From the Froissart MS. in the British Museum.
THE LANDING OF THE LADY DE COUCY AT BOULOGNE.
THE LADY DE COUCY, WHO IS FOLLOWED BY HER WAITING MAID, HAD BEEN IN ATTENDANCE UPON QUEEN ISABELLA, CONSORT OF RICHARD II AND SHE IS HERE SEEN RETURNING SADLY TO FRANCE (IN 1399) BEARING TIDINGS OF THE KING'S DOWNFALL.
Wool, woollens, tin, hides, and corn, were still our chief exports. Slaves, says the historian, were no longer an article of commerce; but the conveyance of pilgrims to foreign shrines was a source of great emolument to merchants. A curious pamphlet of the middle of this century, called "The Prologue of English Policy," gives us a complete view of our imports:—The commodities of Spain were figs, raisins, wines, oils, soap, dates, liquorice, wax, iron, wool, wadmote, goatfell, redfell, saffron, and quicksilver—a valuable importation. Those of Portugal were very much the same. Brittany sent wine, salt, crest-cloth or linen, and canvas; Germany, Scandinavia, and Flanders, iron, steel, copper, osmond, bowstaves, boards, wax, corn, pitch, tar, flax, hemp, felting, thread, fustian, buckram, canvas, and wool-cards; Genoa, gold, cloth of gold, silk, cotton, oil, black pepper, rockalum, and wood; Venice, Florence, and other Italian states, all kinds of spices and grocery wares, sweet wines, sugar, dates.
The age abounded with great merchants. The Medici of Florence; Jacques le Cœur, the greatest merchant that France ever produced, who had more wealth and trade than all the other merchants of that country together, and who supplied Charles VII. with money by which he recovered his country from the English. In our own country John Norbury, John Hende, and Richard Whittington, were the leading merchants of London, the last of whom was so far from a poor boy making his fortune by a cat that he was the son of Sir William Whittington, knight. In Bristol also flourished at this time William Cannynge, who was five times mayor of that city, and who had, for some cause not explained, 2,470 tons of shipping taken from him at once by Edward IV., including one ship of 400 tons, one of 500, and one of 900. The name of this Cannynge is familiar to readers of Chatterton's ingenious Rowley poems.
Of the ships and shipping of the age we need not say more than that, with all the characteristics of the past age, there was an attempt to build larger vessels in rivalry of the Genoese. John Taverner, of Hull, had a royal licence granted him in 1449, conferring on him great privileges and exemptions as a merchant, for building one as large as a Venetian carrack, one of their first-class ships, or even larger. And Bishop Kennedy, of St. Andrews, was as much celebrated for building a ship of unusual size, called the Bishop's Berge, as for building and endowing a college.
In Scotland the state of the shipping interest was much the same as in England. James I. displayed enlightened views of trade. He made various laws to ascertain the rate of duty on all exports and imports, to secure the effects of any traders dying abroad, and permitted his subjects to trade in foreign ships when they had no vessels of their own. In both countries great care was taken to protect and promote their fisheries.