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

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1519 lines and 149649 words, and 31 pages

It is however needless to multiply instances of monopoly. The system was universal, and a curious attempt which was once made to establish free trade at Liverpool died almost as soon as it was born. The charter of Henry the Third contained the usual provision that members of the Guild alone might trade in the borough, unless by consent of the burgesses, but in a new charter of Richard the Second for which he was paid ?5 this clause was left out and free trade practically established. No sooner however did Henry the Fourth appear in 1399 than the burgesses bought from him for ?4 a fresh grant of privileges with the former clause restored, and the old monopoly was consequently reasserted, till oddly enough an outburst of religious bigotry abolished trade restrictions; for seeing that the Liverpool Protestants were shutting out Roman Catholics from their market, Queen Mary in 1555 proclaimed anew the charter of Richard the Second and the right of free commerce. Sometimes a lively smuggling trade betrays the weak side of the monopolists' position; as when Bristol claimed entire control of all ports and creeks as high as Worcester, and the only lawful trade left to Gloucester was the shipping of supplies, mostly of corn, to Bristol. The shippers of Gloucester saw their chance of a rich lawless traffic; small boats quickly and easily laden and drawing little water, shot out of the channel by shallow passages where the bigger Bristol ships could not follow them, and Irish vessels made their way direct to Gloucester and escaped the heavy dues at the Bristol port; and while Gloucester traders grew rich fast, the Bristol folk made complaint that they were threatened with ruin.

This elaborate system of trade regulation was no doubt mainly due to the effort which men were forced to make, as centres of thicker population grew up in a country where the carriage of goods was a slow and difficult matter, to protect themselves from violent changes in the price of food; while it is also possible that a society which dictated wages and profits was naturally drawn on to undertake the corresponding duty of fixing the value in food and clothing of these wages and profits. It would seem that for some centuries the cost of mere subsistence remained almost stationary; and even in exceptional cases, like the Jubilee of 1420 which brought a hundred thousand pilgrims to Canterbury, the corporation which had charge of the preparations was able to ensure that there should be no increase in the ordinary price of provisions.

The prejudice against unregulated trade was no doubt reinforced by the hostility of the town dealer to competitors who throve at his expense on illegal profits; but it was probably the governing body of the town which maintained the most serious opposition to all traffic that depended on the cheating of the common treasury of the borough. For no trifling part of the town revenue came, as we see from the Nottingham records, from fines paid yearly by non-freemen for the privilege of holding a stall in street or market. In Canterbury "Tollerati" paid for the right of buying and selling during a limited period, and at the end of the time renewed the right by a fresh payment of what was called "Tolleration money"; alien traders living without the liberties, there known as "intrantes," took in Romney the name of "extravagantes." Some towns shewed a jealousy of strangers, dictated no doubt by special circumstances; as in Preston, where the "Foreign Burgesses," as distinguished from the "Inn Burgesses," were drawn from the country gentry and squires and some inhabitants of the town, and were merely freed from toll for any goods bought for the use of their families, but were allowed no other profits of trade, and even though they were inhabitants had no right of common on marsh or moor, nor could they join in the election of any town officer nor be themselves elected; while even with these restrictions no trader who lived outside the walls was admitted among them, and it was only in course of time that alien dealers were gradually allowed on payment of a fine to set up stalls in the market-place and carry on their business under the name of "stallingers." In general, however, an open purse was all that was needed to commend a stranger; and if the charge on it was sometimes excessive it seems to have been enforced mainly as a means of persuasion to enter the Merchant Guild.

But for whatever reason the regulation of trade was thought desirable, whether to protect the consumer's pocket or to fill the town treasury, it certainly was not intended to keep buyers and sellers at home, to hamper their enterprise, or to abolish competition. If protection and monopoly were allowed to look big, they were never allowed to get seriously in the way of business. In theory and sometimes in fact iron chains might be flung across the King's highway, bars thrown athwart the river, and custom house officers set at the gate to levy toll and stallage. But gates and bars and chains swung open everywhere before the trader "if he have the penny ready to take to;" the guilds enlarged their rolls for foreigners, the towns granted them their privileges liberally. Since a man could hold citizenship in more than one borough a speculator or merchant doing business in a large way might always circumvent the rules against foreign dealers by being made citizen in some convenient trading centre as well as in his own town, and so obtain power to carry on the business proper to an alien speculator with all the privileges of a resident burgher. Every pedantic hindrance, indeed, was removed out of the way of his enterprise, for a very slight study of town records disposes of the idea that mediaeval trade was ultimately governed by the formal laws of statute books. Monopoly was broken through whenever it was advisable or convenient for special occasions. Bakers and victuallers who rose to municipal offices turned the assize of bread and the inspection of cooking houses and fish stalls into an idle tale. In the hands of merchants the laws of buying and selling were manipulated so as to interfere neither with the free circulation of goods nor with the instinct of the dealer to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest; and it was still left possible to carry food where it was most needed, whether to supply a manufacturing centre such as Norwich or a city which was rapidly doubling its population like London. If the law ordained that the forestaller was to be heavily fined for the first offence; for the second to lose his merchandise and be put in the pillory; and for the third to be deprived of the freedom of the city, the law was simply ignored, or some trifling fine was inflicted--a paltry sum which a prosperous trader might easily disregard. In fact it would almost seem that the actual result of the trade laws was mainly to give the rich wholesale merchant an additional advantage over the poor trader. Forestalling and regrating became the fashionable privilege of town councillors and magnates who through their position and their wealth found it doubly easy to evade local ordinances, of London merchants who were buying all over the country to supply the needs of the growing city, and of dealers on a large scale interested in the export trade; while the terrors of the law served as an effective deterrent to struggling hawkers and chapmen against meddling with the profits won by more exalted speculators from a customary if illegal traffic.

