A history of commerce

by Clive Day

46. Effect of the towns in improving the conditions in the country.—This movement was bound to change the conditions of life in the country districts. The people there were freed from the necessity of devoting part of their time to work which they never did well; they could apply most of their energy to agriculture, and could use the surplus crop which they thus obtained, for a profitable exchange with the artisans of the town. The growth of towns affected them in another way. In the purely manorial period a serf could not better his condition by running away; he had nowhere to go except to other manors like the one he had left, where his condition might actually be worse than before. In the towns, however, practically all the population were free; the artisans were numerous and intelligent enough to provide for their own protection, and did not need to subject themselves to a lord. The towns were islands of freedom in a sea of serfdom or of half-freedom. The custom established itself that a serf who could escape from his lord, and who lived a year and a day within the walls of a town, became a free man, and could not be reduced to his former position. Landlords found that they must bid against the attractions of the town if they were to keep the laborers in the country, and agreed to lighten their burdens if they would stay. Many influences worked together, and the results were modified by many factors, especially of a political kind, in various countries, but the upward movement of the country population was general throughout western Europe. Free men produced more than serfs, and this was another influence increasing the surplus of the country districts, and furthering trade thereby.

47. The “foreign” trade of this period was that between towns, even in the same country.—The student who has begun the history of commerce with the notion, as common as it is erroneous, that the foreign trade of a country is more important than its internal trade, and who is impatient to arrive at the description of this foreign trade, will be disappointed to learn that even in the latter part of the Middle Ages it scarcely existed in the modern sense. We mean now by foreign trade that between states—between the United States and Germany, for example. In the manorial period, as has been suggested, foreign trade was rather that which existed between manors. In the period under discussion it was that which existed between towns. The towns existing inside the boundaries of a modern European country did not, it is true, differ as much among themselves, in their products, as they differed, taking them altogether, from the towns of another country. But the expense of transportation restricted most trade still to a comparatively small radius, and the town, rather than the country, was the natural trading unit. The radius of profitable trade, for most articles, was so small that an English town would have its most important commercial relations with the other English towns rather than with the towns of foreign countries. The town, moreover, was the unit for regulating trade. Each town would have its own customs tariff, and to a merchant of London it made little difference whether he traded with Southampton or with Paris; national regulation was less important than municipal. Climatic and historical influences, it is true, made a clearly marked distinction between the great sections of Europe, the North and the South, the East and the West, and we shall have to take up some of these sections in detail; but we shall use our time most effectively by spending it not on the features of trade in the different modern countries considered separately, but on the characteristics of trade common to all the advanced countries.

48. Small size of the medieval towns.—A point deserving special emphasis in the description of the medieval town is this, that though the town comprised practically all the mercantile and manufacturing population of a country, and though it marked a tremendous advance over the village, yet the town was a very small affair when measured by modern standards. In England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the average size of the first class of towns was probably below 5,000 inhabitants; few had more than 10,000 and many had less than 1,000. On the Continent, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, even celebrated cities like Nuremberg and Strassburg had not over 20,000 inhabitants. Frankfort on the Main had scarcely 10,000, and other cities which played a great part in economic and political history had even less.

49. Rural characteristics of the towns.—Another misconception must be guarded against. Though the town was a distinctly industrial group in comparison with the village, yet each town had grown from a village, and retained many features of its agricultural infancy even to a late period. Most of the townspeople owned some land which they used for garden plots, and every town had considerable amounts of arable and pasture land outside the walls which was used for the benefit of the townspeople if not actually worked by them. In Coblentz, in the thirteenth century, work on the city walls was stopped during harvest by lack of labor, and in London at the same period people were allowed to keep pigs “within their houses,” and the attempt to keep vagrant swine off the streets was a distinct failure.

50. General description of a town.—There were generally a few streets that were broad and straight, as they were the old highways on which the town had grown up. The attempt was made to keep these clear of encroaching houses and shops by sending a horseman through them once a year with a spear held horizontally, and by forcing the removal of obstructions. Most of the streets, however, had grown up from village by-paths and were narrow and crooked. They were rarely paved, and as they served as the repository for all kinds of offal and garbage we can understand why the townspeople wore wooden overshoes when they went out, and even the saints in the pictures were painted with them on. The houses were of wood in the early period, and there were no chimneys, so that fires were frequent and disastrous until they forced people to a better mode of building. Travelers in Europe now remark upon the picturesque beauty of the old houses, and upon the merits of their construction, but it should be noted that most of these relics date from the very end of the Middle Ages and that they were the select few of their time, and give no indication of the character of the average house. Most of the people lived in narrow quarters, dark and drafty, unsuited for good work places and unwholesome as habitations. Wares were exposed for sale either in the open market-places which are so common in European towns, or in little shops like pedlers’ booths at the front of the house. The municipal government spent little or nothing for public works or police protection; it tried to make the inhabitants share in performing all absolutely necessary duties, but succeeded so ill that all the towns were sinks of disease, and breach of the peace was a constant occurrence.

