The members were all controlled by a "stint," according to which an apprentice in the last year of his term might ship one hundred pieces of cloth in the year; while a full freeman in the society could ship from four hundred to one thousand pieces a year, according to the length of time he had been a member. [Footnote: Lingelbach, Laws and Ordinances of the Merchant Adventurers, 67-74.] They were under strict regulations against forestalling and undue competition. They could display and sell their cloth only upon Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and "No person shall stand watchinge at the corners or ends of streetes, or at other mens' Packhouses or at the house or place where anie clothe merchant or draper ys lodged, nor seeinge anie such in the street shall run or follow after hym with Intent to Entyce or lead hym to his packhouse, upon pain of fyve pounds ster." [Footnote: Lingelbach, Laws and Ordinances of the Merchant Adventurers, 89, 91.]
In many respects, on the other hand, the Merchants Adventurers were quite similar to the later chartered companies, whose period of existence their own overlapped. In fact, considering the early date of their origin, the tardy development of English economic life, and the obstacles to trading in a foreign country even so near as the continental seaboard, the conditions which confronted them were much the same as those which the later companies had to meet, and they met them in much the same way. They obtained a charter of incorporation from the king; they possessed a monopoly of trade in a certain territory, as against other men of their own nation; they had a common treasury for joint expenses; and they acted as, and were even called, "the English nation," in the foreign country which was their abiding- place. [Footnote: Lingelbach, Internal Organization, 29-34; Laws and Ordinances, passim; and Charters of 1462 and 1564.] The Merchants Adventurers, therefore, might be looked upon as a late surviving mediaeval merchant guild, modified in form by the necessity of adapting itself to trading in a foreign country; or it might be considered as the earliest of the modern chartered commercial companies, still retaining in the seventeenth century some of its mediaeval features. Viewed in either aspect, the Merchants Adventurers were a living model for the organization of the new type of companies, and the powers and form of government of the latter show a similarity to the older company which is certainly not accidental.
The five or six English companies whose dates of foundation lie within the sixteenth century all yield in importance, interest, and later influence to the East India Company, which was destined to an almost imperial existence of two centuries and a half, and which may well serve as the representative of the English chartered companies. Its origin was closely connected with the international relations of the last decades of the sixteenth century.
The availability of the port of Lisbon as the western distributing centre for Eastern goods ceased in 1580, when Portugal became a part of the dominions of the king of Spain. As war already existed between Spain and the Netherlands, and was soon to break out between Spain and England, commerce was much disturbed; and after a few years of troubled intercourse that port was closed to the merchants of Holland and England. The union of the crowns of Spain and Portugal at this time had much the same effect on the supply of Eastern goods to these two Protestant seaboard states that the conquests of the Turks in the eastern Mediterranean had had for the Italian cities a century before.
It was not likely that the two most vigorous, free, and commercially enterprising states of Europe would allow themselves long to be excluded from the most attractive and lucrative trade in the world. After England, in her resistance to the Armada in 1588, applied the touchstone to the naval prestige of Spain and showed its hollowness, her merchants and mariners took heart and pressed directly to the East. In 1591 an English squadron of three ships, under Captains Raymond and Lancaster, with the queen's leave, sailed down the western coast of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, followed the east coast to Zanzibar, and then passed across to Cape Comorin, Ceylon, and the Malay peninsula. They had mixed fortune, but one vessel returned home laden with pepper, obtained for the most part from the hold of a Portuguese prize. In 1595 the first direct Dutch voyage was made along much the same route. Other English and Dutch voyages followed; and in 1600 and 1602, respectively the English and Dutch East India companies were chartered. The following analysis of the charter of the former of these companies will give the main characteristics of the new commercial system: [Footnote: Charters Granted to the East India Company, 3-26,]
1. The charter, granted by Queen Elizabeth on December 31, 1600, was addressed by name to the earl of Cumberland and two hundred and fifteen knights and merchants, whom it created a corporation and a body politic under the name of "The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading to the East Indies."
2. The territory to which they were given privileges of trade consisted of all continents and islands lying between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan—that is to say, the east coast of Africa, the southern shore of Asia, the islands of the Indian Ocean, and the west coast of America; so long as they made no attempt to trade with any port at the time of the charter in the possession of any prince in league with Elizabeth, who should protest against such trade.
3. The corporation was for all time; but the privileges of trade under the charter were granted for fifteen years, with a promise, if they should seem profitable to the crown and the realm, to extend them for fifteen years more; and with a reservation, on the other hard, of the power to terminate them on two years' notice.
4. The powers of the company were those of an ordinary corporation and body politic. The members of the company and their employees possessed a complete monopoly of trade in the regions described, so far as English subjects were concerned, having, moreover, the right to grant licenses to non-members to trade within their limits.
5. They could buy land without limitation in amount, and as a matter of fact the company gained its first foothold in each of its stations in the East by buying a small piece of land from the native government.