Piracy, as has already been noticed, was of common occurrence, and was a great hindrance to sea-borne trade. Surprising as it may seem, it was cheaper to send goods from London to Venice by the overland route, up the Rhine and across the Alps, than it was to send them by sea. This was partly owing to the huge expenses incurred for defence against pirates. One Venetian captain, reporting his safe arrival in London, mentioned that, fearing to be attacked, he had shipped a hundred extra hands and twenty-two gunners, and that by their aid he had beaten off the attack of a Norman pirate. Perhaps the greatest piratical coup of the time was the capture on August 21, 1485, of the entire fleet of Flanders galleys. They were assailed off Lisbon by a force of French ships, commanded by an officer in the service of the French king. After a desperate fight, lasting twenty hours, in which over four hundred Venetians were killed and wounded, four large galleys surrendered.[[14]] An enormous booty was taken from them, and no one seems to have been punished for the affair. In fact, the deed was justified on the ground that Venice was under a papal interdict and therefore outside the law. Pirates were particularly active in the Channel and, besides roving the high seas, were sometimes bold enough to enter English harbours in search of prey. In 1495 some Frenchmen sailed up Southampton Water and raided the Venetian galleys which were at anchor off the town. They seized, among others, the commander of the fleet and the Venetian consul in England, and held them to ransom, exacting 550 ducats for each.

Piracy was the more difficult to suppress because there was often a very slight distinction between merchant and pirate. Unscrupulous persons frequently combined the two callings as opportunity offered. To check the abuse, a clause was inserted in some of the commercial treaties, to the effect that the owners of vessels, before leaving a foreign port, were to deposit a sum of money as a guarantee of good behaviour, sometimes twice the value of the ship and cargo. Another remedy for the victims of piracy was but an aggravation of the disease. It consisted in the granting of letters of marque or reprisal to the injured parties, thus allowing them to take the law into their own hands. Naturally, the scope allowed them by these letters was very liberally interpreted by the holders, who seem even to have regarded them as negotiable property. An extreme instance was the seizure on the Rhine of certain Milanese merchants, bound for England with their goods, at the instigation of the Emperor Frederick III. This was done on the ground that letters of reprisal against Milan had been granted by a former king of England to a certain merchant, then deceased. His heirs had apparently transferred their rights to the German sovereign.

The extent to which navigation was dependent on the weather is difficult to realize in these days. Communication between England and Spain was almost at a stand-still in the winter. A letter of 1496 mentions that during the first three months of that year the seas had been so rough that few vessels had been able to leave Spanish ports. One courier had been detained two months and another three without any chance of leaving. The diplomatic correspondence between England and Spain, which was dispatched almost exclusively by the sea route, was always much diminished in volume during the winter months, and letters sometimes took many weeks to reach their destination. When Queen Isabella of Castile died and the Archduke Philip, her successor, proposed to travel by sea from Flanders to Spain, he was advised that the voyage could only be made in safety between May and the middle of August. He chose to undertake it in the winter, with the consequence already described. In two months of the year 1498 fifty ships are said to have been wrecked on the coasts of Portugal and Spain.[[15]]

When the perils of the sea were so great, the trades of pilot and chart-maker, often combined by the same individual, were of great importance. In the absence of official charts of coasts and harbours, the man with local knowledge, who could safely guide a ship to port, was much sought after by merchants, and a pilot of good repute could naturally command good prices for his ‘sea cards’. In regulating these matters Spain was in advance of England. When voyages became longer and more frequent, owing to the extension of American discoveries, a proper system of examining and licensing pilots was established. An office for the purpose was instituted at Seville, and in 1519 Sebastian Cabot, who had by that time left the service of England, was put in charge of it with the title of Pilot-Major. All charts and reports of new discoveries were sent in to this office, and the information contained in them was embodied in a standard map, which was thus kept up to date. The Guild of the Holy Trinity, originating early in the reign of Henry VIII, represented an attempt to organize the craft of pilotage on similar lines in England, but it was long before English pilots attained to the standard of the Spaniards in theoretical knowledge.

CHAPTER II
MERCANTILE ORGANIZATION

It was the universal tendency of the Middle Ages for trades and industries to organize themselves, more or less rigidly, for the purpose of mutual defence and assistance. Such organizations accomplished their object by successfully defending the interests of the calling when isolated individuals would have fallen easy victims to tyranny; but the success was concomitant with a stifling of individuality and a stereotyping of personal relations, which were the bane of mediaeval times, and against which the Renaissance was in large measure a revolt.

In England the great London Companies, with their counterparts in other towns, became the arbiters of internal industry; while the greater part of such over-sea traffic as was not in foreign hands became grouped into two combinations of which the members were known as the Merchants of the Staple and the Merchant Adventurers.

Of these, the Merchants of the Staple were the first established, dating back to the thirteenth century, a time when raw wool and tin were practically the only exports of England. At the beginning of the Tudor period they formed a close corporation, under royal patronage, and had in their hands the entire business of exporting unmanufactured wool, wool-fells, and hides to Calais, at which place their dépôt or ‘staple’ had long been fixed. Thither the cloth manufacturers of the Low Countries resorted for the purchase of their raw material.

A very heavy export duty was imposed on wool, yielding from one-third to a half of the total receipts from all customs, and serving the additional purpose of fostering home manufacture by making the raw material more expensive to the foreigner than to the Englishman. The entire expense of maintaining the garrison and fortifications of Calais was defrayed from the wool duty. This political tie between the Crown and the Staplers caused the interests of the latter to be well looked after by the king, although their relative importance inevitably declined as the export of manufactured goods increased. Their monopoly gave them the entire handling of the wool export for Flanders and the Rhine, all other persons being forbidden to engage in it. Italian merchants, however, were allowed to export wool to their own states, provided that none was sold north of the Alps; and other traders, both Englishmen and foreigners, were granted licences from time to time to ship wools to the Mediterranean. The export duties were so adjusted that, generally speaking, non-Staplers paid double as much as Staplers. Henry VII's contemplated extension of the Staple system to Pisa, and the alarm occasioned in Venice thereby, have been referred to in the previous chapter.

The Wool Staple was a typically mediaeval device, harsh and inelastic, and its privileges were doomed to be submerged in the rising tide of manufacturing enterprise. The growth of the latter continued to absorb the surplus of wool until none was left for export. Political events assisted the change: the loss of Calais in 1558 was a crushing blow; and although, by transference to a Flemish town, it was sought to maintain a foreign dépôt, the conflict between England and Spain at the end of the century deprived it of a permanent resting-place. The manufactures of the Netherlands, and consequently their demand for raw material, also languished on the outbreak of their struggle for independence under Philip II. The decline of the Staple was quite appreciable even before the death of Henry VII. The average annual customs paid on wool during the first five years of his reign amounted to £16,800; for the last five years the figure fell just short of £10,000.[[16]] The corresponding averages on all other wares were £17,500 and £29,000 respectively, a very convincing testimony to the efficacy of the king’s policy. There is no evidence that the decreased export of wool was in any way due to a smaller output. To judge from social writers on the period the tendency was all the other way; the conversion of arable land into sheep farms being one of the gravest domestic problems of the time, owing to the consequent falling off in the demand for agricultural labour. The unexported wool must, therefore, have been taken up by the native cloth-makers, and the striking increase in non-Staple trade was the result.