The real foundation of free trade throughout the country, however, and that which alone gave any value to local arrangements and individual privileges, is to be found in the early town charters, where this great gift had a leading place. Almost the first boon asked for by a borough was a grant which should make its burghers or its merchant guild quit of tolls and pontage, and stallage and lastage, throughout the whole kingdom, in fairs and throughout sea-ports, in lands on this and on the other side of the sea; and give them power to buy and sell throughout all England, within cities and without, all kinds of merchandise; with the right to have stalls in other markets than their own without paying stallage, and to buy in such markets at all hours and not only those allowed to strangers. Each charter moreover had wrapped up in it a kind of "favoured nation" clause which gave to boroughs "such liberties as the city of London hath"--a clause which seems to have been interpreted as implying the right for burghers to buy and sell in gross in another town than their own on other than market days, and that "they may have in this respect as much liberty as the citizens of London."

In its wide and unstinted privileges a charter such as this--the grant of a king who was lord of all fairs and markets--expressed the whole spirit of free trade; at a word local monopoly and protection in its true sense were swept away, and every market in the country opened to any trader duly enrolled as a burgher or a member of the Merchant Guild. The question indeed still bristled with difficulties. As the king was constantly giving away or selling his rights, or part of his rights, over markets, there were innumerable cases when the special grant to one town to hold a market without disturbance, and the more general license to its neighbour to consider itself free of all market dues, were wholly irreconcilable; and the law held that no charter of freedom could interfere with any earlier rights granted to any other person or corporation to levy tolls on transport, on crossing a bridge, on entering a gate, on taking up a standing in the market, or the like. In cases where two charters were found to bestow conflicting rights, therefore, the towns set their best lawyers to search out old evidences and records, and to claim the protection of judges of the King's Bench or of Parliament for the grant that boasted of the greater age. The preliminary question of priority of rights having been thus decided, the next step was to remedy the dead-lock of business to which the two communities had been brought by means of formal treaties such as nations make to-day, in which the right to levy toll and custom was probably used as systems of tariffs have been used in modern states--as a means of bribing or threatening refractory neighbours into some concession of free trade. Southampton made its separate treaties with at least seventy-three towns or trading corporations besides all the "honours" of the kingdom, releasing them from payment of its tolls and customs; its burghers had their own compact with Marlborough in which they waived such privileges as they possessed by their own earlier charter; with Bristol they settled the amount of the tax to be levied on Bristol men who brought merchandise to their market; they agreed with the men of Winchester that no tolls should be asked on either side; and in 1501 their treaty with the Cinque Ports was ratified by "your lovers the bailiff and jurats of Hastings." Undermined as they were on all sides, and with gaping breaches everywhere, the walls of protection which the boroughs had thrown up round their markets certainly formed no impediment to the movement of local trade. Before the impatience of traders greedy for gain, artificial frontiers and barriers and tariffs were swept away, and from little self-contained communities where the cottagers grew their own food and spun their own wool and asked scarcely anything from outside save fish and salt and a little iron, the boroughs grew rapidly into centres of expanding commerce. To supply their needs or their luxuries they despatched their traders far and wide. When Ely sent for John of Gloucester, the famous bell-founder, to make the four great bells for the cathedral, messengers had to go to Erith for clay, and to Lynn and Northampton for copper and tin. The Nottingham goldsmith was employed to repair the cross in Clifton Church, and its "alablaster man" supplied the faithful in London with little statues of the Baptist in appropriate shrines. Buyers of wool and sellers of cloth, saddlers, butchers, fishmongers, hawkers of all sorts, obtained from the mayor and commonalty of their borough letters of free passage throughout the kingdom for the carrying on of their business and kept up incessant intercourse between town and town. Everywhere busy forestallers were on the look out for eggs and meat and corn, and bought up supplies all over the country for London or some big town or for the export trade, or turned their privileges under the clause of London liberties into a means of buying wholesale all the week long as regrators in order to sell at a profit on market day, while on that day itself they were out at cock-crow to buy privately when the citizens were at mass, so that by six o'clock there was nothing left in the market for the good folk of the town.

As we look at this mighty volume of commerce pouring from town to town with a steady force that swept all obstacles out of its channel, we may well begin to doubt whether the burghers of the middle ages were indeed stupidly putting their necks under a hard yoke of arbitrary law, and wilfully destroying their own prospects by preferring bondage to freedom, or sacrificing general prosperity to local greeds. The mediaeval system, until it began to fall into the decay that precedes death, was in fact the minister to fine and worthy ends. In a society where few rights existed save by way of privilege, the trading "communitas," whether the borough or the guild, did actually serve as the great engine for the abolition of restrictions, for extending privilege, and throwing open a national commerce. There was a time when every new chartered association was an actual widening of free trade; and a man entered the community of a town for the same reasons that he might to-day take out letters of naturalization in a country where his business lay--not to be ensured against competition, but to share in all commercial privileges which it had won by treaty, and in case of peril to own the protection of its flag. Each town had its own privileged "community" and recognized the "community" of the neighbouring borough; and it was by this mutual recognition only that intermunicipal treaties became possible, or that any borough could ascertain the limits of its responsibility for members in foreign fair or market, could pledge itself to the fulfilment of its treaties, or have any guarantee for redress in case of wrong. In the detailed municipal legislation about debt and surety and mutual responsibility, about punishment of violence, the suppression of an individual traitor to the common weal, the protection of a community from false dealing of any of its confederate states, we may plainly see how local monopolies had come to be far more significant from the point of view of public order and general intercourse than of private wealth. Monopoly and protection in fact had put on the garb of a necessary office and service. Instead of gaolers who kept the trader fast bound at home, they were the strong guardians who attended him as he went abroad, the fore-runners who cut down before him the chains that barred the highway, the ministers of justice that tracked out in his service the fraudulent debtor, the pledges to him in every danger of the vigilance and power of his native town. To each community they were the bonds of a civil order and the tokens of a corporate fidelity.

THE TOWN TRADER

"I have made many a knight both mercer and draper,"

says the merchant in a mediaeval poem,

"Paid never for their prenticehood not a pair of gloves; But chaffered with my chevesance, cheved seldom after."

The feeble and incompetent fell away before the severity of the tests applied, and the trading class was constantly undergoing change. Perhaps some sturdy Jewish stock, like the Phillips of Birmingham, held their own for three or four centuries; but more commonly families spring up into importance and for one or two generations hold the first place in the payment of taxes, and have control of the chief offices of government, till after the third generation the name disappears from the account books. The family has died out, or broken down under the stress of competition, or it has settled upon an estate bought in the country and become merged among the county squires; and some new stock comes in to fight its way with fresh energy and enterprise.

