INTRODUCTION.

Had medieval politicians been in search of an ideal spot for the foundation of a capital for Great Britain, the choice would undoubtedly have fallen on the site of the present city of York. Under Constantine it was one of the imperial cities of the Roman empire; when the Saxon Eadwine held supreme authority over all the English kingdoms save Kent, the northern city on the Ouse was his capital. Had Cnut's dream of a great Scandinavian empire with England at its head been realised, the position of York as the imperial capital would have been secured beyond controversy. But the Norman conquest, which drew England from its natural association with Scandinavia to an artificial association with the south, robbed York of the advantages of its unique geographical position. The ruthlessness of William the Conqueror failed, however, to obliterate all signs of York's former supremacy. Domesday records the king had in York three ways by land and a fourth by water."1 These radiate through Aldborough to the north and Scotland; through Tadcaster to the south and London; and through Stamford Bridge to the east and the sea. The fertile vale of Pickering with its stretches of cornland was easily accessible, though the forest of Galtres impeded communication north of the city Teeswards. The wild Cleveland district, however, offered few attractions to the settler before Teesside cattle were famous, iron and coal supreme factors in industrial life. It is true that the old kingdom of Elmet, the present West Riding, raised a formidable barrier between York and the sea on the west; but a huge continent beyond the Irish sea had not yet entered into young men's visions or old men's dreams.2

1 Domesday (Yorkshire), fo. 298.

J. R. Green, The Making of England, passim In spite of inaccuracies and a blind reliance on untrustworthy data, few historical workers of the eighties will forget the thrill they experienced as they read this Vascinating account of the making of their native land.

a

"The fourth road by water" of the record is technically correct, but the bald description needs amplification. The Ouse, which connected York with Hull and ultimately the continent, was, in medieval days, tidal eight miles above the city. A second outlet on the east, the Derwent, was reached by the royal road to Stamford Bridge. The most casual glance at the map shows a network of rivers in the surrounding district. In the days of scanty and ill-made roads and no mechanical transports, the water communication, secured by the Ouse, the Derwent, the Swale, the Ure, and the Wharfe, was an industrial asset of far-reaching importance.

In fact, by the middle of the fourteenth century, when the story of the merchant adventurers opens, the access of York to the sea by the Ouse and Humber had become a factor of greater importance to the welfare of the city than the strength of its military fortifications, or the multiplicity of its monastic buildings.

The history of the merchant adventurers is especially interesting in the present crisis, for it illustrates the curiously haphazard though practically efficient manner in which a small body of Englishmen, each trading with his own capital, his own factor, using his own individual methods of trade, managed not only to break the monopoly of the state-regulated English staple, but also to wear down a powerful organisation of foreign merchants, the Hanzards, who had seized the lion's share of England's foreign trade. Strenuous individual effort was apparently the simple but efficient weapon with which the battle was won.

The history of the company, from 1356 to the present day, can be divided into three strongly contrasted periods. The first phase, from 1356 to 1420, is marked by steady mercantile and industrial development, though the importance of the movement is obscured by the complicated religious and social machinery within which it worked.

Original conception and vigourous execution characterises the second and most important phase, from 1420 to 1580. By the end of the first decade of this period the mistery was sufficiently successful to throw overboard the simulacrum of

GRANT OF LAND IN FOSSGATE (1356)

iii

secrecy, bring the ecclesiastical element under its own domination, and boldly demand constitutional recognition; though the cloak of religion still appears in the demand for a charter, possibly both petitioners and grantor regarded it as a mere stage trapping. The same device appears as late as the Elizabethan charter of 1580. The third period, from 1580 to the present day, is a dreary story of retrogression; the substitution of privilege for efficiency, state help for individualistic effort, restriction for expansion hastened the downfall of a society, that was out of touch with the spirit of a progressive age.

FIRST PHASE, 1356-1420.

Although the deed, which in 13562 conveyed a piece of land in Fossgate to John Freeboys, John Crome, and Robert Smeton, citizens and merchants of York, does not mark the inauguration of a new society of merchants, it undoubtedly emphasises a new and important phase in the existence of the fraternity from which the mistery sprang. To the medieval mind an organisation without a religious side would have been as alien a conception as a stock exchange with rules framed in the spirit of the sermon on the mount would be to a modern 1 Text, pp. 244, 245.

