Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/122

120 CHAPTER IV. FROM THE ACCESSION OF HENRY III. TO THE END OF THE REIGN OF RICHARD II. A.D. 1216 — 1399.

The history of English commerce during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is in great part the record of a course of legislative attempts to resist or annul the laws of nature, such as probably never was outdone in any other country. A full detail would serve no useful purpose; but a few samples will be found both curious and instructive.

A term which makes a great figure in the commercial regulations of this period is that of the Staple. The word, in its primary acceptation, appears to have meant a particular port or other place to which certain commodities were obliged to be brought to be weighed or measured for the payment of the customs, before they could be sold, or in some cases exported or imported. Here the king's staple was said to be established. The articles of English produce upon which customs were anciently paid were wool, sheep-skins (or woolfels), and leather; and these were accordingly denominated the staples or staple goods of the kingdom. The persons who exported these goods were called the Merchants of the Staple: they were incorporated, or at least recognized as forming a society with certain privileges, in the reign of Edward II,, if not earlier. Hakluyt has printed a charter granted by Edward II., the 20th of May, 1313, to the mayor and council of the merchants of the staple, in which he ordains that all merchants, whether natives or foreigners, buying wool and woolfels in his dominions for exportation, should, instead of carrying them for sale, as they had been wont to do, to several places in Brabant, Flanders, and Artois, carry them in future only to one certain staple in one of those countries, to be appointed by the said mayor and council. It appears that,