Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/155

Rh waters were its walls; and the opulent citizens were very liberal in their donations to religious houses. The customs of Berwick were rented from Alexander III. by a merchant of Gascony for 2197l. 8s., a sum which would in those days have bought about 16,000 quarters of wheat. "By the agency of the merchants of Berwick, the wool, hides, woolfels, and other wares, the produce of Roxburgh, Jedburgh, and all the adjacent country, were shipped for foreign countries, or sold upon the spot to the Flemish company. The exportation of salmon appears to have been also a considerable branch of their trade, as we find it some time after an object of attention to the legislature of England, and the regulation of it entrusted to the great officers of the government. When Edward III. wanted two thousand salmon for his own use in the year 1361, he sent orders to procure them for him at Berwick (then belonging to England) and Newcastle—no doubt the places most famous for them in his dominions." Berwick, however, never recovered from the blow given to its prosperity by the destructive sack of 1296. In the middle of the following century we find the Scottish pearls still exported to the continent. In the statutes of the goldsmiths of Paris, drawn up in 1355, it is ordered that no worker in gold or silver shall set any Scottish pearls along with oriental ones, except in large jewels (that is, figures adorned with jewellery) for churches. The Scottish greyhounds were also at this time in request in other countries." The trade of driving cattle from Scotland for sale in England, which has continued down to the present day," Mr. Macpherson observes, "is at least as old as the times now under our consideration; for we find a letter of safe conduct granted (12th January, 1359) to Andrew Moray and Alan Erskine, two Scottish drovers, with three horsemen and their servants, for travelling through England or the king's foreign dominions for a year, with horses, oxen, cows, and other goods and merchandise." An act of the Scottish parliament in 1367 orders the strict levying Vol. I. II