rapidly increasing trade, and with a House of Commons three-fourths of whose members were burghers personally concerned in these questions, it was impossible to stand still; and the new industrial legislation gradually became the expression not of the autocratic rule of kings, but of a self-conscious government of the people. A long series of Statutes illustrates this great experiment. The new protection devised by burghers and merchants for the fostering of industry was altogether different from the old protection devised by a Court mainly occupied with the problem of re-filling an empty Treasury. The English manufacturer and the English working man were its recognized charge, and in their interest no measure was considered too heroic and no detail too insignificant, whether the matter in hand was the closing of English markets to a whole people, or the decision of how big a piece of leather it might be well in the interest of the shoemaking trade to allow the cobbler to buy for the patching of an old boot. All native trades were "protected" by laws which declared that none of the wares which Englishmen could manufacture at home might be imported from foreign parts, and that none of the raw material they used might be carried out unwrought, or even half finished, to be worked up abroad. The whole people, save a few of the "great estates" and mighty men, must go simply clad in honest goods of English make, and so save themselves from waste, and English workers from poverty. As to the long dispute about admitting foreigners to trade in England, in which the King and the people had ever been in strong opposition, that matter was now more and more regulated according to the desires of the traders. England ceased to be the acquiescent host of guests who, in the vulgar opinion, came to thrive and fatten on her wealth; and a determined resistance was declared against the competition of strangers, till the Hanseatic trader scarcely dared show his face outside the strong walls of his Steel-yard citadel, and the Lombard vainly struggled to protect his last privileges from the assaults of his enemies.

The theory of State protection of industry grew fast, and by the time of Henry the Seventh its triumph was complete, and the foundations of a new national policy were firmly laid--a policy which was to be largely guided by industrial interests and to represent the claims of an elaborate industrial organization established by law and built into vast proportions by international agreement. The new relation of a sovereign to his people in such a State was seen at the end of the century in the first peaceful king of England whose subjects had submitted to his rule, the only English monarch till then who had not been a strong leader in war and who had yet escaped murder or imprisonment at the hands of his people. It has been the singular misfortune of one of our greatest rulers, Henry the Seventh, to be the first sovereign of the modern pattern who ruled over Englishmen, and his memory has in consequence come down to us shorn of all the conventional glory that tradition had until then declared proper to royalty. He has remained in history as we see him in one of his portraits, a dim obscure figure, sadly looking out from the background of a canvas where the big blustering figure of his son, set squarely in front, seems to elbow all virtue save his own out of recognized existence. But in the delicate, careworn, refined face with its suggestion of unrecorded self-effacement, in the penetrating intelligence devoted to the apprehending of the new problems and the infinite labour spent in solving them, in the inscrutable acquiescence with which, "loving to seal up his own dangers," he carried the burdens that were henceforth to fall to the lot of kings, and the unflinching resolution of his methods, we recognize a new type of royal dignity, and measure the work demanded of rulers who saw the power of mere personal dominion founded on force gradually passing from their hands, and in the changing order of the world were called to take up the leadership of the new commonwealth that was to be.

THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

A FRENCH proverb of the twelfth century tells us what the world thought in old days of the origin and uses of a navy. "Point de marine sans pelerinages," men said, seeing in pious penitents its means of support, and in the shrines of St. James or St. Peter or the Holy Sepulchre its destinations. Trade in those days avoided the way of the ocean, and followed the well-known land routes across the heart of Europe, and where the land came to an end took the very shortest way over the water to the next point of solid earth.

And slowly as commerce by sea developed in Europe it developed yet more slowly among the English. All goods that came to them from abroad were carried to their shores by powerful confederations of foreign merchants who controlled the great continental trade routes of the north-west. The "men of the Empire" or the Hanse of Cologne, masters of the highway of the Rhine and of Cologne, the great seaport of the Empire, commanded the whole Eastern trade which then for the most part passed through Germany. The Flemish Hanse of London, which included all the great towns of Picardy and Flanders, and perhaps at one time even Paris itself, carried over sea the wares that were gathered from half of Europe to the great fairs of Champagne. Through these two great companies England first exchanged her wool for certain necessaries such as salt and fish and iron and wood, and for a few luxuries such as spices and silks from the Levant.

And even when commerce swept beyond the narrow seas and passed out of the hands of the men of Cologne and the Flemish Hanse, it was not Englishmen who took their place. If the waterway of the Rhine was forsaken of half its trade as merchants of Northern Italy abandoned the old route across Europe, and instead of sending their goods to the warehouses of Cologne despatched fleets through the Straits of Gibraltar to the ports of the Channel and to Bruges; if the fairs of Champagne languished when armies encamped on its plains and turned them into battle-fields, and the Flemish Hanse of London slowly sank into insignificance--it was only to make way for other competitors of foreign blood. Commerce with the East through the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay was seized by the ships of Florence and Genoa and Venice. The towns of the German Ocean and the Baltic gathered under the banner of L?beck into a new Hanseatic League which broke the supremacy of Cologne, claimed the whole carrying trade of the Northern seas, and opened a new line of communication with the Levant. Novgorod became the centre of the Baltic trade, as Alexandria was the centre of the Mediterranean traffic, and the merchants of the Teutonic Hanse offered to the English trader the silks and drugs of the East, with skins and hemp and timber of Novgorod, and the metals of Bohemia and Hungary.