In picturing to ourselves the life of a mediaeval borough it sometimes happens that, with our constant tendency to exaggerate the strangeness of the past, we perceive only an existence so straitened and humble in condition that all sense of distinctions is lost, and we create a false monotony, supposing that because in that remote world business was carried on in a narrow sphere men's fortunes were therefore more equal, or that the general level of commercial prosperity was necessarily more uniform than it is now. But everything we know of town life, from the moment when the boroughs come into view, forces home the conviction of an inequality of circumstance and wealth as sensible as any that we recognize in the later Middle Ages; of a society which was at no time either simple or homogeneous, and where the plutocrat and capitalist held as imposing a place and bore himself in as lordly a fashion, considering the limits of his stage, as his descendants of modern times. The secret of wealth was first found, as it was long kept, by the butchers, brewers, and victuallers of one kind or another. There were in every borough men like Andrew Bate, the butcher of Lydd, who became "farmer of Dengemarsh," and kept the town in a ferment for years, whether with his herds of cattle which overran the marsh pastures and trespassed on his neighbours' fields or commons so that they could not "occupy in peace," and would rather sell their land than be so "grievously hurted by the cattle of Andrew Bate;" or with his heavy tolls for the "Western men" who came to dry their whiting on the nesse, and found him a hard "extortioner" who "had driven away half Dengemarsh"; above all with his ceaseless activity in extending his borders over the doubtful limits that parted the lands of the town from the lands of the Abbot; so that though the corporation in 1462 insisted on a careful marking out of their frontiers, and years later were labouring to have him supplanted in Dengemarsh by another burgher, Bate was evidently victorious, and ended by seeing his brother, who had been trained in the law probably with this object, appointed Town Clerk and practical controller of the affairs of Lydd. In like manner the rich fishmonger, Daniel Rowe of Romney, who sent his oysters, crabs, lampreys, and trout to London, the eastern counties, Cambridge, and along the valley of the Thames as far as Wallingford, and fetched back in their stead boars, calves, porkers, and bacon, ended by being made Town Clerk of Romney--as indeed became an educated man, who kept his daybooks, where all the travelling expenses of men and horses were carefully set down, in Latin. So also the Romney vintner, James Tyece, who began life in a very small way in 1387, was important enough in 1394 to be sent on a deputation to the archbishop; in 1398 he was Jurat, and in 1414 held so much land that his property was made into a separate ward named after him in 1432.

In short in every town the bakers, brewers, vintners, cooks, hostellers, and publicans "built their nests high" buying burgages out of the pence of the poor, and in spite of law and ordinance walked the streets in the furred mantles of aldermen, entered the council chamber, kept the treasure chest as chamberlains--issuing prudent versions of the town accounts calculated for the public eye, and themselves regulating the assessments for taxes in the interests of their wealthy fellowship--and presided over the courts of justice, where they administered the assizes of bread and beer for the benefit of the fraternity; while for their services they required a part of the common land to be enclosed for their use, or pastured their flocks at the public expense, and in a thousand ways gathered in for generations the harvest that then ripened for men in authority. No law could shut them out from the mayor's seat; and carrying away from office the robe of "clean scarlet" which gave them the chief places among the powerful members of "the Clothing," they still dominated over a helpless people, with scarcely any check save from the jealousy of their fellow traders. Thus all Canterbury was disturbed in 1507 by the brewer Crompe who, having been mayor for a year, returned to his former business on leaving office, and went about busily canvassing the small retailers, promising that if they would sell Crompe's beer he would be their "very good master whatsoever they had to do in the Court Hall," and that he would see to it that their pots should not be carried off on charges of short measure to the Hall. In cases of this kind remonstrance from the people seems invariably to have been perfectly useless, and the only complaint recorded in Canterbury was that of the rival brewers, who met Crompe's competition by an appeal to a custom of the town that the mayor should altogether forsake the victualling trades; in the course of the half century there had been, it was said, at least six mayors who had "lived like gentlemen" for the rest of their lives after leaving office, and though this polite profession allowed them to carry on the business of drapers or cloth manufacturers, it was proved that one ex-mayor who had been a brewer as well as draper left off his brewery and never returned to it; while another who was a baker sold his business, hired his house to another man, and "lived after as a gentleman." Crompe however remained obstinate, contemptuously protesting that the alleged "custom" was but fifty years old and, that the mayors had ceased to be victuallers out of self-indulgence, and because they preferred to live at their ease.

But from the earliest times it is evident that there were many of the more successful traders who rose to a position which, in a humbler degree, closely resembles that of our modern capitalists and employers, and that this class constantly tended to increase in wealth and in numbers. They evidently rivalled in astuteness their brethren of lowlier fortunes.

"Ne had the grace of guile gone among my ware It had been unsold this seven year, so me God help,"

the merchant in Piers Ploughman admits frankly. His wife who made the cloth for sale was diligent in her sphere of economies, ordering her spinning women to spin the yarn out to great length, and paying for it by a pound measure that weighed a quarter more than her husband's weighing machine--when he weighed true. At the draper's he was taught how to stretch out the list of the cloth, or to fasten rich pieces together with a pack needle, and lengthen them out with pressers till ten or twelve yards reached to thirteen; and to get rid of his goods at Winchester and Wayhill fairs he carefully learned to lie and use false weights. To add to these resources he would go to the Lombards for lessons in clipping coin and in lending money out at usury. Weaknesses of remorse troubled him little.

"'Repentedst thou never?' quoth Repentance, 'nor restitution madest?' 'Yea, once,' quoth he, 'I was y harboured with a heap of chapmen, I arose and rifled their mails when they a'rest were.' 'That was a rueful restitution,' quoth Repentance, 'forsooth!'"

No age, indeed, has a monopoly of clever dealers, and every artifice practised in earlier days was familiar to the fifteenth century, and so loudly resented by the consumers, that many people, mistaking the signs of a public zeal to check abuses for the evidences of a growing audacity in evil, have discovered in the later middle ages an accumulating mass of corruption which gradually covered with its blackness the felicity of a purer age. But whether from "the grace of guile," or from sheer ability, the traders prospered on every side. Langland looking out over all classes of men sees how with them above all lay the secret of fatness and good cheer:

"And some chose chaffer, they cheved the better, As it seemeth to our sight that such man thriveth."