2 Sir William Percehay, knight, grants to John Freeboys, John Crome, and Robert Smeton, citizens and merchants, York, all that piece of ground with the buildings, etc., in Fossgate, lying in breadth between Trichour lane on one side and the river Foss on the other, and in length from Fossgate in front to the land of Henry Haxiholme at the back, the whole of which he lately acquired of Robert Lisle and Thomas Duffeld, co-executors of the will of Henry Belton, late merchant, York. Witnesses, John Langeton, mayor, John Scareby, Richard Wateby and John Ripon, bailiffs, Robert Skelton, William Burton, draper, John Haunsard, John Neuton, cook, John Staunton, clerk. Friday next after the feast of St. Lucy the Virgin, 30 Ed. III (16 Dec., 1356). Translation of deed in possession of the company. Possibly the William Percehay mentioned is the second son of Henry Percy, first lord Percy of Alnwick, and Eleanor, daughter of John Fitzalan, lord of Arundel. Annals of the House of Percy, vol. i, p. 70. I have searched many old leases of Fossgate property in the hopes of identifying the boundaries of the original estate of the merchants, but without success. I am, however, inclined on general grounds to think that the passage at the end of Lady Peckett's yard, having an entrance into Fossgate, immediately above and parallel to the entry into the courtyard of the hall, follows the line of Trichour lane. Skaife, who by his indefatigable industry had accumulated an extensive knowledge of medieval York, only states it is on the west side of Fossgate, R. H. Skaife, Plan of Roman, Medieval, and Modern York (1864),

mind. The conveyance, however, contains no allusion to any co-operate religious society in the background. But one of the merchants to whom the land is granted appears the following year as the master of the fraternity, another as one of the thirteen members to whom the licence which legalised the fraternity is granted; these two facts seem to prove beyond controversy that the grant of land was the preliminary step in the organisation of the fraternity, the next step being obviously the erection of a building where the members could hold their meetings. Fortunately the licence renders the story of the development of the institution perfectly clear. A body of successful York merchants, possibly with some latent idea of reviving the glories of the gilda mercatoria granted in 1200,1 approached the king with a request for power to form themselves into a gild. Although the grant of land was made in 1356, the licence to incorporate was not granted until 1357: the merchants probably had been in touch with the king before they bought the land, and knew their incorporation was assured, though the chariot wheels of legal incorporation tarried long. Shorn of verbiage the licence is simple: the merchants, representatives chiefly of the woollen industry, mercers, drapers, hosiers, dyers, were granted a licence to organise a gild for men and women, “in honour of our Lord Jesus Christ and the blessed Mary." They were empowered to choose a master, in whose hands the management of the gild property was to be vested. Chaplains were to be paid to celebrate service in the church of St. Crux, to pray for the royal family, and the brothers and sisters of the gild. On the surface this gild is simply a fortuitous grouping of men and women for purely religious and social purposes. The essential nature of the bond of association only becomes clear, when research has individualised the committee from whom the request for the licence came. Then the second side, the mistery, the practical organisation, emerges. The thirteen brethren appear as thirteen merchants, the sisters as their wives, sisters, or daughters. The spiritual bond of brotherhood

1 Charter Rolls, p. 40. C. Gross, Gild Merchant, vol. i, p. 197; vol. ii, pp. 279, 280. C. Gross, Gilds in Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. xii, passim. 2 Text, pp. 1-3.

ACCOUNT ROLLS (1357-1368)

weakens, the practical bond of similarity of worldly interest strengthens. Nor is the reason for this subterfuge far to seek.1 The government was used to individuals forming religious groups, but looked with suspicion on association for other purposes. On the other hand the merchants themselves did not court publicity, they wished to accumulate wealth without the harassing fear of a rapacious government in the background. The words of the statute of Henry VII, framed at a time when the embryo mistery of the fourteenth century had developed into the great trading monopoly of the sixteenth century, throws light on the subject. After bitter complaints of the excessive fines levied by the merchant adventurers, the preamble to the statute states that the delinquents sheltered themselves under colour of the fraternity of Thomas Becket, bishop of Canterbury, and by colour of such feigned holiness2 gained their covetous ends.

The conveyance of land and the licence of incorporation renders the early history of the fraternity clear; additional details are supplied by the accounts for the eight years from 1357 to 1364.3 These are found in an oblong, rough, tattered paper book, very badly written in grotesque Latin, interspersed with English and Norman French. They differ materially from the elaborate vellum rolls on which similar institutions inscribed their accounts; in fact, it is difficult to avoid suspecting that these are not the final accounts, but only the notes from which the rolls would be compiled. This surmise would explain the absence of much information that we should expect to find in them.

In the grant of land from Sir William Percy, reference is made to the buildings already on it, and these accounts read as if they represented repairs rather than an entirely new building. There is no certain indication that they refer to one single building, but even assuming they do, then the conclusion is forced on us that it was a timber building. The timber in 1 York Memorandum Book, vol. ii, p. xxxi. Surtees Soc., cxxv. 2 Statutes of the Realm, xii Hen. VII, c. 6.

3 Text, pp. 6-16. In printing this document I have not put (sic) after variations in spelling or mistakes in grammar, but have corrected silently where an obscurity of meaning would result from lack of alteration.