The Mediterranean merchant was the great minister to the growing luxury of mediaeval England. "The estates and lords of the realm" and bishops and prelates and parish priests bought from him cloth of gold, rich brocades, vestments of white damask powdered with gold of Venice, and precious work of goldsmiths and jewellers, new-fashioned glass, and many other fine things--articles that "might be forborn for dear and deceivable," grumbled the English dealer in homely goods of native manufacture. The whole luxurious traffic down to the "apes and japes and marmosettes tailed, nifles, trifles, that little have availed," roused the bitter jealousy of the home trader; and even statesmen foretold with alarm the perils that must come to the nation from a commerce which filled the land with fancy baubles and vanities, and carried away in exchange the precious wealth of the people, their cloth and wool and tin, sucking the thrift out of the land as the wasp sucks honey from the bee. But in spite of the hostility of English dealers needy kings anxious to win favour with the great banking companies of Italy diligently encouraged the trade; and freed merchants who came from beyond the Straits from the vexatious control of the Staple; allowed their vessels to put into port undisturbed at Southampton instead of being forced to go to Calais; and their agents to travel through the country and buy and sell at will.

It was Florence which in the first half of the fourteenth century took the lead in the trade of the Mediterranean with England, and whose merchants lent to Edward the Third the money which alone enabled him to carry on the war with France. But when Edward declared himself unable to pay his debts and repudiated the whole of the Florentine loans ruin fell on the city; its trade was paralyzed, and commercial disasters ended in political revolution. Bankers of L?beck took the place of its financiers as the Rothschilds of the mediaeval world; and ship-masters of Genoa seized the commerce which fell from its hands. Though the winning of the port of Leghorn in 1421 brought a fresh outburst of trading activity to Florence, though its merchants established depots and banks and commercial settlements in all the great towns of the North, though cargoes of wool were again shipped to its harbour , the supremacy of the Republic in the Mediterranean trade was never restored.

For its great competitors, Genoa and Venice, were now fairly in the field. Through their station on the Black Sea the Genoese held until the Turkish conquest the chief market in the East for European cloth; and their fleets laden with cloth of gold, silk and spices of the Levant, with alum and mastick from the subject islands of Chios and Phocoea, with the woad of Toulouse, and the wines of Provence, sailed to Southampton to exchange their cargoes for English cloth, which they sometimes carried back direct to the Black Sea, and sometimes took on to sell at the Flemish markets, and so make a double profit on their journey. For their world-wide business the Bank of St. George was founded at Genoa in 1407, with a system of credit notes of acknowledgement for money deposited which could be transferred from hand to hand.

What the Venetians were to the commerce of the Mediterranean that the merchants of the Hanseatic League were to the commerce of the Baltic and the German Ocean. A double strength had been given to the confederation of towns which L?beck had drawn under its banner by its union with the Teutonic Order--an order which had originated in Bremen and L?beck and then settled on the Baltic to create the trading prosperity of Danzig and Elbing. These Prussian cities, while they owned the Grand Master of the Order of Teutonic Knights as their feudal chief, were still dependent on L?beck. And with them were joined a multitude of towns so imposing in their very numbers alone that when the ambassadors of the Hanseatic League in England in 1376 were asked for a list of the members who made up their vast association, they answered scornfully that surely even they themselves could not be supposed to remember the countless names of towns big and little in all kingdoms in whose name they spoke. Under the strangely diverse lordship of Kings, Dukes, Margraves, Counts, Barons, or Archbishops, they found a link in their common union in the Holy Roman Empire, and ever counted England, cut off from that great commonwealth, as a "foreign" nation.

In war or in commercial negotiations this mighty confederation, with its members disciplined to act together as one body, dealt proudly as a nation on equal terms with other peoples, and in the strength of its united corporation it was in fact a far more formidable force than the jealous and isolated Republics of the South. Denmark was laid at its feet by a triumphant war. Norway was held in complete subjection. It forced the English traders in the North Sea to bow to its policy and fight at its bidding. So powerful was the League in the fourteenth century, that when Edward the Third had ruined the banks of Florence it was the merchants of L?beck who became his money-lenders; they were made the farmers of the English wool-tax; they rented the mines of the northern counties and the tin-works of Cornwall. The whole carrying trade of the northern seas lay in their hands. It was vessels of the Hanse that sailed from Hull or from Boston to Bergen with English wares and brought back cargoes of salt fish; that fetched iron from Sweden, and wine from the Rhine vineyards, and oranges and spices and foreign fruits from Bruges; and that carried out the English woollen cloths to Russia and the Baltic ports, and brought back wood, tin, potash, skins, and furs. Within the strong defences of their Steel-yard on the banks of the Thames by London Bridge, the advance guard of the League lived under a sort of military discipline, and held their own by force of the King's protection against the hatred of London traders and burghers, which now and then burst into violent riots.

Thus throughout the fourteenth century it was strangers who held the carrying trade to England along the two great commercial routes--the passage by Gibraltar to the harbours of Italy and thence to Alexandria, and the passage by the Sound to the Baltic ports and so to Novgorod. All the profits of transit as of barter were secured by alien dealers who travelled from village to village throughout the country in search of wool or cloth to freight the foreign vessels that lay in every harbour--vessels bigger and better built for commerce than any of which England could boast. Moreover, the English government was content to have it so, and Kings who wanted to build up alliances for their foreign wars, or to replenish their failing treasury at home, in all commercial regulations showed their favour mainly to foreign traders and left the native shipowner to do as best he could for himself. Once, indeed, in the reign of Richard the Second, a solitary attempt was made to encourage the shipping industry, and the first Navigation Act passed in England ordered "that none of the King's liege people do from henceforth ship any merchandise in going out or coming within the realm of England but only in ships of the King's liegance." This Act, however, after the fashion of the time, was only to be in force for a few months; and after very brief experience Parliament wisely decided that the law need only be obeyed when "the ships in the parts where the said merchants shall happen to dwell be found able and sufficient ... and otherwise it shall be lawful to hire other ships convenient." With this the experiment of State protection came to an end for the next century; and against the great confederations and State-protected navies of the Continent English merchants were left to wage singly as best they could their private and adventurous war.

