Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/204

202 action to collect a number of the puny rivulets into one efficient stream. Even the rapacity of a king or a government, whatever counterbalancing evils it may be attended with, may in some sort answer this purpose; and Cardinal Morton's metaphoric logic, therefore, though not the whole truth, in regard to Henry VII. with his riches being but a cloud made for the refreshment of his people, was not perhaps without a smack of reason as well as of poetry.

Agreeably to the spirit of one of the chancellor's commercial principles, the parliament now passed an act against usury (3 Henry VII. c. 6), that is, against all lending of money on interest, and took much pains to provide against the various ways in which attempts were likely to be made to evade the prohibition. The punishment for offenders was the annulment of the usurious bargain, and a fine of a hundred pounds—"reserving to the church," it was added, "this punishment notwithstanding, the correction of their souls according to the laws of the same." The objection to usury was in its origin purely a religious feeling, derived from the general antipathy to the Jews, the great money-dealers of the middle ages.

In another of the acts of the parliament of 1487-8 passed for annulling an ordinance of the lord mayor and aldermen of London, prohibiting any of the citizens from resorting with their goods to any fair or market out of the city, there occurs incidentally an enumeration of the principal places where fairs were then held throughout the country, and also of the articles sold at them. The London ordinances, if allowed to stand good, the Commons represent to his Majesty, "shall be to the utter destruction of all other fairs and markets within this your realm, which God defend [forbid]; for there be many fairs for the common weal of your said liege people, as at Salisbury, Bristow, Oxenforth, Cambridge, Nottingham, Ely, Coventry, and at many other places, where lords spiritual and temporal, abbots, priors, knights, squires, gentlemen, and your said commons of every country, hath their common resort to buy and purvey many things