FOREIGN TRADE (FIFTEENTH CENTURY)

xli shows a general tendency to follow in the footsteps of the capital after an interval. By the time the mercers' ordinances were ready for endorsement, they had captured the city council, and ratification by themselves of their own ordinances would have been an act of supererogation out of keeping with the practical spirit of the age. The opening clause at once differentiates them from the lesser misteries. It was no mere local fellowship, neither York nor England bounded its activities. The term adventurer had not yet come into use, but the spirit of adventure breathes life and enterprise into the dullrecord. It is the master occupyng" in Bruges, Antwerp, Bergen-op-Zoom, and Middelburg, who fills the stage. It is the factor or apprentice mismanaging his master's affairs "over the see" who is dealt with in special clauses. The rubicon of narrow provincialism was crossed, the merchants' company was the bridge which connected England with wider continental interests; the spirit, which later was to found a colonial empire across thousands of miles of estranging sea, was already at work driving men across the hundreds of miles which separated Yorkshire and Flanders. But the adventurous youth found many obstacles in the way of the satisfaction of his craving. He was under dual supervision. The York mercers instituted an odious system of espionage, "at ilk tyme when men passes over the sea... ane honest persone or ij of the company were appointed to see that apprentices, factors, or servants did not mismanage their master's affairs; they had power to remonstrate with the delinquent, then, in absence of amendment, to seize the merchandise jeopardised by his negligence and send it to England. The rules drawn up in the mart towns by the resident governor and court of assistants left them but little scope for the commission of crime. Excessive "quaffinge" or provoking others to "quaff," playing "openly or Covertly at Cardes tables dyce or any other games for above 6d. a game," being "oute of his lodginge after tenn a Clock in the summer and nyne a Clocke in the winter seasone," were

1 Text, pp. 87-96. The name Darley in the note on p. 87 should be Darby; he was a mercator and chamberlain in 1489.

2 Text, p. 93.

punishable misdemeanours. Dogs might be kept if a licence from the governor was obtained; but if the owner lived in the house, which was often set aside for the English merchants by the civic authorities, he must board the dog elsewhere. As the keeping of dogs led to quarrelling, "It shall not bee lawfull to keep anie suche dogge or dogges within the Englishe house or to lett them Comme into the said house or into the Church." The rules with regard to intercourse with women were very stringent, immediate loss of all privileges followed "mariage with foreign borne wemen," dancing, mumming, walking abroad in the night "seasone at undue houres," the keeping of "lighte women," excess in apparaille," are all sternly repressed.1 Apart, however, from morals, there was a very distinct effort made to keep up the social prestige of the merchants' company.

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In the reign of Edward IV an effort had been made to restrict the woollen industry to capitalists; no clothier was to be allowed to take any apprentice "but he whose father hath 40s. of freehold state of inheritance." Among the York crafts three only, the bowers, the tapiters and the mercers, insist that no apprentice or servant shall be taken if a serf. "And the same apprentice or servant sall come in propre person before the maistre, and constables, and other of the company, to the Trinite hall, there to be examyned and sworn on a buke, whether the apprentice or servant withaldyn in manner of apprentice be freborn, and of fre condition, or born bonde, or in thraldom, and if he be freborn, it sall be leful to his maistre to receyve hym and halde hym, and if he be funden bonde, he sall be utterly discharged of his service, he to go whether he list best, and noght to occupy no langer with his said maister." It is to be hoped that the number of these rejected ones was small, for they had a dreary outlook, to go "whether he list best," has the curiously callous ring characteristic of the fifteenth century. Still attempts to brand a man as a serf were rarely successful. William Burton and William Wistowe, at the end of the fourteenth century,

2

1 W. E. Lingelbach, op. cit., pp. 172, 173, 177, 189-194. Printed from Br. Mus. Add. MS., 18913.

2 Text, p. 94.

MERCER AND MERCHANT (1495)

xliii

prominent wealthy York citizens, were claimed by the Archbishop, but both established their free condition, the one by an appeal in the Mayor's Court, the other by a patent from the King,1

Intermingled with these ordinances about foreign trade are many of purely local application. No one, who has been through the York documents, can fail to see that the mercers were primarily connected with the various branches of the woollen industry. From the evidence of the roll of freemen it seems probable that while wool was still the chief export, and before the local retailer had been differentiated from the wholesale foreign dealer, mercer was indiscriminately applied to both sections. The merchant emerges as cloth took the place of wool, and as the exporter increased in industrial and social importance. The spicer, or grocer, or apothecary, who from the seventeenth century figures so largely in the history of the company, seldom appears in the early records. The demand for silk, spicery, and wine would be satisfied from Mediterranean sources, and though doubtless the Hull boats brought back, especially when Bergen-op-Zoom was the mart town, for the merchants a certain amount of these articles, "merchaundise of oreante," the chief cargoes of the vessels returning from Flanders and the Baltic would be of a more bulky nature, as timber, tar, tallow. The mistery of York silk mercers is of very late formation."