English shipping, indeed, so far as it existed at all, may be said to have existed in spite of the law. There was no navy whatever in any national sense. A few balingers and little coasting vessels lay in the various ports--some of them belonging to private merchants, some to the town communities--and when the King wanted ships for the public service, whether it was to fish for herrings for his household or to fight the French, he simply demanded such vessels as he needed in any harbour, kept them and their crews waiting on his will for weeks or months, sent them wherever he chose, and laid all costs on the town or the owner's shoulders. Moreover, the unlucky merchant forfeited his ship to the Crown for any accident that might happen on it--if a man died, or fell overboard, or if it struck another vessel or touched a rock. The masters might suffer ruin, or in mere self-defence give up the owning of ships, and the sailors might forsake the sea and turn to other occupations to escape being impressed for war: government interference to regulate wages only sent men to take service at more tempting pay in foreign boats. We cannot wonder that towards the end of the fourteenth century it seems to have been thought more profitable under these conditions to make ships for others than to own them, and that builders were selling their vessels to aliens, and these aliens "by reason of the excessive profits thence arising have often sold the same to the enemies of the realm." Henry the Fifth, indeed, proposed to build up a royal navy, but his plans were cut short by his death and his ships sold under Henry the Sixth, and matters went on as before.

English traders, however, did not sit down idly to wait for State protection. Already in the middle of the fourteenth century a new life was stirring in the seaports, and before long every one of them began to send its contingent to the host that went out for the conquest of the sea. Towns big and little were creating or strengthening their fleets, made up either of the "common barges" of the community, or the private ships of their trading companies. Shipbuilding was dear in England from the want of wood in the country as well as of iron suitable for the purpose, and cost, if we may believe a contemporary observer, twice as much as in France. So poor communities like Lydd that could not afford big ventures made shift by hiring vessels from Britanny, Sandwich, or London, and fitting them out as economically as might be, with an old wine-pipe sawed in half to serve for a bread barrel. On the other hand, prosperous ports like Lynn added large sums year after year to the town budget for shipping. A far poorer place, Romney, spent ?73 on its common barge in 1381; in 1396 another was bought and fitted out for ?82; and a third in 1400 at over ?40; while a few years later yet another ship was procured for the Bordeaux trade. These vessels sailed to Scotland and Newcastle and Norfolk and the ports of the Southern coasts; or to Ireland for wood, to Amiens for sea-coal, to Britanny for salt, to Flanders for the wares of the Levant, to Southern France for cargoes of wine, and oil, and wood. In 1400 "the new barge" carried forty-two tuns of wine from Rochelle; in 1404 it brought forty tuns besides oil and wood, and in a later voyage carried fifty-six tuns. Everywhere the trading temper laid hold upon the people. In Rye, where the inhabitants had been wont to pay their yearly oblations punctually on the 8th of September, there came a time when so many of them were abroad, some attending fairs, some fishing in remote seas, "that Divine worship is not then observed by them as it ought to be, and the due oblations are withheld and hardly ever paid;" and the day of offering had to be changed.

The more important side of the movement, however, was the growth of private enterprise as shown in the associations of merchants formed in all the bigger towns for trading purposes. Already in the time of Richard the Second there was a "Fellowship of Merchants" in Bristol who directed the whole foreign trade and the import of foreign merchandise, and who even then did business on a very considerable scale, for when in 1375 Bristol ships laden with salt were captured and burnt in the Channel the losses were set down at ?17,739. Before fifty years were over their trading vessels were known in every sea from Syria to Iceland. The richer merchants built up by degrees little fleets of ten or twelve vessels varying from 400 to 900 tons; and one of them, William Cannynges, an ancestor of Lord Canning, who in 1461 had ten ships afloat , employed 800 seamen and 100 carpenters, masons, and artificers. Nor was Bristol singular in its activity. The Guild of Merchants at Lynn rivalled that of York. "With the Divine assistance, and the help of divers of the King's subjects," John Taverner of Hull in 1449 built a great "carrack" on the scale of the mighty ships of Genoa and Venice. Far and wide the movement spread till the brief tale of 169 merchants which had been counted up by Edward the Third when he wanted to borrow money from them, expanded towards the close of the fifteenth century into a company of more than 3,000 traders engaged in sea-commerce alone.

From whatever town they came these traders with foreign ports were all alike known to the men of the fourteenth century by one significant name--the Adventurers. For since there was but one protected industry in England, the Staple, every merchant who was not a Stapler was a free Adventurer. All trade that lay outside the Staple was for his winning. Bound to no place or company or government or laws, he was left to discover for himself a corner in the world's market, and to protect himself on sea and land. A perfectly indifferent State gave him no help in his first ventures to become the carrier of English commerce, and vouchsafed no encouragement to shipbuilder or master by offers of special favours or grants of reduced tolls on a first voyage. He sailed out of port into a sea of peril. Pirates of all nations, Vitalien Br?der in the Baltic and the North Sea, Likedelers of Calais, Breton cruisers, vigorous monopolists of the Hanse, outraged merchants of the South burning for vengeance, lay in wait on every quarter of the horizon. In 1395 Norfolk traders were robbed of ?20,000 "by the Queen's men of Denmark, the which was an undoing to many of the merchants of Norfolk for evermore afterwards;" and frequent and piteous were the complaints that went up to the Privy Council from English shippers begging redress and protection as outrage followed outrage. But a State which was without any organized naval force was powerless to establish order. Whether it gave the charge of keeping the peace on the high seas to the merchants themselves, or to the Staplers, or by special commission to the Admirals of the coast, or to a committee of lords, or to the foremost among the offenders, the Captain of Calais himself, its experiments were equally vain. In self-protection town barges and merchants' ships sailed in companies under an admiral of their own choosing, armed to the teeth like little men of war against the enemy, and even carrying cannon on board as early as 1407, before any kind of hand-guns had been invented. If when disaster overtook them their masters appealed for compensation to the government they did not wait solely on the State for redress; and English rulers seem to have been often less perplexed to bring a remedy to their sufferings than to conciliate the great foreign confederations whose anger had been roused by their swift and violent retaliation. There were indeed probably no more formidable pirates afloat than these English cruisers themselves, for they were hard fighters who took a prompt revenge; and among foreigners at all events they won the reputation of using their shipping for no other purpose than to harass all trade of other peoples in the narrow seas, and "obstruct the utility of commerce throughout all Christendom."

Under these conditions we can easily understand that throughout the century whenever the question of the English navy emerges in Rolls of Parliament and Statutes and official statements, we have a contemporary picture drawn in the gloomiest colours. Statesmen heap up details to show how badly the merchant service fulfils its vague functions as a royal navy. Ship-owners bring their loud complainings to prove how ill they have been used by the State. Each side burns to waken the other to a sense of its duty, and talk of the decay of English power by sea might be pressed into the service of either, while the loss of Southern France and the temporary blow which this gave to English shipping was used to point the argument on both sides. The sea was our wall of defence, it was said; but now the enemy was on the wall and where was our old might of ships and sailors? The very Dutch were laughing at our impotence, and when they insolently jested at the ships engraved on the coins of Edward the Third and asked why we did not engrave a sheep on them instead, the pun was felt to inflict a deep wound on the national honour.

Such judgements, however, should be read in the light of the records which tell us what English ships afloat upon the sea were actually doing in those days. For at this very time the unofficial Englishman seems to have been boasting that his people possessed a greater number of fine and powerful ships than any other nation, so that they were "kings of the sea;" and if the boast was a little premature it lay on the whole nearer to the truth. Even now the fleets of the Adventurers were going forth to the conquest of the seas, and their enterprise marks one of the great turning points in our history. It was in fact during this century that England raised herself from the last place among commercial peoples to one of the first. At the close of the fourteenth century, as we have seen, English merchandise was mostly borne in foreign ships; a hundred years later, English vessels carried more than a half of all the cloths exported from the country, and about three quarters of all other goods, and the Navigation Act that had failed under Richard the Second was put in triumphant operation by Henry the Seventh.

This was the beginning of a new stage in their history. The Adventurers now proposed to enter the decent ranks of recognized associations, and exchange their roving wars for the more formal aggressions of a chartered company; and at their prayer Henry the Fourth granted them in 1406, for their better ordering and for their protection from other "meddling merchants," a charter by which they took as their official title their old name of the Merchant Adventurers. The grant included all dominions over-sea, and allowed them to wander where they would in the wide world, and to draw within their ranks all the Adventurers of England. As yet their organization was loose and free, and was in fact no true incorporation as a Guild. But it marked the passing away of their free and stormy youth. From this time privileges came to them from all sides by English grants, by gifts from foreign towns, by protection of the rulers of various countries. Finally in 1446 they received a new charter of privileges from the Duke of Burgundy by which their tolls were fixed, full protection assured to them, and an organization provided which lasted for the next century. So confident did they become of their power, that when Henry the Seventh at his accession raised the tolls required of them they refused to pay, and he did not dare to enforce the order. Seeing indeed in their success the triumph of English commerce, he remained their steady supporter, confirmed their privileges, and when at Calais they desired greater centralization and a stricter discipline, he gave them a regular organization after the pattern of the Staplers under Edward the Third, with governors and a council of twenty-four assistants. Amid all their successes it was little wonder that there came a time when they themselves forgot the free audacity of their adventurous youth. In their maturer years, as the vehement assertors of monopoly and State protection, they cast behind their backs the very remembrance of their lawless predecessors, and for a braver pedigree they traced their greatness back to ancestors made respectable by a fabled charter from King John himself, and boasted of Aldermen clothed in scarlet who were supposed to have borne rule over them in good old times in Antwerp.

The legend was the product of a time when Antwerp was in fact the capital of the Merchant Adventurers--the home and centre of their trade. For there in the fifteenth century they entered on an inheritance which had been left waste when the merchant princes of the Staple had finally retired to Calais, and had thus practically abandoned all direct trade between Antwerp and England to private hands. The Adventurers soon solved the question of who was to carry it on. In 1407 the city gave them a House in perpetual succession. Three of their merchants sat in the Toll-hall with the toll-keepers of the borough to see justice done to their brethren. Known among the people as "the nation," they early showed their power, and in the first half of the fifteenth century privileges in the English trade were more and more withdrawn from the native traders of the Netherlands, and gathered into their own hands. They used their powers to the full, governed firmly, ordered the whole English trade with the Low Countries, dictated what fair was to be attended, and ruled the prices, in spite of the loud remonstrances of the unlucky natives. At the great marts held in the Netherlands four times a year "they stapled the commodities which they brought out of England, and put the same to sale," and by 1436 they could boast that they bought more goods in Brabant, Flanders, and Zealand than all other nations, and that if their merchants were withdrawn it would be as great a loss to the French trade as though a thousand men of war were sent into the country. The growing jealousy of the manufacturers in Flanders indeed threatened at times to cut off their entire business; and as they were the first to bear the rising storm of commercial rivalries, so again and again they were brought within sight of ruin by the laws passed on either side the water forbidding all import or export trade.

