Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1. Green Alice Stopford

to Edward the Third the money which alone enabled him to carry on the war with France. But when Edward declared himself unable to pay his debts and repudiated the whole of the Florentine loans ruin fell on the city; its trade was paralyzed, and commercial disasters ended in political revolution. Bankers of Lübeck took the place of its financiers as the Rothschilds of the mediæval world; and ship-masters of Genoa seized the commerce which fell from its hands. Though the winning of the port of Leghorn in 1421 brought a fresh outburst of trading activity to Florence,117 though its merchants established depots and banks and commercial settlements in all the great towns of the North, though cargoes of wool were again shipped to its harbour (one English merchant alone in 1437 selling to an agent of the Albertine Company wool to the value of almost £12,000),118 the supremacy of the Republic in the Mediterranean trade was never restored.

      For its great competitors, Genoa and Venice, were now fairly in the field. Through their station on the Black Sea the Genoese held until the Turkish conquest the chief market in the East for European cloth; and their fleets laden with cloth of gold, silk and spices of the Levant, with alum and mastick from the subject islands of Chios and Phocœa, with the woad of Toulouse, and the wines of Provence, sailed to Southampton to exchange their cargoes for English cloth, which they sometimes carried back direct to the Black Sea, and sometimes took on to sell at the Flemish markets, and so make a double profit on their journey.119 For their world-wide business the Bank of St. George was founded at Genoa in 1407, with a system of credit notes of acknowledgement for money deposited which could be transferred from hand to hand.

      The great galleys of Venice, however, were formidable rivals of the carracks of Genoa. For Venice, hidden away in the Adriatic, with nothing of its own save salt to offer, showed in perhaps a higher degree than any other Italian State what might be achieved by a lavish system of State protection.120 It was the State that built its merchant fleets; the State that leased out the vessels every year to the highest bidders for trading purposes; the State that ordered the conduct of their business for the greatest public wealth; the State that protected them from competition by forbidding its citizens to send out their spices by the overland route, or to take in cloth from England that had not been carried in Venetian galleys by long sea. By the authority of its government Venice had been made the emporium of the Mediterranean, and Italian traders obediently carried cloths or tin or bales of skins from England to Venice, and from Venice to Corfu. Fortune favoured the most astute among her wooers, and showered on Venice the coveted blessings of trade. Her ships travelled far, and Italian merchants who had once been only known in England as financial agents employed by the Papal Court to collect the tribute due to Rome, now flocked to the island on business of a very different character. The harbour of Southampton was crowded with galleys, in which cunning tailors sat day and night cutting the bales of material bought into garments, so as to save the export dues on cloth.121 In the time of Richard the Second a Genoese merchant who had leased the castle as a storehouse for his wares proposed to the King to make of Southampton the greatest trading port of the west, and he might well have carried out his promise if the London merchants had not prudently sent a messenger to murder him at his own door.122 Notwithstanding the inhospitable and grudging welcome given by London itself the Lombards found means by the King’s help to maintain a thriving settlement, and in the fifteenth century the Venetian Consuls gathered letters for the regular mail to Venice once every month.123

      What the Venetians were to the commerce of the Mediterranean that the merchants of the Hanseatic League were to the commerce of the Baltic and the German Ocean. A double strength had been given to the confederation of towns which Lübeck had drawn under its banner by its union with the Teutonic Order – an order which had originated in Bremen and Lübeck and then settled on the Baltic to create the trading prosperity of Danzig and Elbing. These Prussian cities, while they owned the Grand Master of the Order of Teutonic Knights as their feudal chief, were still dependent on Lübeck.124 And with them were joined a multitude of towns so imposing in their very numbers alone that when the ambassadors of the Hanseatic League in England in 1376 were asked for a list of the members who made up their vast association, they answered scornfully that surely even they themselves could not be supposed to remember the countless names of towns big and little in all kingdoms in whose name they spoke.125 Under the strangely diverse lordship of Kings, Dukes, Margraves, Counts, Barons, or Archbishops, they found a link in their common union in the Holy Roman Empire, and ever counted England, cut off from that great commonwealth, as a “foreign” nation.126