The large sums that passed from hand to hand--the imposing debts registered in the town accounts--the complaints of a master being in arrears to his apprentice for a sum of ?100, or an apprentice to his master for ?138--the leasing out of the customs of a great port like Southampton to a single merchant--all these things indicate the new plutocracy that was beginning to appear. Drapers and clothiers were admitted into the select circles of privilege; in the towns the rank of "gentleman" became the appropriate reward of a successful cloth merchant, and even in the county society the clothier was beginning to oust the old proprietors. The Tames of Gloucestershire were ordinary dealers who made cloth and traded at Cirencester till about 1480 when John Tame rented great tracts of land at Fairford for his flocks of sheep, and in the new industrial centre which he developed there, wool was collected to feed the Cirencester manufactory. All over the country he bought at a cheap rate lands which the ruined nobles could no longer hold; and his enormous wealth increased yet further under his son Edmund, who took his place among the "gentry" by becoming High Sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1505, receiving the reward of knighthood in 1516, and entertaining Henry the Eighth at his house at Fairford in 1520.

The most wealthy folk in the towns, however, were probably the class that had grown up with the developement of foreign commerce and the export trade--the merchants who forsook handicrafts and lived wholly by "grete aventour." Their lot was not altogether an easy one in a society perplexed by the mighty rush of the new commerce, where men trained in an earlier system looked with a mixture of fear and dislike on the intrusion of a dubious profession not vouched for by familiar custom--"covetous people who seek their own advantage," and who not only lay under suspicion as men who refused to work, but were reproached with the destruction of trade by underselling the goods of English artizans with cheaper foreign wares. The government was concerned lest by their dealings the merchants should diminish the stock of gold to be kept in the country; while, on the other hand, Church and people unanimously saw in bargains with bills and pledges and sums bearing interest, which were then known as "dry exchange," something not to be distinguished from the sin of usury, and called on the government to declare void all such "damnable bargains grounded in usury, coloured by the name of new chevesaunce contrary to the law of natural justice"--"corrupt bargains which be most usually had within cities and boroughs." To the delicate conscience of theologian or social preacher trade could only be defended on the ground that honestly conducted it made no profit. As for the "poor commons," they held that while a man might live by trading, and perhaps make a modest competence, he had no right to grow rich; his gains represented to the people the wages of iniquity, and the hungry toiler sitting over his mess of beans and bacon-rind comforted himself as best he could with thoughts of the weary ages merchants must at last count in purgatory, watching kings and knights and bishops pass out of its gates, while they themselves still lingered to pay the penalty of great oaths and innumerable taken

"Against clean conscience, for covetyse of winning."

Meanwhile their way was made difficult on earth, and along the road to fair or market the wandering merchant or chapman was held to ransom by the rustics, while the harmless messenger who travelled by his side was sent merrily on his road.

To the mediaeval mind indeed the merchant burdened with his goods was the very type of the soul laden with sins, and painfully battling its doubtful way to heaven. He passed from peril to peril in the transport of the packages on which he had set the sign that distinguished his wares, the tall cross with shrouds or the flag. No navy protected his vessels on seas that swarmed with pirates, and companies of ships as ready for battle as for commerce, set out together, under command of one of the captains chosen as admiral, to fight their way as best they could, while at home fear beset the owner on every side. If a merchant sent his servant over sea to Bruges, or despatched an apprentice to one of the Baltic ports to gather in the profits due to him or to carry merchandise, no man might comfort him, and no religious thought distract his spirit till his messengers returned; and even when his goods reached port all his experience and cunning were needed to deal with the exactions of the king, who demanded the first choice of his wine or precious cargo, or to baffle the rapacity of the officers of the sheriff, the officers of the staple, the collectors of customs, the treasurers of the town, the searchers, or the clerk of the market.

If, however, the risks of the merchant who dared the "great adventure" increased a hundredfold, so the chances open to courage and skill became more brilliant, and the triumphant trader became the object of national pride. London had its hero--

"The son Of Merchandy, Richard of Whittingdon That loadstar and chief chosen flower What hath by him our England of honour?

That pen and paper may not me suffice Him to describe so high he was of prise."

A brass in the church of Chipping Camden, dated 1401, commemorates the "flower of the wool merchants of all England." In Dartmouth the long prosperity of the Hawleys was recalled in the local proverb--

"Blow the wind high, blow the wind low: It bloweth good to Hauley's hoe."

There were none who surpassed the merchants of Bristol--men who had made of their town the chief depot for the wine trade of southern France, a staple for leather, lead, and tin, the great mart for the fish of the Channel and for the salt trade of Brittany, whose cloth and leather were carried to Denmark to be exchanged for stock-fish, and to France and Spain for wine; who as early as 1420 made their way by compass to Iceland; whose vessels were the first from England to enter the Levant; and who when calamity fell on their business by the loss of Bordeaux, and by the competition of London merchants and the concentration of commerce in the hands of its Adventurers, turned their faces to the New World; sending out in 1480, and year after year from that time, two, three, or four light ships to sail "west of Ireland" in search of the "Island of Brasylle and the seven Cities," till in 1496 Cabot started with five vessels on his voyage of discovery, whence he came back to live in great honour among his fellow-townsmen, dressing in silk, and known as the "Great Admiral." The Bristol merchants of those days lived splendidly in fine houses three stories high, the grander ones having each its own tower. Underground stretched vast cellars with groined stone roofs: the ground floor was a warehouse or shop opening to the street; above this were the parlour and bedroom, with attics in the gables; while the great hall was built out behind with a lofty roof of carved timber. In the towers treasures of plate were stored which rivalled those of the nobles, and the walls were hung with the richest tapestries, or with at least "counterfeit Arras." Perhaps it was some such house which suggested to the poet, born perhaps in a village "cote," and who knew Bristol well, the idea of an abode which might be offered to the Lord of heaven--

"Neither in cot neither in caitiff house was Christ y bore, But in a burgess house, the best of all the town."

