The account of a “Court” meeting of the East India Company’s Committees in London gives a glimpse of the regular course of their work in dividing gains, etc., and has an especially interesting note of the way they conducted their relations with the King, their debtor, through the mediation of a famous courtier.
Captain Rannie’s evidence, as a Company’s military officer on the spot, is striking as showing how the struggle between Dupleix and Clive in the Carnatic had reacted by alarming the Nawabs of Bengal; and, again, in tracing their hostility further to the interference with trade and its dues, on which, perhaps as much as on land-dues, the ruler’s treasury depended. These were the grievances which caused our later troubles with Mir Jaffier and Mir Cossim, our own nominees, and they were not ended till Warren Hastings, with twenty years’ experience as a trader, came to govern and to reform them in 1773.
Life of T. Raymond
The chief value of these extracts lies in the insight they give into the domestic life of courtiers, of an ambassadors’ suite, of common soldiers and officers on campaign, of the utter ruin of the population at the seat of war. This is an interesting commentary on the condition to which most of the German states must have been reduced during the incessant campaigning of the Thirty Years’ War.
A Court Leet
Both the origin and name of courts leet is obscure; they were possibly survivals of the Anglo-Saxon hundred courts, seem to have a popular origin, and were certainly the courts in which review of Frankpledge was held, and other petty police work done.
Dugdale’s “History of Draining”
This is valuable for a picture of the gradual process by which England changed from the fen and forest condition in which the Romans found it, to the corn-producing country of to-day. The passages quoted deal with the draining of the area about the Wash, from which the sea had gradually receded, and which is known as the Great Level, or the Bedford Level. Dugdale wrote at the close of the Commonwealth period, and his review brings out the value of the monastic care of the drainage works up to the dissolution of the abbeys; also the fact that such undertakings as this requiring capital were managed by companies of Adventurers, exactly similar to those who took up colonization. The grants of land by which Bedford and his associates were repaid, are an instance of the way the members of such Companies grew to be the plutocrats who, in the eighteenth century, were able to control politics by the purchase of seats or of votes in Parliament. Bedford was the recognized head of a great party under George II and George III.
LONDON
THE HANSA LEAGUE’S HOUSE IN LONDON
(Stow, Book II, p. 202)