Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Alice Stopford Green

“I have made many a knight both mercer and draper,”

says the merchant in a mediæval poem,

“Paid never for their prenticehood not a pair of gloves;
But chaffered with my chevesance, [bargains] cheved [prospered] seldom after.”[126]

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;[127] 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.[128] 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 mediæval 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.[129] 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[130]—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.[131]

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,[132] 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.[133] 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,”[134] 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 (a bit of special pleading on his part since this was just the age of the mayoralty itself in Canterbury) and, that the mayors had ceased to be victuallers out of self-indulgence, and because they preferred to live at their ease.[135]

At the first victuallers and publicans owed their supremacy in the town society to the fact that among a people needy and thrifty the trader’s only way to fortune lay in selling the common necessaries of life. The great bulk of the people lived poorly. In general perhaps the master craftsman scarcely earned a higher wage than his journeymen,[136] and may have often eked out his livelihood by ploughing and reaping his lot of the common land at one time, while at another he worked at his occupation with two or three helpers—servants and apprentices “which be of no great having,” and who were by law compelled to cut, gather, and bring in the corn[137] if they were employed in a trade “of which craft or mystery a man hath no great need in harvest time.” The first speculators who were tempted by visions of a great public with its exhaustless needs and unfathomable purse pursued their dreams with the guile of petty schemers. If a dealer proposed to make his fortune in malt he opened proceedings with the strictest economies. A penny or a half-penny served as earnest money to the peasants from whom he bought his corn, and who were told to come to the house for payment. “And when they come there and think to have their payment directly, the buyer says that his wife at his house has gone out, and has taken the key of the room, so that he cannot get at his money; but that the other must go away and come again soon and receive his pay. And when he comes back a second time, then the buyer is not to be found; or else, if he is found, he feigns something else, by reason whereof the poor men cannot have their pay. And sometimes while the poor men are waiting for their pay the buyer causes the corn to be wetted,” and then tells the peasant he may take it away with him if he does not like the price offered.[138] In the same way the cloth contractor started with a modest business that needed no outlay of money, taking the raw material which his customers brought to him and handing it over to weavers, who on their side provided their own tools and did the work in their own homes. As he prospered in the world he may have become the owner of a few looms which he let out to the weavers he employed; or he perhaps added to his trade the keeping of a little shop or some small pedlar’s business for the sake of such petty gains as the law, looking in those days with scant favour on dealers, might allow. Often hard set to carry on his business, he sought to help out his poverty by cunning, and the expedients to which he was driven—the giving out of bad material or short weight to his workmen, the devices to save a few pence here and there by deducting it on one pretext or another from payments due, the giving wages in victuals or needles or mercery or the waste trifles of his little shop—must often indicate the distracting pressure of immediate need under which he anticipated the devices of the small working employer of to-day.[139]

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,”[140]

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.[141] Weaknesses of remorse troubled him little.