The commerce of England during the reign of Henry VIII. and his immediate successor had been almost wholly monopolised by the two very powerful corporations to which we have already referred. But the association of German merchants having become unpopular, a large portion of their trade soon afterwards fell into the hands of the “Merchant Adventurers.” To this influential fraternity English merchants were admitted on payment of a small fine; the government of the day, in their ignorance of the requirements of trade and navigation, having hitherto divided the commerce so far as practicable between these two companies, attempting at the same time to fix the boundaries of their respective rights by charters. But towards the close of the reign of Edward VI., when the interests of the English merchants greatly predominated, and when a committee which had been specially appointed to inquire discovered that the Steel-Yard traders, though exempted from the alien duties, had largely defrauded the revenue by giving rights of denizenship to foreigners, the Crown deprived them of many of their most valuable privileges, and practically revoked their charter.
Mode of conducting business.
Mistaken laws.
Nor is it surprising that foreigners should have so long held in their hands the largest share of the maritime commerce of England, though when Henry VIII. ascended the throne there were no reliable accounts of its extent. A sort of haphazard mode of conducting business was then the rule of her merchants, who had then no means of early and accurate information of what their foreign competitors were doing, or of the quantity or quality of merchandise they themselves required; moreover, their commercial laws were so ill defined and so liable to uncertain and extraordinary changes that no dependence could be placed upon them. Hence it was that Henry endeavoured to give consistency to his legislative measures, though even these (as might have been expected) were in most instances far from perfect; as, for instance, when he attempted to regulate the price of labour, and to determine by law what sum each employer should pay to the labourers and others they employed.[106] No doubt there was more pretence for such a system where, as in most parts of England, there were still large ranges of common and unenclosed forest land on which the labourer might feed a cow, where his pigs, ducks, and geese might range, and where he could obtain his fuel without charge. Moreover, in those days labour was not, as now, a marketable commodity, it being then a recognised principle of law to apportion out, so far as seemed possible, the rights of the various classes of society, and to determine the price of such labour, not according to the demand, but according to the presumed cost of the necessaries of life.
The Bridport petition.
Naturally in such attempts to regulate prices, Henry VIII. and his ministers committed many ludicrous as well as palpable mistakes, and admitted the justice of demands equally indefensible. For instance, when the bailiffs and burgesses of Bridport presented, in 1529, a petition to Parliament, stating that the inhabitants of their town had been accustomed from time immemorial to manufacture the greater portion of the large cables, etc., required for the royal navy and for merchant shipping, by which their town was “right well maintained,” asserting further that “evil disposed persons” resident in the vicinity had begun to do similar work to the injury of their town, an Act of Parliament ordered that all hemp grown within five miles of the town of Bridport should be sold only in that town, and that no person within the same distance from that highly favoured seaport should manufacture any hempen goods under pain of forfeiting what they had manufactured! The first principles of sound political economy being then unknown, class interests, as a natural consequence, were protected either by the help of favoured corporations, under royal charters, or by special enactments.[107]
Chartered companies.
Of these some still survive to remind us of a period in the history of England when the favoured few had means placed at their disposal of accumulating wealth denied to the great mass of the community. Although most of these charters are now objects of no value except to satisfy the curiosity of antiquaries, others remain vesting their possessors with a power which, if ever it did, can no longer render any public service. For centuries the vast organisation of these companies penetrated the entire trading life of England. Laws were framed to protect them in all their operations, and to provide that no person should supply articles he had not been educated to manufacture, nor any manufacturer be permitted to sell what he had produced on the best terms he could obtain: the Legislature also decided for him the price at which each article was to be sold.
Prices regulated by law, and employment provided.
In London, a control council in communication with the Council and the Crown[108] attempted to regulate every branch of trade. Its duty was to determine prices and fix wages, so that each might be kept in harmony with the acts of the Legislature; to arrange the conditions of apprenticeship, and discuss all minor details. In company with the Lord Mayor and other civic dignitaries, its members inspected the shops and stores of the respective traders, and received and examined into their complaints. In connection with the municipal authorities of London there were local councils in nearly every provincial town who fulfilled similar duties, reporting to the control body or the Privy Council such matters as were to be submitted to Parliament. When these representations had been duly considered, the necessary statutes were passed and forwarded through the chancellor to the mayors of the various towns and cities. By these arrangements no person was allowed to commence any description of trade or manufacture till he had served a regular apprenticeship, and had proved himself competent to exercise his craft to the satisfaction of the authorities. But the care of the Legislature was not extended solely to able-bodied adults; attempts were made to compel every child to be brought up to some special business or calling.[109] Such a principle may have been plausible in theory, but it broke down in practice; the Legislature, however, insisted that the mayors in towns and the magistrates in counties should find means to apprentice every child to agriculture, so that they might not be drawn to “dishonest courses,” whenever the parents were unable to pay the fees for apprenticeship in other trades.