But the growing luxury of private life is a far less striking feature of the mediaeval borough than the splendid tradition of civic patriotism and generosity which seems to have prevailed. Burghers who prospered in the world left their noblest records in the memories of their public munificence; and there were hundreds of benefactors like Thomas Elys, the Sandwich draper, who in 1392 founded the hospital of S. Thomas-the-Martyr, and endowed it with a messuage and 132 acres of land; and within five months after founded the chantry of S. Thomas-the-Martyr; or like Simon Grendon, three times mayor of Exeter, who left money to found a hospital for the poor. Gifts to churches of plate and vestments and books, legacies for chantries or for priests are too numerous to mention; but there was a steady tendency among the townspeople to turn their benefactions into very different channels, and bequeathing their money to the town corporation instead of a religious body, to devote it directly to secular purposes and charities of the new fashion--founding free schools, building walls, repairing bridges, maintaining harbours for their borough, or leaving a fund for the payment of the ferm rent or certain fixed taxes. An Abingdon merchant gave a thousand marks towards the bridges over the two dangerous fords, Borough Ford and Culham Ford, which had to be built by the Abingdon men "at their own cost and charges, the alms of the town, and the benevolence of well-disposed persons," and which were to make Abingdon the high road from Gloucester to London. In 1421, when the Friars who owned the sources from which Southampton had its supply of water could no longer afford to replace the decayed pipes, a burgher "for the good of his soul" left money for new leaden pipes sufficient for the whole town as well as for the friars. An Ipswich burgess gave the very considerable sum of ?140 to relieve his fellow-townsmen of certain yearly tolls; and money was always forthcoming for gates and walls and market crosses, for the buying of new charters, the adorning of the Town Hall, or gifts of plate to the corporation; while as we have seen, a new system of education was practically founded by the free schools which were so largely endowed by their liberality.

But the constant fusion of classes which went on steadily throughout the century showed how solid were the reasons which drew together the rich traders of the towns and the half bankrupt families of the county. Impoverished country gentry were tempted by the money made in business, just as the "merchants and new gentlemen" hoped to reach distinction by marriage into landed families. Squires built for themselves houses in the neighbouring boroughs, turned into traders on their own account, and commonly took office at last in the municipal government; while on the other hand successful city merchants were becoming landed proprietors all over the country, were decorated with the ornaments of the Bath, and distinguished by fashionable marriages, in spite of the fretful sarcasms of a "gentle" class consoled in the hard necessities of poverty by a faint pride. "Merchants or new gentlemen I deem will proffer large," Edmund Paston wrote when a marriage of one of his family was in question; "well I wot if ye depart to London ye shall have proffers large." He seems to have preferred that the Pastons should look out for good connections; and possibly this anxiety was especially present in the case of the women, for the family seem to have been rather excited when Margery Paston in 1449 married one Richard Calle, and went, as John said, "to sell candles and mustard in Framlingham." But John Paston felt no hesitation about marrying the daughter of a London draper. One brother considered the solid merits of a London mercer's daughter, and another was very anxious to secure as his wife the widow of a worsted merchant at Worstead, who had been left a hundred marks in money, a hundred marks in plate and furniture, and ?10 a year in land. The money side of marriage with a substantial burgher must have had its attractive side also to the county ladies. In Nottingham, according to the "custom of the English borough," half of the property of the husband passed at his death to his widow; and a London mercer setting up in business promises in his contract of marriage "to find surety that if he die she to have ?100 besides her part of his goods after the custom of the city."

All interests in fact conspired in effacing class distinctions to an extent unknown in European countries; and in a land where "new men" had long been recognized among the king's greatest officials, and where law created no barriers in social life, all roads to eminence lay open before the adventurer. Notwithstanding this freedom, however, the English merchant never rose to the same height of wealth and power as the great traders of the Continent. We have no such figures as that of Jacques Coeur, burgher of Bourges, whose ships were to be seen in England carrying martens and sables and cloth of gold; or trading up the Rhone; or competing with rivals from Genoa, Venice, and Catalonia for the coasting trade of the Mediterranean; or sailing to the Levant, each vessel laden with sixteen or twenty thousand ducats for trade adventures. Three hundred agents in various towns acted as his factors in business; and his ambassadors were to be found at the court of the Egyptian Sultan, or sitting as arbitrators in the quarrels of political parties in Genoa. "I know," he writes with frank consciousness of power, "that the winning of the San Grail cannot be done without me." He had bought more than twenty estates or lordships, had two houses at Paris, two at Tours, four houses and two hotels at Lyons, houses at Beaucaire, B?ziers, Narbonne, S. Pour?ain, Marseilles, Montpellier, Perpignan, and Bourges. In 1450 he had spent 100,000 crowns of gold on the new house he was building out of Roman remains at Bourges, and it was still unfinished. As Master of the Mint at Bourges and at Paris, and as the greatest capitalist of his nation, he practically controlled the whole finances of France; and, indeed, held in his hands the fortunes of French commerce, and even of the French nation, for it was his loans to the King that alone enabled Charles to drive the English out of Normandy. At a time when all trade was strictly forbidden to the noble class, a grateful monarch, mindful of timely loans and of jewels redeemed from pawn by his useful money-lender, ennobled Jacques Coeur, with his wife and children. His eldest son was Archbishop of Bourges; his brother was Bishop of Lu?on; his nephew and chief factor was Councillor of King R?n?, and Chamberlain of the Duke of Calabria. But just as far as he went beyond the English trader in his glory and success, so far he exceeded him in the greatness of his ruin. The same arbitrary power which had set him above his fellows could as easily be used to cast him down; and after twenty years of prosperity Jacques Coeur was a State prisoner, robbed of all his goods, and condemned to perpetual exile. Transforming banishment into opportunity for new ventures, he set off eastward at the head of a crusade in 1456 to die on the journey, and find a grave in Chios.