      In war or in commercial negotiations this mighty confederation, with its members disciplined to act together as one body, dealt proudly as a nation on equal terms with other peoples, and in the strength of its united corporation it was in fact a far more formidable force than the jealous and isolated Republics of the South. Denmark was laid at its feet by a triumphant war. Norway was held in complete subjection. It forced the English traders in the North Sea to bow to its policy and fight at its bidding. So powerful was the League in the fourteenth century, that when Edward the Third had ruined the banks of Florence it was the merchants of Lübeck who became his money-lenders; they were made the farmers of the English wool-tax; they rented the mines of the northern counties and the tin-works of Cornwall.127 The whole carrying trade of the northern seas lay in their hands. It was vessels of the Hanse that sailed from Hull or from Boston to Bergen with English wares and brought back cargoes of salt fish;128 that fetched iron from Sweden, and wine from the Rhine vineyards, and oranges and spices and foreign fruits from Bruges; and that carried out the English woollen cloths to Russia and the Baltic ports, and brought back wood, tin, potash, skins, and furs. Within the strong defences of their Steel-yard129 on the banks of the Thames by London Bridge, the advance guard of the League lived under a sort of military discipline, and held their own by force of the King’s protection against the hatred of London traders and burghers, which now and then burst into violent riots.

      Thus throughout the fourteenth century it was strangers who held the carrying trade to England along the two great commercial routes – the passage by Gibraltar to the harbours of Italy and thence to Alexandria, and the passage by the Sound to the Baltic ports and so to Novgorod. All the profits of transit as of barter were secured by alien dealers who travelled from village to village throughout the country in search of wool or cloth to freight the foreign vessels that lay in every harbour – vessels bigger and better built for commerce than any of which England could boast.130 Moreover, the English government was content to have it so, and Kings who wanted to build up alliances for their foreign wars, or to replenish their failing treasury at home, in all commercial regulations showed their favour mainly to foreign traders and left the native shipowner to do as best he could for himself. Once, indeed, in the reign of Richard the Second, a solitary attempt was made to encourage the shipping industry, and the first Navigation Act passed in England ordered “that none of the King’s liege people do from henceforth ship any merchandise in going out or coming within the realm of England but only in ships of the King’s liegance.”131 This Act, however, after the fashion of the time, was only to be in force for a few months; and after very brief experience Parliament wisely decided that the law need only be obeyed when “the ships in the parts where the said merchants shall happen to dwell be found able and sufficient … and otherwise it shall be lawful to hire other ships convenient.”132 With this the experiment of State protection came to an end for the next century; and against the great confederations and State-protected navies of the Continent English merchants were left to wage singly as best they could their private and adventurous war.

      English shipping, indeed, so far as it existed at all, may be said to have existed

117

Clement, Jacques Cœur, 23-4.

118

For the failure of this company in 1437 and its effect on English traders, see Bekynton’s Corres. i. 248-50, 254.

119

Libel of English Policy. Pol. Poems and Songs, ii. 172.

120

Schanz, i. 124-6.

121

Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 11, 87. 11 H. IV. c. 7. Yarn and unfulled cloths paid only subsidy – finished cloths paid also customs and measuring tax. Schanz, i. 448, note.

122

Davies’ Southampton, 254.

123

Denton’s Lectures, 192; Paston Letters, iii. 269.

124

Pauli’s Pictures, 126-132.

125

Keutgen, 41.

126

Keutgen, 41. Dinant was the only town outside German-speaking countries that belonged to the Hanseatic League. It entered the League in the middle of the fourteenth century as a sort of external member – only sharing its privileges in England and never voting in its assemblies – tolerated rather than holding its right by formal grant. Pirenne, Dinant, 97-102.

127

Keutgen, 5, 30.

128

Keutgen, 14-18.

129

For a description of the Steel-yard see Pauli’s Pictures.

130

The ordinary size of French ships seems to have been 1,000 or 1,200 tons. (Heralds’ Debate, 51-2.) Cannyngs, of Bristol, had in his little fleet vessels of 900, 500, or 400 tons. (Cruden’s Gravesend, 131.) The “Harry Grace à Dieu,” built at Woolwich, 1512, was of 1,500 tons, and cost £6,472. (Ibid. 143-9.)

131

1382; 5 Richard II., Stat. 1, c. 3. See Schanz, i. 360, for the scope of this law.

132

6 Richard II., Stat. 1, c. 8.