For in their desperate attempt to save the Flemish weavers from ruin the Dukes of Burgundy forbade dressers to finish English cloth, or tailors to cut it in the Netherlands, and laid heavy penalties on any man in Flanders who was seen dressed in woollen stuffs of English make; but still the cloth came in, smuggled by speculating dealers from Antwerp, or scattered broadcast by licensed merchants who had bought from the authorities leave to evade the law. Once in consequence of political disputes the Adventurers had to migrate to Calais, and see the legal trade with the Low Countries given to the Easterlings, a sight which "sore nipped their hearts;" but first in "disordered" fashion, then lawfully, they were soon back at their old occupations. With the steady support of Henry the Seventh, whose whole policy was directed to develope the trade with Burgundy and bind England and the Netherlands into a united commercial state, their prosperity was assured; and before the close of the century Antwerp, after two hundred years of struggle for supremacy in trade, took its place as the great centre of commerce in the Netherlands, while its rival Bruges sank into utter poverty and decay. When at last after many chances and changes, the English won in 1506 through Henry the Seventh free trade in cloth throughout all the dominions of the Archduke Philip save Flanders, they actually found themselves better off in the Netherlands than the native merchants, paid less tolls than they, and were in a position whence they might easily overrun the country with their wares and finally destroy its decaying cloth industry.

From their central stronghold in Antwerp the Merchant Adventurers further maintained a lively war to right and left, on the one side with the Staple at Calais, on the other with the Hanseatic League.

It was practically the jealousy of the Staplers that had first driven the Adventurers from Bruges, and no sooner did they feel their strength than they prepared to make their ancient enemies pay the penalty for old wrongs. Towards the merchants of the Staple the very character of their trade from the first forced them into a militant attitude. Shut out from all interest in the sale of wool, their fortune rested solely on the manufacturing industries, and the more weaving at home was encouraged the greater were their gains. And since the wool merchants proceeded both to claim and to practise the right of exporting and selling cloth as well as wool, they became in a double sense obnoxious to their rivals. Now, however, the Adventurers could fight from the vantage ground given them by their new position as a chartered company. Out of their acknowledged right to demand tolls on the sale of cloth in their marts, they deduced by a liberal interpretation of their powers the right to require from each trading Stapler in addition to the ordinary tolls an entrance fee or hanse of ten marks, by payment of which he became a freeman of the Adventurers' Company and was made subject to their laws and courts, and if he refused to pay they seized his wares, or imprisoned him till he gave the "hanse." Wealthy merchants of the Staple who had taken their wares to Middleburg might find themselves thrown into prison among felons and murderers infected with odious diseases; the resolute Adventurers refused bail, and quietly ignored royal letters of remonstrance. Already in 1457 the Staplers complained bitterly to the English King and to the Duke of Burgundy, that under colour of letters patent and charters, their enemies so vexed them both in their goods and persons as to threaten them with utter ruin. But the decision of Henry the Sixth that the Adventurers were asserting unjust claims which were strictly forbidden for the future scarcely interrupted the battle, and the same series of complaints and aggressions was brought in 1504 before the Star Chamber, by whose judgement the Adventurers were again forbidden to go beyond their right of levying tolls. But if the law was against them they had on their side their own inexhaustible activity, their unscrupulous audacity, their large self-confidence, and the weakness of the dying company of the Staple. Six years later when the Staplers again summoned them before the King for their "crooked minds and froward sayings" and lawless deeds of violence, they answered with uncompromising contempt. The Staplers, they allowed, might have certain privileges in Calais--but as to talking of rights in Burgundy, that in their opinion was absurd to urge after the removal of the Staple thence. Outside Calais the Staplers had no rights. With regard to their claim to exclusive jurisdiction over their members, "that article might have been left out of their book, for why every reasonable man knoweth the contrary." In spite of such "reasonable men," however, once more the law was proclaimed to be against them; but as they knew well the law was powerless to set up again the ruined company of the Merchant Staplers.

With the second and more formidable army arrayed against them, the merchants of the Hanseatic League, the war of the Adventurers had to be carried on with greater circumspection. Through a couple of centuries the doubtful conflict was maintained on every sea and in every port from Danzig to Iceland. For the first hundred years things went ill for the Adventurers. The League monopolized the whole commerce between the Scandinavian kingdoms and England; drove out the English from Schonen, the centre to which all the fishers of the Baltic and North Seas gathered for the salting, packing, and selling of their fish; harassed them with fire and sword in Bergen, the Staple town of the north, scattering them at one time by starvation, at another by decrees of expulsion; banished them from the Prussian towns belonging to the Teutonic Order which they were "destroying" with their cloth, and sought to ruin their trade by issuing an order that no merchant of the Hanse should buy English cloth outside England itself. When the League waged war with Denmark and Norway in 1368-9 to confirm its mastery of the Northern Seas, it dragged the English traders at its heels into the fight, and at its close threw them off without a thought. It gave a scornful answer to demands made by Parliament under Edward the Third and Richard the Second that the tolls exacted from Hanseatic traders for exporting goods from England should be increased; and retorted by a decree that all trade with England should be utterly broken off, thus shutting the great market at Elbing to the English merchants who had made it the centre of their trade with Russia and the towns of Prussia.

