Equally interesting is it to find that the Hull merchants of the seventeenth century were, evidently, firm believers in the modern doctrine of ‘Protection.’ For, by one of the statutes regulating the trade of the port, all alien merchants must bring their goods to the Exchange and must pay one penny in the pound for the privilege of sale.

What an insight into the working-lives of the townspeople, whether traders or craftsmen, we have given us in the ancient documents of the Merchant Gilds and Trade Gilds! As Canon Lambert says in his Two Thousand Years of Gild Life, they ‘bring back into view the everyday life of the town in the centuries of which they treat. As we study them we can mingle again in the vigorous life of the narrow streets. We can learn how it was that the men of that time built houses of which the mortar stands to-day as hard as stone; we can picture the barber looking askance at the upstart man who presumed as surgeon to molest his ancient right of letting the blood of his customers at the fall of the leaf; we can look into the mysteries of the brewing-vat as it was before tea had usurped the time-honoured place of the pewter at the breakfast tables of society; we can see the shipwrights who made the ships of Elizabeth at work; we can walk, as it were, along the small booths and shops, and judge of the quality of the goods which had come from Hamburg or Muscovy, or which had been fashioned with such care in the workshop behind the parlour.’

Of the Religious or Social Gilds, which existed at even earlier times than the Merchant and Craft Gilds, something was said in Chapter XVIII. The fate which overwhelmed the Religious Gilds during the reign of Edward VI. had, doubtless, some effect on the Trading Companies and Brotherhoods of Craftsmen. But the last-named were very largely excepted from the Suppression of the Gilds in 1547, and their gradual decay and final extinction were due to the introduction of new industries and new methods of working. The Hull Merchants’ Company became extinct in 1706, there was still existing at Beverley in 1752 the Brotherhood of the Barkers or Tanners, and the last entry in the Book of the Hull Fraternity of Coopers is dated 1788.

XX.
THE SUPPRESSION OF THE MONASTERIES
AND
THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE.

In a previous chapter were described the various buildings of a monastery and the mode of life of its inmates. And at the end of the chapter reference was made to the gradual loss of those high ideals which had been the origin of the many hundred monasteries that existed in our country at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The results of that loss will now be described.

The benefits to the country at large arising from the establishment of these religious houses had been great. They served as hotels for the rich and as almshouses for the poor. The Cistercian monks were pioneers in agriculture. Both monks and friars got together libraries of books—that at Meaux Abbey contained 324 volumes in 1539—and were mostly diligent scribes. Thus they helped to spread the means of learning.

But by the beginning of the sixteenth century many Houses had outlived their usefulness. Their inmates had decreased in numbers until only six monks remained where sixty had once been. Laxity of discipline crept in with this decrease of numbers. Hence it seemed right to suppress the small and useless religious houses, and to apply their revenues to other useful purposes.

This was the thought in the minds of both Cardinal Wolsey and the Pope of Rome when in 1524 the one applied for a certain Papal Bull and the other granted it. It was to the effect that various small monasteries to the annual value of three thousand ducats should be suppressed, and their revenues used to endow the new ‘Cardinal College’ which Wolsey was then planning to build at Oxford. Four years later permission was granted to suppress others to the annual value of eight thousand ducats. In the following year King Henry VIII. was given permission to suppress others to the annual value of ten thousand ducats, and to apply their revenues to the foundation of new cathedrals.

‘Very right and proper,’ you will probably think. ‘The money was going to be put to a better use.’ Yes, but these suppressions might point out to some unscrupulous adviser of the King a means whereby large supplies of money could easily be obtained; and if the King happened to be in need of money and was not very scrupulous as to the manner in which that money were obtained, it might become a very dangerous precedent.