Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/78

64 them with goods on his own account, and grew rich by traffic.

Notwithstanding all this, the nation was not yet much more enlightened as to the real principles of trade than it was in the previous century. The same absurd restrictions were in force against foreign merchants. Such foreign merchants were required to lay out all the money received for goods imported in English merchandise. No gold or silver coin, plate or bullion, was, on any recount, to be carried out of the kingdom. Banks were now established in most countries, and bills of exchange had been in use since the thirteenth century—so that these remedied, to a great extent, this evil; but it is clear that where he exports of a country exceeded its imports, the balance must be remitted in cash; and the commercial men were clever enough to evade all the laws of this kind. No fact was so notorious as that the coinage of England abounded in all the countries to which she traded.

Besides the prohibition of carrying out any English coin or even bullion, foreign merchants were to sell all the goods they brought within three months, but they were not to sell any of them to other merchant strangers, and when they arrived in any English town they were assigned to particular hosts, and were to lodge nowhere else. Yet, under all these obstacles, our commerce grew, and our merchants extended their voyages to ports and countries which they had not hitherto frequented. In 1413 they fitted out ships in the port of London for Morocco, having a cargo of wool and other merchandise valued at £24,000, or £240,000 of our money. This raised the ire of the Genoese, who seized these precious ships; but Henry IV. soon made ample reprisals by granting to his subjects letters of marque to seize the ships and goods of the Genoese wherever they could be found; and so well did the English kings follow this up, that we find them in Richard III.'s reign not only successfully competing with their great rivals, the Genoese, but having obtained a footing in Italy itself, and established a consul at Pisa. Consuls, or, as they were then called, governors, of the English traders abroad, were also established during this period in Germany, Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Flanders.

Wool, woollens, tin, hides, and corn, were still our chief exports. Slaves, says the historian, were no longer an article of commerce; but the conveyance of pilgrims to foreign shrines was a source of great emolument to merchants. A curious pamphlet of the middle of this century, called "The Prologue of English Policy," gives us a complete view of our imports:—The commodities of Spain were figs, raisins, wines, oils, soap, dates, liquorice, wax, iron, wool, wadmote, goatfell, redfell, saffron, and quicksilver—a valuable importation. That of Portugal was very much the same. Brittany sent wine, salt, crest-cloth, or linen, and canvas. Germany, Scandinavia, and Flanders, iron, steel, copper, osmond, bowstaves, boards, wax, corn, pitch, tar, flax, hemp, felting, thread, fustian, buckram, canvas, and wool-cards. Genoa, gold, cloth of gold, silk, cotton, oil, black pepper, rock-alum, and wood. Venice, Florence, and other Italian states, all kinds of spices and grocery wares, sweet wines, sugar, dates, with what the author considered great trumpery:

Towards the end of the century, 1483, we have an Act passed, at the instigation of the manufacturers of London and other towns, to prohibit the following long list of articles—a proof that they were busy making all these things for themselves:—Girdles, harness wrought for girdles, points, leather-laces, purses, pouches, pins, gloves, knives, hangers, tailors' shears, scissors, and irons, cupboards, tongs, fire-forks, gridirons, stock-locks, keys, hinges, garnets, spurs, painted glasses, painted papers, painted forcers, painted images, painted cloths, beaten gold and beaten silver wrought in papers for painters, saddles, saddle-trees, horse-harness, boots, bits, stirrups, buckler-chains, latten-nails with iron shanks, turners, hanging candlesticks, holy water stops (stoops), chafing-dishes, hanging leavers, curtain-rings, wool-cards, roan-cards, buckles for shoes, shears, broaches for spits, bells, hawk's-bells, tin and leaden spoons, wire of latten and iron, iron candlesticks, grates, and horns for lan-thorns, with other things made by the petitioners, prohibited on pain of forfeiture. This list is, as it were, evidence of the numerous civilised requirements of the age, and of the rapid growth of our manufactures.

The age abounded with great merchants. The Medici of Florence; Jacques le Cœur, the greatest merchant that France over produced, who had more wealth and trade than all the other merchants of that country together, and who supplied Charles VII. with money by which he recovered his country from the English. In our own country John Norbury, John Hende, and Richard Whittington, were the leading merchants of London, the last of whom was so far from a poor boy making his fortune by a cat that he was the son of Sir William Whittington, knight. In Bristol also flourished at this time William Cannynge, who was five times mayor of that city, and who had, for some cause not explained, 2,470 tons of shipping taken from him at once by Edward IV., including one ship of 400 tons, one of 500, and one of 900. Cannynge, in the last generation, was immortalised by Chatterton in his wonderful poems of Rowley.

Of the ships and shipping of the age we need not say more than that, with all the characteristics of the past age, there was an attempt to build larger vessels in rivalry of the Genoese. John Taverner, of Hull, had a royal licence granted him in 1449, conferring on him great privileges and exemptions as a merchant, for building one as large as a Venetian carrack, one of their first-class ships, or even larger. And Bishop Kennedy, of St. Andrews, was as much celebrated for building a ship of unusual size, called the Bishop's Berge, as for building and endowing a college.

In Scotland the state of the shipping interest was much the same as in England. James I. displayed the same enlightened views of trade as of government in general. He made various laws to ascertain the rate of duty on all exports and imports, to secure the effects of any traders dying abroad, and permitted his subjects to trade in foreign ships when they had no vessels of their own. In both countries great care was taken to protect and promote their fisheries.

The coin of these times in England was chiefly of gold and silver. The gold coin consisted of nobles, half-nobles,