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.[104] 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”;[105] 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,[106] and were merely freed from toll[107] 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;[108] while even with these restrictions no trader who lived outside the walls was admitted among them,[109] 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.[110] 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,[111] 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,[112] 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 mediæval 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.[113] 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.[114] 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 (at least as to one of its meanings) 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.”[115]
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.[116] 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.[117] 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[118] 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;[119] and in 1501 their treaty with the Cinque Ports was ratified by “your lovers the bailiff and jurats of Hastings.”[120] 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.[121] 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.[122] 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[123] 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.[124]
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 mediæval 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.[125] 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.
CHAPTER III
THE TOWN TRADER
With the appearance of the new commercial society in the boroughs we feel that the history of modern England has begun. By the formation of a prosperous middle class, a new type of character was introduced into English life—a type which lay altogether outside old traditions, and was as far from imitating the confident superiority of classes that held the mastery by traditional right, as it was from preserving the simplicity and resignation of the masses of those who confessed a hereditary duty of subjection. The mediæval burgher was trained in a rough school. Owing nothing to class or family or patron, roughly judged and consigned to his own place in the ranks by the test of competition in its simplest form, the industrial rivalry between man and man, the trader had no helper if he did not help himself. Merchants burdened with little capital, like the trader pictured by Holbein in his Dance of Death carrying all their store of wealth bound up on their persons, and free to change their residence as often as commerce offered brighter prospects elsewhere, wandered from town to town, leaving no trade unlearned, no fair unvisited at home, and no market forgotten abroad. Craftmasters equally destitute of money had to trust to their own wit in the struggle for life, and became practised in vigilance and patience, thrift and caution, in the contempt of hardship, in strenuous and ceaseless activity. The discipline of trade was severe, and the conditions of prosperity hard. If a gentleman intruder appeared among these men hoping to find an easy way to wealth in the more respectable forms of business to which the county families alone condescended, his experiences were watched with contemptuous good humour by the burghers, who knew the hardships of the road.