Now when to this power of demand created by the “sticking” at the point of transhipment or port of import, of goods coming from abroad, there is added the power of demand caused by the residence of government, of a court and of wealthy men apart from those who are wealthy through commerce, you get, of course, a very highly increased power of demand which makes of the port of import a specially great economic centre. A ship coming to such a port in order to take on board there the export in which it deals, can enter loaded with imports which are sure of a ready market.
SUNBURY
It so happens that London during all the centuries of its growth, and especially during those four hundred years of the Middle Ages which chiefly established its great position, was in exactly this position. Not only was it, as modern Liverpool is, a point of transhipment round which a vast quantity of subsidiary activities had grown, it was also close to the more or less permanent residence of the court, to what became the permanent seat of legislature, and to what was very early the permanent seat of the central courts of justice. The process continued uninterruptedly. After the loot of the church land of the endowments of the poor under the Tudors, the great palaces of the new aristocracy lined the Strand, and from the early seventeenth century—when this process was completed—onwards, the power of demand exercised by London alone and its local call for imports, has never ceased to grow, until to-day the position of London as an importing centre is due almost entirely to this character, next to its value as a clearing house: It is now only in a much less degree a point of transhipment.
The type of goods for which this local power of demand existed had also a very great effect in helping the growth of London through the traffic of the Thames.
Perhaps the principal import of the Middle Ages in value was that of wine. It was a luxurious import for which there was a local demand, especially where you had the residence of the wealthier people, and, what was exceedingly important, it was an import large in bulk. It meant that ships would come either in great numbers or in heavy tonnage, and this in itself suggested London as a place of export for their return, made a speculative voyage to London worth taking, and developed the warehousing space and the wharf space of the port. Later came coal, later still the tropical products, and last of all the great passenger traffic. But in every stage of the development London has exercised a local power of demand for that kind of import which demanded bulk in storage.
As to the second point, the easy access to the foreign port whither export was to be made, London was again especially favoured, in its point of growth. To-day it is no longer so, as we shall see in a moment. London is going forward with the momentum of its past. But until quite modern times London looked more favourably at the points to which England exported than did the other island ports, its rivals. It lay in the full focus of that long curve of the Norman, the Picard, the Flemish and Dutch coasts, which were the principal markets of the Middle Ages. Right opposite were the Flemish cities that bought English wool—the staple export—right opposite, also, the mouths of the Rhine for communication with the interior Germanies and, though a little more distant than the northern ports, agreeable to all that Baltic and North Sea trade which grew up with the close of the Middle Ages. The league of mercantile towns called Hanseatic had its depôt in London from the middle of the thirteenth century. The northern ports of England that lie a little nearer had no hinterland to feed their commerce, and London was, moreover, the best clearing-house and centre of general exchange for them in all the north and west. In this character it surpassed even Bruges.
When all these conditions changed—when the discovery of the New World, and of the Cape route to the Indies, when the growth of north-country industries and one hundred other factors had taken away from the site of London its old topographical supremacy, the port was so firmly established that it provided its own sources of vitality.