English Economic History: Select Documents

by Unknown

Those in the country ride about among the farmers, and buy the corn even in the barn before it is threshed; nay, sometimes they buy it in the field standing, not only before it is reaped, but before it is ripe. This subtle business is very profitable; for, by this means, cunningly taking advantage of the farmers, by letting them have money before-hand, which they, poor men, often want, they buy cheap when there is a prospect of corn being dear; yet sometimes they are mistaken too, and are caught in their own snare; but indeed, that is but seldom; and were they famed for their honesty, as much as they generally are for their understanding in business, they might boast of having a very shining character.

2. Mealmen; these generally live either in London or within thirty miles of it, that employment chiefly relating to the markets of London; they formerly were the general buyers of corn, that is to say, wheat and rye, in all the great markets about London, or within thirty or forty miles of London, which corn they used to bring to the nearest mills they could find to the market, and there have it ground, and then sell the meal to the shopkeepers, called mealmen, in London.

But a few years past have given a new turn to this trade, for now the bakers in London, and the parts adjacent, go to the markets themselves, and have cut out the shopkeeping mealmen; so the bakers are the mealmen, and sell the fine flour to private families, as the mealmen used to do. And as the bakers have cut out the meal shops in London, so the millers have cut out the mealmen in the country; and whereas they formerly only ground the corn for the mealmen, they now scorn that trade, buy the corn, and grind it for themselves; so the baker goes to the miller for his meal, and the miller goes to the market for the corn.

It is true, this is an anticipation in trade, and is against a stated wholesome rule of commerce, that trade ought to pass through as many hands as it can; and that the circulation of trade, like that of the blood, is the life of the commerce. But I am not directing to what should be, but telling what is; it is certain the mealmen are, in a manner, cut out of the trade, both in London and in the country, except it be those country mealmen who send meal to London by barges, from all the countries bordering on the Thames, or on any navigable river running into the Thames west; and some about Chichester, Arundel, and the coast of Sussex and Hampshire, who send meal by sea; and these are a kind of meal merchants, and have factors at London to sell it for them—either at Queenhithe, the great meal-market of England, or at other smaller markets.

By this change of the trade, the millers, especially in that part of England which is near the Thames, who in former times were esteemed people of a very mean employment, are now become men of vast business; and it is not an uncommon thing to have mills upon some of the large rivers near the town, which are let for three or four hundred pounds a year rent.

3. Maltsters; these are now no longer farmers, and, as might be said, working labouring people, as was formerly the case, when the public expense of beer and ale, and the number of alehouses, was not so great, but generally the most considerable farmers malted their own barley, especially in the towns and counties, from whence they supplied London, and almost every farmhouse of note.

As the demand for malt increased, those farmers found it for their purpose to make more and larger quantities of malt, than the barley they themselves sowed would supply; and so bought the barley at the smaller farms about them; till at length the market for malt still increasing, and the profits likewise encouraging, they sought far and near for barley; and at this time the malting trade at Ware, Hertford, Royston, Hitchin, and other towns on that side of Hertfordshire, fetch their barley twenty, thirty, or forty miles; and all the barley they can get out of the counties of Essex, Cambridge, Bedford, Huntingdon, and even as far as Suffolk, is little enough to supply them; and the like it is at all the malt-making towns upon the river of Thames, where the malt trade is carried on for supply of London, such as Kingston, Chertsey, Windsor, High Wycombe, Reading, Wallingford, Abingdon, Thame, Oxford, and all the towns adjacent; and at Abingdon in particular, they have a barley market, where you see every market-day four or five hundred carts and wagons of barley to be sold at a time, standing in rows in the market-place, besides the vast quantity carried directly to the maltsters' houses.

The malt trade thus increasing, it soon came out of the hands of the farmers; for either the farmers found so much business, and to so much advantage, in the malting-trade, that they left off ploughing, and put off their farms, sticking wholly to the malt; or other men, encouraged by the apparent advantage of the malting-trade, set it up by itself, and bought their barley, as is said above, of the farmers, when their malt trade first increased; or both these together, which is most probable; and thus malting became a trade by itself.

Again, though the farmers then generally left off malting in the manner as above, yet they did not wholly throw themselves out of the profit of the trade, but hired the making of their own malt; that is, to put out their barley to the malthouses to be made on their account; and this occasioned many men to erect malthouses, chiefly to make malt only for other people, at so much per quarter, as they could agree; and at intervals, if they wanted full employ, then they made it for themselves; of these I shall say more presently.

Under the head of corn factors, I might have taken notice, that there are many of those factors who sell no other grain than malt; and are, as we may say, agents for the maltsters who stay in the country, and only send up their goods; and assistants to those maltsters who come up themselves.