Beside such a career as this, and measured by the prizes that hung before the adventurers of the Continent, the life of the English trader was indeed homely and monotonous. Triumph and ruin alike were on a modest scale. No great figure stands out from the rest as the associate of princes or the political agent of kings. No name has come down to us glorified by a vast ambition, or dignified by an intellectual inspiration, or made famous for turning the balance of a political situation. And it is just in this fact that we discover the essential character of the new commercial society in England. Instead of colossal fortunes we find a large middle class enjoying everywhere without fear a solid and substantial comfort. And, perhaps as a consequence of the widespread diffusion of material prosperity, the republic of traders had succeeded in developing a marvellous art of organization, with all its necessary discipline. The triumphs of the English merchants were won by a solid phalanx of men alike endowed with good average capacity, possessing extraordinary gifts of endurance and genius for combination, and moving all together with irresistible determination to their ends. The uniformity and regularity of their ranks was never broken by the intrusion of a leader of genius pre-eminent among his fellows; and whether in towns or in commercial fraternities, the little despotisms that were set up were despotisms, not of a single master, but of groups of men who had devised a common policy and by whose voluntary and united efforts it was sustained. In fact the very spirit of the people seemed to have entered into the great industrial system which had sprung up in their midst--a growth free and independent, nourished out of the common soil from which it came, obedient to its own laws, expanding by the force of its own nature.

No doubt there was loss as well as gain for a society so constituted. The special genius of the people, their remoteness from outer influences, the concentration of the national forces on the pressing industrial and commercial problems of the moment; all these things evidently affected the developement of the national life, and tended in many ways to leave civilization still rude and imperfect. But in addition to this we are also conscious of the influence of a certain prevailing mediocrity of station. The horizon of the trading and industrial classes was bounded by a practical materialism where intellect had as little play as imagination. Neither the glamour of ancient Rome nor the romance of a crusade ever touched the fancy of an English merchant, busy with the problems of the hour. There is no stately dwelling of those days to show the magnificent conceptions which might occupy a merchant builder, and a "palace of King John" at Nottingham, or a turreted house at Bristol, "the best of all the town," telling their tale of a comfortable domesticity, contrast strangely with the famous building of Bourges. So far as we know no trader or burgher possessed a library; out of the lost past not so much as a line of Horace found an echo among even the more lettered men of business till over a hundred years later; not a picture was carried home from the schools of Italy or the Netherlands; of the mighty commerce of the world beyond the sea the trader knew everything, of its culture nothing; and England remained without any distinguished patrons of the arts or fosterers of learning save those found in bishops' palaces. And not only was the trader limited on the side of art and letters; in the hurry of business he had no time and less attention to give to political problems that lay beyond his own parish or his industrial domain. Fortunately for his country he reaped an exact reward. His business prospered, but the work of statesmanship in its finer sense was given to others; and in the political and commercial crises through which England had to pass she for a time chose her leaders from men trained in another and more comprehensive school. It was only in the next century that the merchant by degrees began to enter on a new dominion in the world of politics. Under the early Tudors it became the custom to appoint as representatives of England in foreign countries traders resident in the place, and though the system is commonly put down to the niggardliness of the Court, it was more probably due to the ruler's sagacity. In England itself it was with Thomas Cromwell, the clerk of Antwerp, the wool merchant of Middelburg, scrivener, banker, and attorney, that for the first time the man of business made his vigorous entry into the Court, struck aside at a blow the venerable traditions that had gathered there round Church and State, and from the wreck and ruin of the past proclaimed the triumph of a new age.

THE LABOUR QUESTION

PERHAPS no complaint is at first sight so startling amid the vigorous growth of manufacture and commerce which marked the fifteenth century, and in a society where pestilence and plague apparently kept population stationary, as the complaint of surplus labour; and the elusive way in which the problem appears and vanishes again makes it yet more bewildering. People complained at one moment of labourers unemployed, and at the next they modified old laws because they could not get workmen enough. Masters on all sides were evading the regulations which limited the number of their apprentices and journeymen, and still cried to the State for protection for their craft because the artizan could find no work to do. Men talked of foreign competition and too many workers in every trade, and took forcible measures to keep down prices and wages. The lawmakers were forbidding the import of foreign goods so as to give employment to destitute artizans at home, and the artizans were conspiring to limit their output and raise their prices. That there was some real trouble whose indeterminate presence can be felt behind all these conflicting appearances we cannot doubt; but it may be questioned whether the trouble was that of labour for which there was no demand.

Many of the complaints no doubt arose in some period of peculiar suffering, when an outbreak of war or the rivalry between England and the Netherlands shut the great markets across the sea, and left weavers with idle looms and bales of cloth unsold; and we must occasionally take the phrases of statutes passed under the stress of some temporary calamity as merely describing a distress too unaccustomed to be borne in silence. For instance the statute of 1488 which was passed during the depression of trade that marked the first years of the reign of Henry the Seventh proposed to restore prosperity to the drapers' craftsmen, for "they that should obtain their needy sustentation and living by means of the same drapery, for lack of such occupation daily fall in great number to idleness and poverty;" but the commercial treaties which distinguished the next three or four years of Henry's reign were probably more effectual than any statute of this kind, and they sufficiently prove that the trade was not in a dying or decrepit state.

Occasionally too the murmurings of the people only tell of troubles that follow every industrial change. To an employer the new industry came to search out the extent of his resources and his activity. What with the haste to make wealth, and the hurry of keeping pace with the demands of foreign traders and of big markets, he was hard pressed by the necessity of cheap and swift production, and his attempts to improve his industrial methods brought him into collision with workers to whom ruder and more wasteful ways of doing business were often more immediately profitable. Labour disputes arose over questions of wages and piece-work, of holidays, of the employment of women and cheap workers. Occasionally the master carried on an illicit industry--keeping workmen privately engaged in his own house or on board a ship in the port, so as to withdraw his servants from the supervision of the town council, and his goods from charges for the town dues. If he had accumulated a little capital he perhaps moved out to the valleys of Yorkshire or Gloucestershire in search of water-power for his fulling-mills, or of finer wool for his weavers; or forsook the manufacturing town for some rural district where labour was plentiful, and where he could escape the heavy municipal dues which his business could ill afford to pay. While the valley of the Stroud was welcoming Flemish settlers and seeing mills spring up along every stream, London and Canterbury found their manufacturing trade slipping away from them; and the glory of Norwich departed as cloth-makers pushed along the moorland streams of Yorkshire to Wakefield and Huddersfield and Halifax, and set up fulling-mills among the few peasant huts of remote hamlets.

Difficulties also arose when the manufacturer began to contrive the first rude form of a factory system, and so disturbed the occasional labour of his neighbourhood; after the manner of the brewers of Kent, who besides having to supply London and the big trading ports of the coast were also beginning to send out beer to Flanders, and who no longer as of old bought their malt from the people, making only some trifling hundred quarters or so in their own houses, but began to make at home as much as a thousand or even eighteen hundred quarters, to the hurt of those farmers and youths who had once gained a livelihood by preparing malt for sale. Or perhaps enterprising masters began to introduce new machinery to keep pace with the increasing demand for their wares. Such an innovation was resisted as hotly as in our own century. The shearers of cloth raised a cry against a new iron instrument invented for raising the nap of cloth so that it could be quickly burned off without the old labour, while shearers were left idly loitering. Among the cap-makers "some of the trade provided a water-mill for fulling their caps" in 1376, by which apprentices and freemen of the trade found themselves deprived of work and "at the point of perishing." Their appeal to the town was of course on the ground that caps so fulled were bad wear for the community, and the mills were in consequence forbidden; but a century of disobedience and evasions and wranglings followed until the working fullers appealed to Parliament itself, and in 1482 it was decreed that hats, bonnets, and caps, which "were wont to be faithfully ... thicked by men's strength, that is to say with hands and feet," should never again be fulled in fulling-mills invented "by subtle imagination to the destruction of the labours and sustenance of many men," and to the "final undoing" of the cap-makers.

Even the question of foreign immigration stirred up contention between clothiers and weavers. Manufacturers trading in marts where the fine work of Flemish experts--the most skilful weavers in Europe--had been displayed, required for the success of their trade the services of the finely trained artizans who took refuge in England from the ruin that awaited them in Flanders, and in many a town skilled immigrants found themselves welcome guests. Under the protection of the classes to whom the foreign artizan can never have been unwelcome--the consumer, the merchant, and the master--he fared well enough; for so long as he was subjected to the local control of the guild or the municipality, forced to dwell in the house of an Englishman, forbidden to sell in retail, kept under a supervision so strict as practically to shut him out from the market, the employers of labour saw no reason for anxiety. On the other hand the complacent view of the manufacturer was not shared by the English artizan; and in places where trade was shrinking or where there was financial trouble the foreigner might chance to be made into the luckless scape-goat of the community, and have heaped on his head all the calamities that burdened the guild or the municipality. For example, in the middle of the fifteenth century when the Bristol wool trade was half ruined by the loss of Bordeaux which destroyed its great market and brought about lasting changes in the French manufacturing centres; and by the determination of the Merchant Adventurers to establish in London and in favour of London merchants a practical monopoly of the cloth trade with the Northern Seas, a complaint was made by the journeymen against the master-weavers who had "brought in and put in occupation of the craft strangers, persons of divers countries, not born under the King's obeisance but rebellious," urged the desperate working man in search of an unassailable argument which should finally decide the matter, "which been sold to them as it were heathen people"; and the Mayor granted the desired order that no foreign weaver should be brought into Bristol--a law which did not however restore the cloth trade to their city.

In this case we seem really to hear the complaint of the poor journeyman; and elsewhere, in appeals for compassion and protection, in statutes of Parliament and royal charters, or in ordinances of Town Councils for his relief, we seem from time to time to find ourselves on the brink of a labour problem present to the modern as to the ancient world. But generally the story of foreign immigration as it has been handed down to us is in no sense the story of the labour question. An association of masters seeking to secure a strict monopoly for their own advantage could not bring a more powerful argument than the desperate situation of their workmen--an argument which might be used by a powerful corporation confident of official support, or by a dying trade which had been utterly beaten in the competitive struggle--and which taken alone throws little light on the subject. When the dispute with the foreigner emerges it generally seems to bear the character of a quarrel among dealers rather than a grudge of artizans. The working man had no doubt his grievance, but it is not his voice which we hear--it is the voice of his more noisy neighbour the shopkeeper or the trader, who knowing that he himself had little to expect from the sympathy of the English consumer, passed briefly over the subject of his own immediate interests, and used with artistic skill the sufferings of the wage-earner to kindle a general compassion and heighten the effect of an appeal to an anxious government or an alarmed public. For as we read the Town Ordinances and Acts of Parliament these strange "artificers" who were setting the world on fire put on the guise of pedlars or small dealers who "bring much foreign wares with them to sell," and were thus especially obnoxious to the native traders; such foreign pests, it appears, were going "to men's doors" "taking up standings" and there "showing" their wares to the undoing of the natives, and hiring servants of their own people to retail their goods about the country--an unpardonable offence in the eyes of London merchants, who were moving heaven and earth to become the only middlemen of the foreign trade. With varying success the native dealers clamoured for protective legislation, praying that the strangers might be forbidden to engage freely in trade, and forced as journeymen to serve only an English master, or as masters to employ only English servants. A usurper like Richard the Third, anxious to conciliate the leading burghers of the towns, was ready among other things to forbid any alien whatever to become a handicraftsman, or any foreigner to take an apprentice of his own people save his own son or daughter; while on the other hand, Henry the Seventh carried out his own views of industrial policy by bringing weavers over to develope the trade of Yorkshire and Devonshire.

But under whatever restrictions the foreigners still came, and the same cry against them went up loudly from time to time. Manufacturers and middlemen who would have gladly welcomed immigrants so long as they gave themselves out as men working for hire, resented the invasion of strangers coming from over sea "with their wives, children, and household, and will not take upon them any laborious occupation as carting and ploughing but use making of cloths and other handicrafts and easy occupations;" and this apparently as masters, for the complaint was that they employed only foreign apprentices, so that English people were falling into idleness and becoming thieves, beggars, and vagabonds. "The land is so inhabited with a great multitude of needy people, strangers of divers nations ... that your liege people, Englishmen, cannot imagine or tell whereto or to what occupation that they shall use or put their children to learn or occupy within your said cities or boroughs"--so the Londoners complain in 1514: and add that if this went on Englishmen would no longer be able to pay their rents, maintain their households, and subdue and vanquish their ancient enemies the French. Hopeless, in fact, of combating the theory of his time that trade legislation was meant in the first instance to serve the interests of the buyer rather than the dealer, and fearing lest an argument for monopoly of sale might hardly withstand the criticism of a hostile public, the trader was tempted to discover some circuitous course, and catch at the cause of the poor workman, the terror of the French, and the patriotic vision of a nation of warrior weavers, as infallible appeals to the sentiment of his time.