The English traders, however, took all misfortune with the hardihood and exuberant courage of youth. Help from their own government was beyond hoping for, so long as conquering kings like Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth were bound hand and foot to the great mercantile houses of L?beck and the Hanse towns by the loans raised from them to carry on the French wars; while Henry the Fourth, who, before he came to the throne, had been in Danzig and seen the troubles of the English merchants there, and who in his anxiety to win the support of the trading class, was persistent in negotiations to improve their position, had not the power to give effect to his desires. The Adventurers, therefore, could only follow the one obvious course open to them, and kept up a steady brigandage on the seas and a series of opportune attacks on the enemy's out-posts. They held on desperately at Bergen, and stoutly clung to the formal right which Henry the Fourth had given them to organize themselves under consuls in Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, for the carrying on of their trade. Fishing boats which were shut out from the Baltic or from Bergen sailed on to Iceland, where, as the island was the private property of the King of Norway and was allowed to receive no ships save the King's, or those licensed by the King, opportunities for illegal trade were abundant and profits large. A frugal people, needy and remote, eagerly welcomed smuggled goods from England in exchange for their fish; and the smugglers carried on a rough business--outlaws and daring men of their company plundered and killed and stole cattle and desolated homesteads, and bartered after their own self-made laws. It mattered nothing to them that Henry the Fifth, in obedience to the League, forbade the trade, or that in a storm of 1419 twenty-five English ships were driven on the coast of Iceland in three hours. Bristol men found their way to its shores by help of the compass, leaving for us the first record of its use in England, probably in 1424; and about 1436, in a year when the English had been expelled from Bergen, so many vessels sailed to Iceland that they could get no return cargo, and half of them had to come empty home. But the northern trade was not all violent or lawless. English merchants bought double licenses from the English and the Norwegian kings, which allowed them to carry on a regular traffic; and in the middle of the fifteenth century one of the Bristol merchants, Cannynges, had in his hands the chief trade with northern Europe. Not only were his factors established in the Baltic ports, but his transactions with Iceland and with Finland were on so great a scale that when in 1450 all English trade with these regions was forbidden in virtue of a treaty with the King of Denmark, Cannynges was specially exempted on account of the debts due to him there by Danish subjects, and for two years he had a monopoly of the trade.

Meanwhile the Adventurers watched their opportunity to carry the war nearer home, for the League, already weighted with the effort to maintain its monopoly before the rise of Scandinavian powers and the consolidation of the Duchy of Burgundy, was further troubled within its own ranks by divided counsels. In the reign of Henry the Sixth, therefore, the English renewed among other claims their old demand that the Hanseatic merchants should no longer be favoured at their expense, but should be treated like any other foreigners and forced to pay the same tolls on wine and wool. There was a chance of success, for L?beck and the western towns finding in their strength and self-reliance arguments for a policy of peace with England, were generally for amicable compromise; though the eastern towns led by Danzig, weaker at sea and peculiarly sensitive to any increase of money burdens, preferred fighting to submission with its apprehended dangers. The party of violence won the day and a fierce maritime war followed with open hostilities and reprisals and lawsuits and endless negociations. On one occasion the English seized a fleet of 108 sail returning to L?beck and Riga, and the men of the Hanse retaliated by laying hands on rich English prizes. Trade was so ruined that Henry the Sixth declared himself unable to pay to the Count Palatine the dowry of his aunt Lady Blanche, because there were now no dues and customs coming into his Treasury from the German merchants. At last the dispute came to a climax in 1469, when the English quarrelled with the German traders in London, summoned them before the courts and imposed a fine of ?13,520, while members of the Steel Yard were thrown into prison, and the corporation nearly broken up. The answer of Bremen, Hamburg, and Danzig was given in a fleet which gathered against England under the leadership of Charles the Bold. But just at this moment came the English revolution by which Edward the Fourth was driven out of the country, and all the great trading bodies, the Hanseatic League, and the Flemish and Dutch corporations, seeing the danger which threatened their commerce from the new political situation, cast aside minor quarrels and united to set Edward again on the throne. Such a service demanded a great reward; and in 1474 a treaty was signed at Utrecht, by which the Hanse was given back all its earlier privileges, and secured in possession of its Guild Hall and Steel Yard in London, and its houses in Boston and Lynn. The Adventurers who made a bold demand that the Easterlings should renounce the right of carrying out wool or wool-fells from England can scarcely have expected to succeed; but they at least gained some measure of peace for their colony in Danzig.

The Hanseatic League, however, had now come to an end of its triumphs. From this time the English pressed them hard. A law which forbade the import of silk and the export of undressed cloths struck a heavy blow at their trade. Then came the order that Rhine wine must only be carried in English ships. Officials used their infinite powers of annoyance with hearty good will, and the merchant who landed with his goods, harassed first by the relentless officers sitting at the receipt of custom, and then thwarted in every possible way by the Mayor and corporation, was at last driven by public abuse behind the walls of the Steel Yard, so that in 1490 a member of the Hanse dared scarcely show himself in the streets of London.

Meanwhile the great confederation of Commonwealths itself showed grave signs of falling asunder. The bigger towns that no longer needed the protection of the association were quite ready to forsake it, and in 1501 began to refuse to bring their cloth to the Staple at Bruges, and to look for freer conditions of trade. At the same time the monopoly of the League was being threatened on all sides. The Prussian and Livonian towns treated them as enemies. A Dutch fleet competed with them in the Baltic. A Danish trading company had risen to dispute their monopoly in Denmark. The Swedes shut them out. The Norwegians made intermittent experiments at independence. At last in 1478 came the worst calamity that could befall their trade, the capture of Novgorod by the Muscovites, with the destruction of its free government and the ruin of its position as one of the commercial capitals of the world.