51. Improvement in conditions in the later Middle Ages.—In the early period of the towns, say before 1300, conditions were distinctly worse than they were in the last two centuries of the Middle Ages, when commerce had attained such development that it brought great wealth to some and comparative comfort to many among the city people. The town of Colchester, in England, ranked as one of importance in 1295, but a tax roll of that date shows a striking poverty in the stock in trade assessed for taxation, in the small value of household furniture, in the insignificant amount of most of the assessments, and in the preponderance of rural wealth like live-stock and agricultural produce over other kinds of personal property. In the fourteenth century, however, the population of the town doubled, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the towns of England in general freed themselves from the worst features of medieval squalor, accumulated wealth, and expended large sums in building and improvements.

52. Town organization. The merchant gilds.—Much more might be said about the general characteristics of the medieval town, but the student of the history of commerce must devote most of his time to its economic life. He must prepare himself to accept and understand conditions quite different from those of modern times, and must try to realize how much the world has gained by the advance of the commercial organization from these early stages. In every town the merchants and manufacturers were organized in gilds and subject to strict regulation. The Anglo-Saxon word gild means “a contribution to a common fund,” and came to be applied to the society itself. Societies had existed in the first part of the Middle Ages with social and religious objects, and about the eleventh century, with the springing up of trade, commercial gilds became more and more common. It is supposed that the dangers and difficulties of trade were then so great that merchants united in bands for a journey, as caravans are now formed in the unsettled countries of the East. A collection of early gild rules shows that the members were subject to regulations like the following: Every one was obliged to carry armor, a bow and twelve arrows on penalty of a fine; they must stand by and help each other when they set out for a journey; in case one member had not sold his wares the others must wait one day for him; if one was imprisoned or lost his wares on the road the others must ransom him. The organization was probably temporary at first, and the company of merchants dissolved at the end of the trip; but as such caravans became more regular at any place there grew the tendency to permanence of organization. These merchant gilds were at first also private associations, formed voluntarily by the merchants to protect themselves; but they received public recognition and became a part of the town government as the town saw the advantage it could get from them in pushing its trade and protecting it against the efforts of rivals. They included not only professional merchants, but all who bought and sold, including many artisans. Of the nine members who belonged to the Shrewsbury merchant gild in its earliest period two were fishermen and one was a butcher.

53. Position of the merchant gilds; their privilege of monopoly.—These merchant gilds did not exist in all parts of Europe, and differed much from each other in the various regions where they did exist. In England, which we shall choose to illustrate their operation, they became regular parts of the town government. They were granted one most important privilege, the exclusive right of trading within the town. “Foreigners,” which meant at this period the people from any other town, whether English or not, were allowed to bring their wares to the town and to sell them wholesale, but they were forbidden to purchase wares which the townspeople wanted for themselves, and they were not allowed to keep shops and to sell retail. The gilds were not like modern “trusts,” for, in the first place, their membership was very broad, and, in the second, they were associations of men, not of capital, and there was no division of profits among the members. There was a strong feeling of solidarity among the members, however, and competition between them was discouraged. In some places there was a law that if a gildsman made a bargain for any ware another gildsman had the right to share in it if he gave security that he could pay for the portion he desired.

54. Development of manufactures in the towns; the common handicrafts.—The growth of towns led, as has been said, to a specialization in manufactures which was impossible before. All the industries that had been carried on in villages were continued in towns by professional craftsmen, and new ones were added as the demand for them grew. There were from a dozen to a score of handicrafts which supported for centuries the staple manufacturing groups of the towns: butchers, bakers, brewers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, masons, carpenters, cabinet-makers, wheelwrights, skinners or furriers, tanners, shoemakers, saddlers and harness-makers, weavers, dyers, fullers, and tailors. Most of these terms will be familiar to the reader. Coppersmiths took the place of the modern tinsmiths before the introduction of tinned iron. Fullers improved the texture of cloth after it had been woven, by beating and washing it with fuller’s earth, a clay which absorbs the grease from the wool; the cloth loses in length and breadth but gains in body and thickness.

55. The craft gilds.—The craftsmen, like the traders, were organized in gilds, which followed shortly after the rise of merchant gilds. The general reason for their existence was the desire on the part of members of a particular craft to be free to regulate their professional affairs as they pleased, and the willingness on the part of the public authorities to grant them this privilege when it seemed to promise better work and better products for the consumer. To insure efficient regulation the grant of monopoly was necessary, and accordingly no one was allowed to practise a craft who did not belong to the appropriate gild. We shall see that the monopoly was greatly abused in later times and was a serious hindrance to the development of manufacturing. At the start, however, the craft gilds were liberal; they desired a large number of members to increase their political importance, and admitted them freely; inside the gild the class distinctions were at first unimportant. “The regulations drawn up by the crafts aimed at the prevention of fraud, and the observance of certain standards of size and quality in the wares produced. Articles made in violation of these rules were called ‘false,’ just as clipped or counterfeit coin was ‘false money.’ For such ‘false work’ the makers were punished by fines (one half going to the craft, the other half to the town funds), and, upon the third or fourth offence, by expulsion from the trade. Penalties were provided, as far as possible, for every sort of deceitful device; such as putting better wares at the top of a bale than below, moistening groceries so as to make them heavier, selling second-hand furs for new, soldering together broken swords, selling sheep leather for doe leather, and many other like tricks.”