We find animosities and complaints of the same kind directed against the struggling suburban manufacturers, who competed with the townsfolk by dint of braving every hardship, and accustoming their hands to every form of labour. To the town manufacturer they were an abomination; and he sought to enlist the sympathy of the public by loud complaints that it was only workmen who had scarcely learned their trade who thus left their masters to set up for themselves and make an independent living. It is probable indeed that their numbers were often recruited by small masters who had fallen through poverty out of the regular ranks of industry; as for example when an apprentice or a stranger set up in business to try his luck, and having been given perhaps three or four years in which to pay by instalments the sum charged by the guild for opening shop, made his escape out of the borough just before his last fine became due, being by that time possibly ready to start as a free trader in an "upland" hovel, and to eke out a scanty living by working at his hand loom or his rope-making in the intervals of cultivating field or garden. But such home industries, however they originated, were inevitably disallowed by the municipal organizers of labour. They diverted trade, established a formidable competition of unregulated labour, reduced tolls, and emptied the tax-gatherer's collecting box. Town councillors and shopkeepers and journeymen with one accord declared war on those who for their own "singular advantages and commodities, nothing regarding the upholding of the said towns, nor the common wealth of the handicrafts ... nor the poor people which had living by the same," hired farms and became graziers and husbandmen, and yet took to weaving, fulling, and shearing cloths in their own houses; or who, like the grasping people that withdrew from Bridport, took farms "for their private lucre" and not only "used husbandry" but made cables, ropes, ships' tackling, and halters in their idle hours.

Disputes of the kind which have been mentioned, however, were of trifling importance in the secular controversy between the leaders of industry and the general body of workers, as it presented itself in the Middle Ages; and the great problem of all--that which concerned no separate groups or industries, but the whole mass of labour that was to be let out for hire--was one inarticulate through its very magnitude. While workers were being set free from the land wherever arable farms were turned into enclosed pastures for sheep farming, they were called for by the manufacturer whose new business of making cloth needed more hands than the old business of selling wool. But the labour released from the field was perhaps not always easily transferred to the shop; and when the countryman who with his fellows had toiled on the land

"All for dread of their death such dints gave hunger,"

and, save when harvest time gave a brief plenty, ate in suffering his cake of oats with a few curds, his "bread of beans and peases," his onions and half-ripe cherries, and little baked apples,--when he forsook his "cote" and carried to the town nothing but his hunger, his ignorance, his want of skill, he did not necessarily mend his fortune by turning from the serf of the landlord into the wretched dependent of the employer. Moreover, as though the obstacles in the way of his helplessness were not already sufficiently overwhelming, by the ingenious device of man the difficulty was made yet more acute. Artificial barriers to keep in check the labour that clamoured at their gates were thrown up with all the united strength of State and Town and Guild. The State in order to protect the agricultural interest strictly forbade the poor countryman to leave husbandry for trade, or to apprentice his child to any craft. The towns for reasons of their own hastened to intensify the effect of these laws by local regulations, or by the strictness with which they carried out old enactments. Finally the guilds fenced themselves about with rules to protect their monopoly by limiting their numbers and shutting out intruders. As the fifteenth century went on all these bodies alike enforced their provisions with increasing severity, and the danger that threatened the working-class through the industrial revolution was hardened into a present calamity.

It is impossible to conceive that regulations of this kind were self-denying ordinances on the part of employers to limit the supply of labour; they rather come to us as echoes of the first great controversy concerning the position and privileges of the hired worker. The "protection" of industry from all competition was the first and the last creed of the crafts --a protection by which every conceivable danger that might threaten the interests of the monopolists was struck down, whether it was the competition of other allied trades, or that introduced by machinery and new methods of organizing labour, or rivalry between members in the same craft, or the intrusion of dealers from the provinces, or the immigration of alien manufacturers from abroad. As to the main principle there was no dispute; and there were some of its less important developements where the interests of the masters and the journeymen coincided. But to employers and dealers the monopoly of trade chiefly meant their own monopoly of production and sale; while the wage-earner's dominant anxiety was to keep surplus labour out of the craft, lest the regular workman might be deprived of his comfortable certainty of subsistence. Labour however was too sorely needed in the enormously increasing trade of the country for masters to deny themselves its services; nor did any of their ordinances necessarily tend in the least to produce a result so disastrous to themselves. In their eyes the important matter was that workers should be kept docile and obedient, retained in country districts where they were most advantageous to the contractor, and prevented from making claims on the control or the profits of industry which must have hampered the great business of the moment--the expansion of English trade; and the ability of the craft-leaders was shown in the masterly tactics which they adopted, the success which they achieved, and the political sagacity by which they accomplished their purpose without open strife or public agitation.

For it seems probable that the labour question had its origin with the very beginning of manufacturing industries, and that long before the fifteenth century a large class of hired workers already existed. We know that in the fourteenth century the wage-earners in the crafts already constituted a force which the State and the municipality had come to fear, and that not only in London but in other towns journeymen had learned discontent, and had begun to combine for self-protection. We know also that before 1340 one manufacturing town at least owned its miserable race of labourers who worked by the day at a bare subsistence wage of a penny, an outcast people whose abject poverty was their only protection; men possessing absolutely nothing by which they could be attached for crimes or offences, and who could laugh at any attempt of the court to summon or to fine them; while their employers, not being held legally responsible save under some special ordinance for such day labourers as these, took no care for the debt or crime of a class without privilege or standing in the eye of the law. And obscure as the subject still is, we seem at a very early time to detect behind the guild system a growing class of "uncovenanted" labour, which the policy of the employers constantly tended to foster, their aim being on the one hand to limit the number of privileged serving-men, and on the other to increase the supply of unprotected workers.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet