Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/154

 140 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S opinion, not disagreeing," might truly have been said, at any moment, of the King and his people. But that the firm trust of Englishmen in the nobleness of their ruler remained unshaken during those sixteen years of storm and stress, of taxation and war, of absence and seeming neglect, was surely due to the profound impression of justice, patience, honesty, wisdom, and self-denying toil, created by the two brilliant years of internal reform, whose course we now attempt to trace. First in point of date comes the famous Statute of L, Merchants, or Acton Burnell. As we have formerly seen, the expansion of foreign commerce, brought about by the Crusades, had rendered the merchant a figure of new impor- tance in the social system of the country. But he fitted badly into the established order of things. As often as not a " foreigner," ^ he had no native town in England, he was a member of no clan or blood-feud group, of no fief or monastery. He was a lost unit in a society which barely recognised individualism in its humbler ranks; which had a profound distrust of strangers ; which looked on commerce mainly as an opportunity of cheating, and commercial profit as something nearly akin to usury. The safety of the stranger merchant, at first secured by placing him under the I " mainpast," or guarantee, of his host, subsequently strength- ened by his own spontaneous association into gilds or brother- ' hoods, was finally recognised, as a matter of national policy, by the express words of the (Jreat Charter. But it was necessary to the welfare of the merchant, not only that he should be protected from bodily harm, but that he should be actively assisted in the enforcement of his rights. People were beginning to discover, that credit is the life-blood of commerce ; and credit could not exist in a society which knew nothing of commercial honour, as w0 understand it, without an adequate machinery for the enforcement of com- mercial obligations. No man, in the England of the thir- teenth century, would have thought a fraction the worse of of the time. Often it merely means a person not a member of the speak- er's immediate locality. But, in these pages, it will be used in its mod- ern sense of a political alien.
 * The word " foreigner " has various shades of meaning in the records