Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/180

178 duties. The religious persons of all kinds resident in the country were not considered subject to the payment of custom-duties, any more than of almost any other public burdens; and, taking advantage of this privilege, the Cistercian monks had become the greatest wool-merchants in the kingdom, until, in 1344, the parliament interfered, and prohibited them for the future from practising any kind of commerce. The evil, however, of ecclesiastical communities and individuals engaging in trade long continued, in England and elsewhere, to defy the edicts both of the temporal and the spiritual authorities.

Commercial legislation in England in the reign of Henry VI. was still as short-sighted and barbarous as ever, especially on the great subject of national jealousy—the treatment of foreigners. In 1429 a law was passed that no Englishman for the future should sell goods to any foreign merchant except for ready money, or for other goods delivered on the instant. The penalty for the violation of this enactment was to be the forfeiture of the merchandise. The very next year, however, we find the parliament complaining, that, because of this ordinance, "the English merchants have not sold, nor cannot sell nor utter, their cloths to merchants aliens, whereby the king hath lost his subsidies and customs, which he ought to have had if the said cloths had been sold as they were, and were wont heretofore, and English merchants, clothworkers, and other the king's liege people, in divers parts of his realm, greatly annoyed and endamaged;" whereupon, at the solicitation of the commons, the late law is so far relaxed as to permit sales at six months' credit. Some years after this, the wisdom of the legislature displayed itself in another attempt of a still stranger kind. In 1439 it was ordained that no foreign merchant should sell any goods to another foreigner in England, on pain of the forfeiture of the goods so sold; the reason assigned for this law being, that "great damages and losses daily come to the king and to his people by the buying and selling that the merchants,