History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce, Volume 1 (of 4)

by W. S. Lindsay

and its state soon afterwards.

Almost everything that is known of the state of Britain, and of its commerce and manufactures, from the time of its evacuation by Rome till the commencement of the eighth century, is derived from the ancient biographies of the Saints, then the chief, if not the sole, histories of the Western world; and faint indeed is the glimmering of light which these writers throw upon the state of navigation during those periods.[468] From these writers we get the story of the first Saxon expedition, together with the traditional tales of Hengist and Horsa, and of the fifteen hundred men, and the three long vessels or “ships” they came in. No reliance can, however, be placed, as Mr. Kemble has shown, on this statement; nor is it likely that the vessels of the northern pirates were superior to those Saxon craft already noticed, in which, on their second expedition, the Saxons are said to have landed seventeen thousand men on the shores of Britain.

London.

Indeed, the accounts of the internal state of Britain and Ireland during that portion of the dark ages to which we now refer, so far as regards its trade and manufactures, are of the most meagre description; and the little we do find is rather in the form of incidental notices in books devoted to other objects than commerce or science. For instance, it is merely to an incidental remark of the venerable Bede[469] that we are indebted for the earliest notes of London after the abdication of the Romans. Speaking of the East-Saxons, at the commencement of the seventh century, he says that “their metropolis is the city of London, which is situated on the bank of the aforesaid river (Thames), and is the mart of many nations resorting to it by sea and land;” adding that “King Ethelbert built the church of St. Paul, in the city of London, where he and his successors should have their episcopal see.”

That the Britons then possessed no naval force fitted to compete with the Saxons is clear, from the fact that their contests with them were invariably carried on by land, and that no effectual resistance by sea was offered to the vast numbers of Saxons and Angles who poured into the island. It is, indeed, not improbable that the Romans, when they assumed the government of Britain, discouraged the inhabitants from the creation of a fleet, which might endanger their possession of the island, a fact which would naturally account for the inferiority of the Britons when matched against invaders, who, from the nature of their previous lives, were more at home on the sea than on land.

Accession of Offa, A.D. 755.

One only of the kings of the Heptarchy, Offa of Mercia,[470] exerted himself to resuscitate the declining trade and commerce of Britain. Offa, having in view the raising of a naval force to defend his dominions, encouraged his subjects to fit out ships, and to carry goods in their own bottoms instead of trusting for transport to so large an extent as they had hitherto done, to the vessels of foreign nations. But his praiseworthy efforts were only transient in their character. Some of the English traders who resorted to the continent (including Rome and Venice), in order to evade payment of the customs exacted from them in their transit through France, pretended to be pilgrims on their journey to the imperial city, whose baggage was exempted from duties. This attempt to evade the duties was discovered, and reported to Charlemagne by his collectors of customs; the payment of the duties was enforced, and the goods of the English merchants, consisting chiefly of works in gold and silver, for which English workmen were then famous, and which were in great demand in Italy,[471] were seized and confiscated until the pleasure of the emperor was known. The merchants appealed to Offa for redress, who, by way of retaliation, laid an embargo upon the French shipping frequenting his ports. Thus differences arose between Charlemagne and Offa which continued for some years, and thus the improvement in commerce which, since the time of the Roman dominion in Britain, had been well-nigh extinguished, was nipped almost in its bud. These differences, combined with the incessant wars then waged between the Anglo-Saxons and their remote ancestors, the Danes and Norwegians or Northmen, for the supremacy of the Northern Ocean, prevented for the time all hope of any permanent improvement in the maritime commerce of Britain.

Restrictions on trade and commerce.

Nor, indeed, did the laws of the Saxon kings afford much encouragement to the development of trade. Those of Kent, which were considered as patterns for the other kingdoms, enacted that if any Kentish Saxon should buy anything in London, and bring it into Kent, he should have two or three honest men, or the Portreeve (the chief magistrate of the city), present at the bargain.[472] By the same laws, no man was allowed to buy anything above the value of twenty pence, except in a town, and in the presence of a magistrate or some other trustworthy and responsible witness. Similar, and even greater restraints were imposed on bartering one commodity for another. In fact, during a considerable period of time, no bargain could be contracted without the personal presence of some principal person or chief magistrate as a witness; a restrictive system, which may have been necessary when few, if any, of the traders could write, and disputes were frequent and inevitable, but which, like some laws of much more recent times, seriously retarded the progress of commerce. It is curious to note that the origin of every protective or restrictive law, even from the infancy of commerce, has proposed for its object the securing individual profits or the supposed safety of the revenue. At this period of English history the king claimed a portion of the price of all goods imported or sold within his dominions above the value of twenty pence; a practice which we learn, from an entry in Domesday, prevailed till after the Norman invasion. It is there stated that a certain per centage of everything bought or sold in the borough of Lewes was to be paid to the Portreeve (royal tax collector), and especially the sum of fourpence for every man sold as a slave within its boundaries.[473]

Salutary regulations.