Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/137

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 129 The York records contain two or three welcome bits of new evidence on the much-discussed question of the fraternity of St. Thomas a Becket to which in the seventeenth century the merchant adventurers traced the origin of their company. This fraternity under the charter of 1462 was to receive a fourth of the fines, and it was the rapidly increasing entrance fees levied by it that were the main subject of the famous complaint in 1497 of the non-London merchants, who then spoke of having paid the lesser fee of half a noble for a few years past. Through a Request of 1488 we find there was then in the hospital of Holy Trinity at York an altar to St. Thomas the Martyr (and St. Nicholas) as well as one to St. Katherine, All three saints were closely associated with commerce, and the presump- tion is that the dedications were much older than 1488 ; but the one to St. Thomas may have been a concession to the hegemony of London. In 1509 the Norwich merchants writing to York to communicate grievances against the London adventurers speak of themselves as being ' free of the fellowship which is called the fraternity of St. Thomas beyond the sea '. The accounts of disputes about the assessment of government levies and forced loans throw considerable light on the relations between London and the other branches. Towards the loan of £30,000 negotiated by Gresham in 1560 Newcastle was assessed at £1,200 and York only at £450. But that even this small contribution was a serious burden is shown by the fact that the York merchants were obliged to borrow the amount from Antwerp bankers and were still paying compound interest at 12 per cent, in 1562. Miss Sellers speaks of Sir T. Gresham as directing the policy of the company at this time. This is certainly the view that has been endorsed by authorities Hke Drs. Lingelbach and Hagedorn. Gresham was a merchant adventurer who became the financial agent of the Crown, and who in- the latter capacity effected in 1553 a re-organization of the adventurers on monopoly lines for fiscal purposes, but that he succeeded in reconciling the interests of the merchants with the policy of the government was never claimed by himself and is sufficiently disproved by the correspondence printed in Burgon's Life. What Gresham did claim was that by manipula- tion of the adventurers as Crown agent he was enabled to restore the financial credit of the realm and turn the rate of exchange in favour of England. It has been assumed that he combined with this exploit the still greater one of enabling the merchant adventurers to lay the basis of England's commercial supremacy. A fuller knowledge of EUzabethan commercial history will show that both exploits are equally mythical. To that fuller knowledge the latter half of the York documents as edited by Mss Sellers furnish a valuable contribution. The interest naturally culmirlates in the incorporation of the York adventurers in 1580, and the records abundantly illustrate some of the many-sided developments of the previous five years, and show how the rapid closing up of one channel of English foreign trade after another by the formation of new monopolies like the Spanish company and the Eastland company and by the growing restrictions within the original company of adventurers was affecting the trade in the lesser ports. The merchants at York, whilst rightly protesting along with those at Hull, Newcastle, Chester, &c., at VOL. XXXV. — NO. CXXXVII. K