The big name has, as usual, imposed a little on later generations, and greater treaties have gone unnoticed for want of an equally pompous title. At first, indeed, amid the political disquiet and the trade depression which marked the early years of his reign, Henry went to work slowly and patiently, and in 1486 even confirmed the Utrecht treaty of 1474 which ensured a number of privileges to the Hanse. But this policy of peace was only assumed for a brief space while he was making ready for war. In 1486 he renewed the commercial treaty made by Edward with Britanny in 1467. The real campaign, however, may be said to have opened by the Navigation Act of 1489, when the shipping trade was definitely taken under State protection. And what that State protection implied was at once shown in a series of commercial treaties with almost every trading country of Europe, whether its traffic lay in the northern or the southern seas. Building up on every hand alliances against the Hanseatic Confederation he steadily drew to himself the friendship of the Scandinavian peoples tired of the domination of the League. In 1489 he sent an embassy , to make terms for a commercial alliance with Denmark and Norway, and won from the Northern powers freedom of trade for the English in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, with the right to acquire land, to form corporations and choose aldermen, and to be under special protection of the Danish King. To defeat the pretensions of Danzig he turned to the Livonian towns, and by treaty with Riga attempted to secure a Russian trade which might open the way of Novgorod and the East to English Adventurers--an attempt which however was frustrated a few years later. A conference was held in 1491 at Antwerp with the Hanseatic envoys, whom Henry with diplomatic insolence kept idly waiting for four weeks till the messengers he had sent to Denmark with friendly proposals of a treaty as unfavourable as possible to the interests of the Hanse, returned with their answer. The promise of this inauspicious opening for the League was amply fulfilled in the long negotiations which lasted at Antwerp from 1491 to 1499, and in which the foreigner was consistently humbled before the triumphant Merchant Adventurer, all his compromises rejected so far as they tended to limit the freedom of the English trader, and the League compelled to accept terms ruinous to its interests and disastrous to its great tradition of supremacy.

The story of these Antwerp negotiations gives us a true measure of the place gained during the last hundred years by the Merchant Adventurers in the North, where, having dealt the last blows to the ancient company of the Staple, and broken the power of the Hanseatic League, their fleets now sailed triumphantly on every sea. And yet this was but half their work; for the North was a small thing to win unless they could also load English vessels with the cargoes of the East and the tribute of the great commercial cities of the Mediterranean. Until the middle of the fifteenth century the trade of the eastern Mediterranean had been altogether carried on by Italians. It was only in 1432 that the French merchant Jacques Coeur , had sent out some ships to take part in the Eastern trade; and the Levant was not really opened to Western merchants till 1442, when the Venetians were driven out of Egypt and the monopoly of the Italians broken up. It was very soon after that a Bristol merchant, Sturmys, fitted out probably the first English ship that visited the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. But the new inheritors of the East were received with bitter jealousies. Rival vessels fought for the spoils and carried off the booty like common pirates; and the Genoese traders in their anger seized Sturmys' ship on its return voyage and robbed it of its cargo of spices and green pepper. He reckoned his loss at 6,000 francs, and on his complaint to the government all the Genoese merchants in London were thrown into prison until they should give bonds for the payment of this sum.

The question of the Mediterranean was thus vigorously opened. In London, indeed, the Italians might securely reckon on hard treatment. Merchants just beginning to feel their strength, half-ruined Staplers, London shopkeepers and manufacturers, all alike hated their Italian rivals with a common hatred, and were crying out for the most decisive measures against foreign competition. Less careful than their King of nursing political alliances in view of foreign wars and complications, the traders boldly proposed a bill in the Parliament of 1439 to forbid the Venetians from carrying any wares save those of their own manufacture--a measure which if it had passed would have practically annihilated the whole Venetian trade to England. Their next proposal was a law to forbid selling anything to the Genoese or carrying anything to their port. Steadily supported as the Lombards were by the King against the people, they nevertheless saw their privileges from this time limited step by step; and once after the persecution of 1455 in London even attempted to leave the capital for ever. The great days of their trade monopoly were gone. Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third laid heavy burdens on them. Henry the Seventh kept them dependent on his arbitrary will for a very slight increase of freedom, such as he might see fit to grant from time to time, tried to limit their gains, and in the very first year of his reign forbade them to carry French woad or wine, or silk goods, and further hindered them in the export of wool.

At this time the population of the Venetian Republic was bigger than that of all England, and English traders had a good many other affairs on their hands beside their quarrel with Venice. The dispute, nevertheless, did not languish. No sooner were Henry's regulations proclaimed in 1485 than English merchants set sail for Crete, bought up the stores of malmsey there, and carried them off to the Netherlands under the very eyes of the Venetian captains. Venice passed a law against such traffic, and in the stress of anxiety as to the English competition took to building better ships to maintain her own carrying trade; while England retorted by setting up a monopoly of her own wool in revenge for the Venetian monopoly of wine.

Nor was the good chance that favoured them in Portugal less wonderful. With the traders of Lisbon and Oporto England had entered into a commercial treaty in the middle of the fourteenth century--a treaty which was altered in 1386 to include the whole of Portugal. But by some happy destiny whose favours strewed the path of English traders, they asked and obtained in 1458 a revision of old agreements so as to secure the utmost advantage for their own interests, and all this had been completed just before the discovery of the Cape route gave to Portugal its enormous naval importance and threw Eastern commerce into a new channel. The quarrel with Venice inspired the English with increased ardour in their friendship for the new masters of the spice trade; and when Portuguese dealers invited English merchants to make their bargains for Eastern wares in Lisbon instead of journeying to Venice, these gathered in such numbers to the new emporium of Indian goods that their own shipping failed to carry the wealth offered to them and the merchants had to hire Portuguese vessels.

THE COMMON LIFE OF THE TOWN

"For they will and would as best were for themselves, Though the King and the commons all the cost had. All reason reproveth such imperfect people."

