CHAPTER II
TRADE
The Tudor period begins with the lowest point reached in town and country of a decline and decay that had been steadily persistent for nearly two hundred years. The prosperity of a trading city depends upon the prosperity of its markets. There were many causes for this decay. The famines, of which there were four, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the Hundred Years’ War; the Civil Wars; the weakness of the fleet and the piracies in the Channel; the growth of the power of Parliament and the consequent decay of local independence; the feeble government of Edward II. and Henry VI.; the fearful devastation of the Black Death; the changes in the manorial system;—all these things together contributed to the decay of trade over the whole country. To quote a writer on the fifteenth century. Denton, in his England in the Fifteenth Century, says that the decay of England commenced soon after the death of Edward I. It continued, showing an increased rate of decay, after the death of Edward II.
SOUTH VIEW OF THE CUSTOM-HOUSE IN THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH. BURNT IN THE GREAT FIRE, 1666
E. Gardner’s Collection.
The country parishes everywhere, on the northern and the Welsh march, on the southern seaboard, and in the Eastern Counties, had to be exempted from payment of taxes on account of poverty; lands were untilled; there was loss of sheep and cattle; agriculture was at a standstill for fear of pirates. Or the country parishes were actually deserted: the people, ruined, had left the farms and the clearings; the churches were allowed to fall into ruin; Monastic Houses were desolate and empty because the Brethren had no longer any rents.
In the towns there were open spaces within the walls where houses had once stood. One has only to visit King’s Lynn in Winchelsea for an example of this decay.
Even in London, it has been observed, for more than a hundred years after the Rebellion of Jack Straw there stood in Fleet Street the blackened ruins of two forges which that rebel’s followers had burned. In all that time there was not found any who thought it worth while to rebuild the forge.
In London during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although the time was one of commercial decline, there were still rich merchants. It is in a time of decay that the merchants make complaints of aliens; that they clamour for protection; that they demand the import and the export of merchandise in English ships; that they would prohibit the sending of gold and silver out of the country; let the foreign merchants be paid in kind.
The melancholy condition of the country at the beginning of the sixteenth century is described most vividly by Cunningham:—
“There is less mention made of decay in the first thirty years of the sixteenth century; but the facts were again brought forcibly forward when the Parliament of Henry VIII. began to put pressure on the owners of houses to repair their property and to remove the rubbish that endangered life in the towns. Norwich had never recovered from the fire of 1508; the empty spaces at Lynn Bishop allowed the sea to do damage in other parts of the town. Many houses were ruined and the streets were dangerous for traffic in Nottingham, Shrewsbury, Ludlow, Bridgenorth, Queenborough, Northampton and Gloucester; there were vacant spaces heaped with filth, and tottering houses in York, Lincoln, Canterbury, Coventry, Bath, Chichester, Salisbury, Winchester, Bristol, Scarborough, Hereford, Colchester, Rochester, Portsmouth, Poole, Lyme, Feversham, Worcester, Stafford, Buckingham, Pontefract, Grantham, Exeter, Ipswich, Southampton, Great Yarmouth, Oxford, Great Wycombe, Guildford, Stratford, Hull, Newcastle, Bedford, Leicester and Berwick; as well as in Shaston, Sherborne, Bridport, Dorchester, Weymouth, Plymouth, Barnstaple, Tavistock, Dartmouth, Launceston, Lostwithiel, Liskeard, Bodmin, Truro, Helston, Bridgewater, Taunton, Somerton, Ilchester, Maldon and Warwick. There were similar dangers to the inhabitants of Great Grimsby, Cambridge, the Cinque Ports, Lewes; and even in the more remote provinces things were as bad, for Chester, Tenby, Haverfordwest, Pembroke, Caermarthen, Montgomery, Cardiff, Swansea, Cowbridge, New Radnor, Presteign, Brecknock, Abergavenny, Usk, Caerlon, Newport in Monmouthshire, Lancaster, Preston, Liverpool and Wigan, were taken in hand in 1544. In trying to interpret this evidence, however, we must remember that we are reading of attempts to repair, not of complaints of new decline; the mere fact that such attempts were made was perhaps an indication that things had reached their worst; and we are perhaps justified in inferring from the double mention of some few towns that a real improvement was effected in the others.” (The Growth of English Industry.)