Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/225

Rh cloths, calf-skins, &c.; their imports silks, camblets, rhubarb, malmsey, muscadel and other wines, oils, cotton-wool, Turkey carpets, galls, and Indian spices. One of these voyages up the Mediterranean usually occupied a whole year, and was accounted exceedingly difficult and dangerous. Sundry foreign vessels, such as Candiots, Ragusans, Sicilians, Genoese, Venetian galleasses, and Spanish and Portuguese ships, were also employed by the English merchants in this trade.

An important act of parliament affecting commercial transactions was passed in 1546, the last year of this reign (stat. 37 Hen. VIII. c. 9), which, although entitled "An Act against Usury," in fact repealed all the old laws against lending and borrowing money on interest, and allowed interest to be taken at the rate of 10 per cent, per annum. The preamble recites that the former statutes against usury have "been so obscure and dark in sentences, words, and terms, and upon the same so many doubts, ambiguities, and questions have risen and grown, and the same acts, statutes, and laws been of so little force and effect, that by reason thereof little or no punishment hath ensued to the offenders of the same, but rather hath encouraged them to use the same." It is most certain, indeed, that no law could prevent the taking of interest, which did not put down the lending of money altogether.

A few notices that have been preserved relating to the shipping of the early part of the sixteenth century may here be introduced. The royal navy of England, properly so called, takes its rise from the reign of Henry VlII. At first Henry possessed only one ship of war of his own, the Great Harry; to which a second was added by the capture from the Scottish captain, Andrew Barton, of his ship called the Lion, in June, 1511,—an incident which led, two years after, to the war between the two kingdoms, the battle of Flodden, and the death of James IV. The next year, 1512, Henry built another ship at Woolwich, the Regent, weighing 1000 tons, and described as the greatest ship that had yet been seen in England. From an indenture drawn up between the