If frontier towns had periods of comparative quiet, the seaports, threatened by sea as by land, lived in perpetual alarm, at least so long as the Hundred Years' War protracted its terrors. When the inhabitants had built ships to guard the harbour, and provided money for their victualling and the salaries of the crew, they were called out to repair towers and carry cartloads of rocks or stones to be laid on the walls "for defending the town in resisting the king's enemies." Guns had to be carried to the church or the Common House on sleds or laid in pits at the town gates, and gun-stones, saltpetre, and pellet powder bought. For weeks together watchmen were posted in the church towers with horns to give warning if a foe appeared; and piles of straw, reeds and wood were heaped up on the sea-coast to kindle beacons and watch-fires. Even if the townsfolk gathered for a day's amusement to hear a play in the Court-house a watch was set lest the enemy should set fire to their streets--a calamity but too well known to the burghers of Rye and Southampton.

Inland towns were in little better case. Civil war, local rebellion, attacks from some neighbouring lord, outbreaks among the followers of a great noble lodged within their walls at the head of an army of retainers, all the recurring incidents of siege and pitched battle rudely reminded inoffensive shopkeepers and artizans of their military calling. Owing to causes but little studied, local conflicts were frequent, and they were fought out with violence and determination. At the close of the fourteenth century a certain knight, Baldwin of Radington, with the help of John of Stanley, raised eight hundred fighting men "to destroy and hurt the commons of Chester"; and these stalwart warriors broke into the abbey, seized the wine and dashed the furniture in pieces, and when the mayor and sheriff came to the rescue nearly killed the sheriff. When in 1441 the Archbishop of York determined to fight for his privileges in Ripon Fair he engaged two hundred men-at-arms from Scotland and the Marches at sixpence or a shilling a day, while a Yorkshire gentleman, Sir John Plumpton, gathered seven hundred men; and at the battle that ensued, more than a thousand arrows were discharged by them.

Within the town territory the burghers had to serve at their own cost and charges; but when the King called out their forces to join his army the municipal officers had to get the contingent ready, to provide their dress or badges, to appoint the captain, and to gather in money from the various parishes for the soldiers' pay, "or else the constables to be set in prison to abide to such time as it be content and paid." When they were sent to a distance their fellow townsmen bought provisions of salt fish and paniers or bread boxes for the carriage of their food, and reluctantly provided a scanty wage, which was yet more reluctantly doled out to the soldier by his officer, and perhaps never reached his pocket at all. Universal conscription proved then as now the great inculcator of peace. To the burgher called from the loom and the dyeing pit and the market stall to take down his bow or dagger, war was a hard and ungrateful service where reward and plunder were dealt out with a niggardly hand; and men conceived a deep hatred of strife and disorder of which they had measured all the misery. When the common people dreamed of a brighter future, their simple hope was that every maker of deadly weapons should die by his own tools; for in that better time

"Battles shall never eft be, ne man bear edge-tool, And if any man it, be smit therewith to death."

Lessons in common financial responsibility had been early forced on the burghers everywhere by the legal doctrine that the whole body might be held responsible for the debt of one of its members, while each member on his part was answerable for the faults of his fellows, whether singly or collectively. Thus when Norwich failed in paying debts due to the King in 1286, the sheriff of Norfolk was ordered to enter the liberty and distrain twelve of the richer and more discreet persons of the community; and when the rent of Southampton was in arrears, one of its burgesses was thrown into the Fleet in London. Under such a system as this the ordinary interest of citizens in questions of taxation and expenditure was greatly quickened. The municipalities were stern creditors. If a man did not pay his rent for the King's ferm the doors and windows of his house were taken off, everyone in it turned out, and the house stood empty for a year and a day or even longer before the doors might be redeemed in full court, or before it passed to the next heir. But it was probably rather owing to the happy circumstances of the English towns than to the vigilance of the burghers that there is no case in England of a disaster which was but too common in France--the disaster of a borough falling into bankruptcy, and through bankruptcy into servitude and political ruin.

Forced labour such as this could of course only be applied to works where skilled artificers were not necessary; but occasions soon multiplied when the town mob had to be replaced by trained labourers, and we already see traces of a transitional system in the making of the Hythe harbour, where the municipality had to engage hired labour for such work as could not be done by the burgesses. But undertakings for which scientific skill was needed sorely taxed local resources, and the burghers were driven to make anxious appeals to public charity. In 1447, when Bridport wanted to improve its harbour, collectors were sent all over the country to beg for money; indulgences of forty or a hundred days were promised to subscribers by archbishops and bishops; and a copy of the paper carried by one of the collectors gives the sum of the masses said for them in the year as amounting to nearly four thousand: "the sum of all other good prayers no man knoweth save only God alone." The building and repairing of bridges as being also work that demanded science and skilled labour involved serious cost. When the King had allowed the bridge at Nottingham to fall into the river, he generously transferred its ownership and the duty of setting it up again to the townspeople; who appointed wardens and kept elaborate accounts and bore grievous anxiety, till finding its charges worse than all their ordinary town expenses they at last fell to begging also. So also the mayor of Exeter prayed for help in the matter of the bridge there, which had been built by a wealthy mayor and was "of the length or nigh by, and of the same mason work as London Bridge, housing upon except; the which bridge openly is known the greatest costly work and most of alms-deeds to help it in all the west part of England." Such instances reveal to us the persistent difficulties that beset a world where primitive methods utterly failed to meet new exigencies, and where the demand for technical quality in work was beginning to lead to new organizations of labour. Meanwhile the burghers had to fight their own way with no hope of grants in aid from the state, and little to depend on save the personal effort of the whole commonalty.

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