English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (XIVth Century)

by J. J. Jusserand

a practice which cannot fail to be deeply resented by all lovers of cats.

The regular merchants whom Langland and Chaucer describe, so splendid to look at that no one knew they were “in dette,” adorned with Flaundrish hats and “botes clasped faire and fetisly,” were a very different sort of {238} people; but though no mere wanderers, they were, too, great wayfarers. Many of them had had to visit the continent to find markets for their goods, and for their purchases. Through them too, and it was in fact, perhaps, the safest and most reliable among many such channels of information, ideas of what was going on in the outer world and how things were managed in France and elsewhere, points of similitude and comparison, were introduced into England and made the subject of thought and discussion.

46. A PEDLAR ROBBED BY MONKEYS.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

During the fourteenth century the foreign trade of England had greatly increased; there was a constant intercourse with Flanders, with Bruges above all other towns, for the sale of home produce: wools especially, and woolfels, cheese, butter, tin, coal,[318] etc., with the {239} Rhine country, with Gascony, with Spain, for the purchase of wines;[319] with the Hanse towns, Lombardy, Venice, and the East. Unintelligent regulations constantly interfered, it is true, with this development, but so strong was the impulse that it went on steadily. One of the most persistent and most noxious of these regulations was the prohibition to export money or bullion, which governments were never tired of renewing.[320] English merchants were forbidden, when purchasing goods in foreign countries, to pay for them with money; they had to pay in kind, with wools, cheese and other home produce, which of course might or might not be found acceptable by the vendor. It was, in other words, forbidden to use money as a means of facilitating exchange, which is its very raison d’être, and people had to return to the primitive practice of troc, or exchange in kind. It had sometimes worse effects than that of impeding transactions; foreign merchants might, as once did the Flemings, show their appreciation of the rules imposed on their English purchasers by answering their proffer of wools and cheese with a beating and imprisonment until they would alter their laws or their minds. For {240} which treatment, English merchants sent doleful complaints to Parliament. In such cases retaliation upon Flemings in England might be demanded, but no thought was entertained, even by the injured party, of repealing laws considered as an indispensable safeguard for the kingdom.[321]

Not much wiser were the rules applied to merchant shipping, made worse by constant change, a defect which was noticeable in every trade regulation of that time. Some are curious as being an attempt to establish the long lived, but more moderate rules devised by Cromwell in 1651: “Item, to increase the navy of England which is now greatly diminished, it is assented and accorded, that none of the king’s liege people do from henceforth ship any merchandize in going out or coming within the realm of England in any port, but only in ships of the king’s liegeance.” But the very next year this impossible statute was altered so as to practically annul it: “It is ordained and granted that the said ordinance only have place as long as ships of the said ligeance in the parts where the said merchants happen to dwell be found able and sufficient.”[322] The same unsteadiness of purpose was shown in almost every branch of the yet unbaptized science of political economy.

Not less worthy of notice than this attempt at a Navigation Act is the claim made, even then, by the Commons of England to a traditional supremacy over the seas. In one of their innumerable petitions concerning the decay of the navy, which seems to have been a favourite complaint in England from the remotest period down to our own time, they state that the rash and often {241} useless pressing of ships for the king’s service had brought about a most dangerous decrease of the navy; many mariners addicting themselves to other trades, while only “twenty years ago, and always before, the shipping of the Realm was in all the ports and good towns upon the sea or rivers, so noble and plenteous that all the countries held and called our said sovereign: the King of the Sea (le Roi de la Mier).”[323] As these were trading ships, only occasionally used for war purposes, this gives an idea of the importance to which British merchant shipping had risen in the fourteenth century and which it desired to recover.

The rules concerning foreign merchants coming to England were in the same manner constantly changed; sometimes the hardest restrictions were put upon them, and sometimes everything was done to allure them to come. The result was the same; trade was impeded doubtless, but it went on, and in spite of the unsteadiness of legislation, of retaliatory measures (as when, for instance, Hanse merchants were imprisoned in England and their goods seized on account of misdeeds committed by Prussians, “ceux de la seigneurie de Pruys,” no reason of complicity being alleged, but only it seems one of geographical vicinity[324]), in spite of restrictions innumerable, the intercourse steadily increased, to the great benefit of the community and the wider diffusion of ideas. In the ninth, the twenty-fifth, the twenty-seventh, and other years of his reign, King Edward III again and again stated that he took foreign merchants under his special protection: “To replenish the said realm and lands,” he said on one of these occasions, “with money and {242} plate, gold and silver and merchandises of other lands, and to give courage to merchants strangers to come with their wares and merchandises into the Realm and lands aforesaid, we have ordained and established that all merchants strangers which be not of our enmity, of what land or nation that they be, may safely and surely, under our protection and safe conduct, come and dwell in our said realm and lands, where they will, and from thence [freely] return,” selling their goods to whom they please, being exempted from purveyance and only paying the ordinary customs.[325] If war is declared between England and their country, they will have forty days to quit the realm, during which time they shall be allowed to continue their sales, and even more delay will be allowed them in case they are ill, or are detained by bad weather. This last was, as we have seen, a very necessary proviso, for a merchant coming with his goods in the depth of winter to a broken bridge might be stopped a rather long time; as also if, reaching the sea-coast, he found contrary winds. The statute of the twenty-fifth year provided that the liberal intentions of the king towards foreign merchants should be brought by way of proclamation to the notice of the officers and inhabitants of all the English counties, trading cities, seaports, etc.[326]

Thus protected and impeded by turns, foreign trade jogged on, and as common interest was, after all, stronger than popular prejudice and narrow regulations, it managed to thrive in England. Foreign gilds were established in London; foreign settlements were created in several trading towns,[327] foreign fleets visited the English coasts {243} at regular intervals, none with more important results than the fleet of the Venetian Republic. It began to call regularly at the ports of Flanders, England, and the North, in the year 1317; each ship had on board thirty archers for its defence, commanded by young Venetian noblemen. There was in the fourteenth century a Venetian consul at Bruges, and the commander of the galleys did not fail to put himself in communication with him. The fleet, or “galleys of Flanders,” as it was called, brought to England cotton from Egypt, cloth of silk from Venice, cinnamon, pepper, cloves, saffron, camphor, musk, and other drugs or spices from the East, sugar from Egypt and Sicily, etc. The trade of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean was very extensive; it was carried on freely, except during occasional wars with the Saracens, and the commercial interest that the Italian Republics had in the continuation of a good understanding with the infidel was one of the principal causes of the cessation of crusades. From England the Venetian galleys took back wools and woollen cloths, leather, tin, lead, sea-coal, cheese,[328] etc.