Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/69

Rh support of which the measure could have had little efficacy or success. We may take this decree conferring the honours of nobility upon commerce, therefore, as testifying not only to the liberality and wisdom of Athelstan, but also to the estimation in which commerce had already come to be held among the English people. It may be regarded as a proof that the Anglo-Saxons had never entertained much of that prejudice against the pursuits of trade, which we find so strongly manifested during the middle ages, wherever the political and social institutions were moulded upon, and fully animated by, the spirit of the feudal system. But it is especially interesting in reference to the present subject, as an indication of the growing importance of English commerce and of the public sense of that importance. From this time English fleets and ships of war come to be frequently mentioned. Athelstan assisted his nephew, Louis IV. of France, in his contest with the Emperor Otho, by sending a fleet to the coast of Flanders, to ravage the emperor's territories in that quarter. This was done in conformity with a treaty of mutual defence, which is memorable as the first of the kind that had been entered into between the two kingdoms. Edgar's navy, and also that which Ethelred fitted out by a tax upon all the lands in the kingdom to repel the Danes, make a great figure in the history of the next half century. Some accounts make Edgar's fleet to have amounted to between three and four thousand ships—a statement resembling in its style of evident hyperbole the whole history the old monkish chroniclers have given us of this king, whose lavish benefactions to the church have secured him an extraordinary return of their gratitude and laudation. Ethelred's, again, is recorded to have been the most numerous naval armament that had yet been seen in England; so that it must have surpassed that of Edgar.

Even in the disastrous reign of Ethelred, we find indications of the continued progress of trade, both coasting and foreign. In certain laws enacted by Ethelred and his Witan, at Wantage, in Berkshire, it is declared, that every smaller boat arriving at Billingsgate (so old are that