Gower's well-known picture of the mercer's shop, with its stock of "beds, kerchiefs, and ostrich feathers, sandals, satins, and stuffs from overseas," was doubtless authentic, as he was a London merchant himself, but the demand for articles of this kind would be greater in London than York; cloth, iron, and lead are the only articles referred to in the early register. Chaucer, with one of his inimitable touches, in a pregnant

1 York Memorandum Book, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 249, 250, lxi.

2 Professor Unwin informs me that both London and Shrewsbury mercers dealt principally in woollen goods. Sir John Watney holds the same view, The Mercers' Company, pp. 1-3. Mr. A. H. Johnson writes: "curiously enough, a mercer, William Hauteyn, both buys wool and sells cloth at the fairs of St. Ives and St. Botolph and at Winchester " in the thirteenth century. The Drapers of London, vol. i, p. 77.

phrase gives the keynote to the whole social development of the fifteenth century; he says of the merchant:

"For sothe he was a worthy man with-alle,

But sooth to say, I noot how man him calle."

Gower, too, has no great respect for his fellow-traders:

66

'He followeth straight after his own lucre,

And thinketh scorn of the common good."

Langland, although he speaks bitterly of falseness being apparelled by the merchants to serve in their shops as an apprentice, and of the compassion they show to guile, gives them good advice, as if he thought their case was not hopeless. He owns that they do not observe the saints' days as holy church teaches, but advises them to buy boldly, sell again, and save their winnings, and with them build maisons Dieu, help those in misery, mend bad roads, repair bridges, endow maidens in order that they should marry, or endow nunneries in order to provide a home for them. The poets give us vivid pictures of the merchant's moral characteristics, his anomalous social status, but unfortunately no hint as to his stock-in-trade, the articles the sale of which brought him wealth. That the York mercer kept a shop, and even in the fifteenth century jealously guarded the mistery from being monopolised by the non-shopkeeping section, is clear from the ordinances of the mistery; but it is equally clear that his chief business was the exportation of cloth. One of their regulations reads as if an attempt had been made to seize the governorship for someone not intimately connected with the mercery trade, possibly a merchant who had larger dealings in lead than cloth. Under the heading "eleccon off the maister," it is explicitly stated, "sall none be chosen to occupy as Maister of the said company, but anely ane able persone, thatt occupyse in a shop in the mercery."

The financial affairs of the company were managed by master, constables, and searchers. But each year the master had to present his accounts, which were rigorously supervised by the whole fellowship. The common box in which the money was

1 Text, p. 93.

THE STATUTE OF 1497

xlv kept could only be opened with the knowledge of all the three financially responsible officers. The master "sall have the comon box in kepyng, that langs to the entre and qarterage of the bretherhede. The constables, that sall occupy for the yere, sall have a key of the same box in thaire kepyng, and the sersoures of the mercer craft sall have another key in thaire kepyng, and that the common fe all be lokked in the seid box." For twenty years the merchant adventurers dwelling "out of London” made intermittent efforts to frustrate the efforts of the London merchants to monopolise foreign trade, but without success. The increased power of the central authority under Henry VII enabled the parliament of 1497 to deal in a more decisive way with the difficulty than had been possible to Edward IV, whose tenure of kingship had always been inThe evil, too, was greater than when John Pickering had attempted to drive the northern traders from the field. The fine levied by the London company of mercers had risen from the original fee of "halfe a olde noble sterling " to "cs. Flemmysh," and "nowe it is soe that the seid feleship and Merchauntes of London take of every Englishman or yonge merchaunte beyng there att his first comming xxli. sterlinge for a fyne, to suffre him to bye and sell his owen propre goodes wares and merchaundises that he hath there." The picture given in the statute of the result of this conduct dictated by "uncharitable and inordinate covetise for their single profite and lucre," and "contrarie to all lawe reason charite right and conscience," is fantastically gloomy. "By reason wherof all the cities townes and burghs in this Realme in effecte be falle into great povertie ruyne and decaye, and as nowe in maner they be withoute hope of comforte or relief,

secure.

1 Text, p. 95. The chest in the hall at the present time has two padlocks and one fixed lock; it seems too large for the purpose of a money-box, and is more probably the evedence chest to which allusion is often made. cf. A. H. Johnson, op. cit., vol. i, p, 109. "In 1414 we hear of only one box, the box de Dieu or spiritual box. Subsequently a temporal box was also established. Into the spiritual box were paid the rents, the quarterage, and the fees for apprenticeship, into the temporal the fees for entry in the freedom and the livery, fines, and subscription."

2 Value 68. 8d. or 108. See Glossary.

3 The Flemish shilling was worth less than the English shilling, but rates of exchange varied.