47. A RICH MERCHANT TRAVELLING (CHAUCER’S MARCHAUNT).
(From the Ellesmere MS.)
Below men in such exalted situations as a Whittington (praised to the skies in the “Libelle”) or a Canynge, the bulk of the merchant community throve as best they could. One of the necessities of their avocation was constant travelling. They were to be met along the roads almost as much as their poorer brothers the pedlars. They also made great use of the water-courses, and carried their goods by boat whenever possible. Hence the constant interference of the Commons with the erection of new mills, weirs, and other hindrances on rivers by the owners of the adjoining lands. The “Rolls of Parliament” are full of petitions asking for the complete suppression of all new works of this sort as being detrimental to the “common passage of ships and boats on the great rivers of England,” or stating that “the merchants who {246} frequent the water between London and Oxford used to have free passage on the Thames from London to Oxford, with their ships to carry their goods and to serve the commonalty and the people, but now they are disturbed by weirs, locks, mills, and many other hindrances.”[332] The reasons why merchants preferred such a conveyance were that the cost of carriage was less; that, save for the occasional meeting of unexpected locks and weirs, they were more certain than on ordinary roads to find before them a clear course; and that they were better able to protect themselves against robbers.
They could not, however, go everywhere by water, and willingly or not they had then to betake themselves to the roads, and incur all the mischances that might turn up on the way or at the inn. In his “Visions,” Langland describes how one of his mischievous characters once rifled at the inn the boxes of travelling chapmen:
“ ‘Thus, ones I was herberwed,’ quod he · ‘with an hep of chapmen,
I roos whan thei were arest (having their rest) · and yrifled here males’ ” (their trunks).
Repentance, who had just been asking if his interlocutor had never made “restitucioun,” wonders at this strange statement as to how things went on at the inn:
“That was no restitucioun, quod Repentance · but a robberes thefte.”
To which the careless creature retorts in a way that reminds one of Chaucer’s French of Stratford-atte-Bow: