Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2. Green Alice Stopford

the law served as an effective deterrent to struggling hawkers and chapmen against meddling with the profits won by more exalted speculators from a customary if illegal traffic.

      The real foundation of free trade throughout the country, however, and that which alone gave any value to local arrangements and individual privileges, is to be found in the early town charters, where this great gift had a leading place. Almost the first boon asked for by a borough was a grant which should make its burghers or its merchant guild quit of tolls and pontage, and stallage and lastage, throughout the whole kingdom, in fairs and throughout sea-ports, in lands on this and on the other side of the sea; and give them power to buy and sell throughout all England, within cities and without, all kinds of merchandise; with the right to have stalls in other markets than their own without paying stallage, and to buy in such markets at all hours and not only those allowed to strangers. Each charter moreover had wrapped up in it a kind of “favoured nation” clause which gave to boroughs “such liberties as the city of London hath” – a clause which seems to have been interpreted (at least as to one of its meanings) as implying the right for burghers to buy and sell in gross in another town than their own on other than market days, and that “they may have in this respect as much liberty as the citizens of London.”[115]

      In its wide and unstinted privileges a charter such as this – the grant of a king who was lord of all fairs and markets – expressed the whole spirit of free trade; at a word local monopoly and protection in its true sense were swept away, and every market in the country opened to any trader duly enrolled as a burgher or a member of the Merchant Guild. The question indeed still bristled with difficulties. As the king was constantly giving away or selling his rights, or part of his rights, over markets, there were innumerable cases when the special grant to one town to hold a market without disturbance, and the more general license to its neighbour to consider itself free of all market dues, were wholly irreconcilable; and the law held that no charter of freedom could interfere with any earlier rights granted to any other person or corporation to levy tolls on transport, on crossing a bridge, on entering a gate, on taking up a standing in the market, or the like. In cases where two charters were found to bestow conflicting rights, therefore, the towns set their best lawyers to search out old evidences and records, and to claim the protection of judges of the King’s Bench or of Parliament for the grant that boasted of the greater age.[116] The preliminary question of priority of rights having been thus decided, the next step was to remedy the dead-lock of business to which the two communities had been brought by means of formal treaties such as nations make to-day, in which the right to levy toll and custom was probably used as systems of tariffs have been used in modern states – as a means of bribing or threatening refractory neighbours into some concession of free trade.[117] Southampton made its separate treaties with at least seventy-three towns or trading corporations besides all the “honours” of the kingdom, releasing them from payment of its tolls and customs; its burghers had their own compact with Marlborough[118] in which they waived such privileges as they possessed by their own earlier charter; with Bristol they settled the amount of the tax to be levied on Bristol men who brought merchandise to their market; they agreed with the men of Winchester that no tolls should be asked on either side;[119] and in 1501 their treaty with the Cinque Ports was ratified by “your lovers the bailiff and jurats of Hastings.”[120] Undermined as they were on all sides, and with gaping breaches everywhere, the walls of protection which the boroughs had thrown up round their markets certainly formed no impediment to the movement of local trade. Before the impatience of traders greedy for gain, artificial frontiers and barriers and tariffs were swept away, and from little self-contained communities where the cottagers grew their own food and spun their own wool and asked scarcely anything from outside save fish and salt and a little iron, the boroughs grew rapidly into centres of expanding commerce. To supply their needs or their luxuries they despatched their traders far and wide. When Ely sent for John of Gloucester, the famous bell-founder, to make the four great bells for the cathedral, messengers had to go to Erith for clay, and to Lynn and Northampton for copper and tin.[121] The Nottingham goldsmith was employed to repair the cross in Clifton Church, and its “alablaster man” supplied the faithful in London with little statues of the Baptist in appropriate shrines.[122] Buyers of wool and sellers of cloth, saddlers, butchers, fishmongers, hawkers of all sorts, obtained from the mayor and commonalty of their borough letters of free passage throughout the kingdom for the carrying on of their business[123] and kept up incessant intercourse between town and town. Everywhere busy forestallers were on the look out for eggs and meat and corn, and bought up supplies all over the country for London or some big town or for the export trade, or turned their privileges under the clause of London liberties into a means of buying wholesale all the week long as regrators in order to sell at a profit on market day, while on that day itself they were out at cock-crow to buy privately when the citizens were at mass, so that by six o’clock there was nothing left in the market for the good folk of the town.[124]

      As we look at this mighty volume of commerce pouring from town to town with a steady force that swept all obstacles out of its channel, we may well begin to doubt whether the burghers of the middle ages were indeed stupidly putting their necks under a hard yoke of arbitrary law, and wilfully destroying their own prospects by preferring bondage to freedom, or sacrificing general prosperity to local greeds. The mediæval system, until it began to fall into the decay that precedes death, was in fact the minister to fine and worthy ends. In a society where few rights existed save by way of privilege, the trading “communitas,” whether the borough or the guild, did actually serve as the great engine for the abolition of restrictions, for extending privilege, and throwing open a national commerce. There was a time when every new chartered association was an actual widening of free trade; and a man entered the community of a town for the same reasons that he might to-day take out letters of naturalization in a country where his business lay – not to be ensured against competition, but to share in all commercial privileges which it had won by treaty, and in case of peril to own the protection of its flag. Each town had its own privileged “community” and recognized the “community” of the neighbouring borough; and it was by this mutual recognition only that intermunicipal treaties became possible, or that any borough could ascertain the limits of its responsibility for members in foreign fair or market, could pledge itself to the fulfilment of its treaties, or have any guarantee for redress in case of wrong.[125] In the detailed municipal legislation about debt and surety and mutual responsibility, about punishment of violence, the suppression of an individual traitor to the common weal, the protection of a community from false dealing of any of its confederate states, we may plainly see how local monopolies had come to be far more significant from the point of view of public order and general intercourse than of private wealth. Monopoly and protection in fact had put on the garb of a necessary office and service. Instead of gaolers who kept the trader fast bound at home, they were the strong guardians who attended him as he went abroad, the fore-runners who cut down before him the chains that barred the highway, the ministers of justice that tracked out in his service the fraudulent debtor, the pledges to him in every danger of the vigilance and power of his native town. To each community they were the bonds of a civil order and the tokens of a corporate fidelity.

       CHAPTER III

      THE TOWN TRADER

      With the appearance of the new commercial society in the boroughs we feel that the history of modern England has begun. By the formation of a prosperous middle class, a new type of character was introduced into English life – a type which lay altogether outside old traditions, and was as far from imitating the confident superiority of classes that held the mastery by traditional right, as it was from preserving the simplicity and resignation of the masses of those who confessed a hereditary duty of subjection. The mediæval burgher was trained in a rough school. Owing nothing to class

115

Select Pleas of the Crown (Selden Soc.), 88-9.

116

Case of the Abbot of Westminster against Southampton. Rot. Parl. i. 20-21. Trial before the King’s Bench at Westminster in 1201 where the Burgesses of Northampton claim that unjust toll is taken from them by the Abbot of Thorney, which he defends by virtue of custom and an older charter than Northampton. Select Civil Pleas (Selden Soc.), i. 11. See a case at Plymouth, 1495; Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 273. Leicester and Nottingham; Ibid. viii. 416-417. Southampton and Bristol; Report on Markets, 56. Winchester; Ibid. 55. See also Ibid. 62; Gross, ii. 257-8; 177-182; 147; 379. A merchant from the Cinque Ports who insisted on the privilege of burgesses to pay no toll with regard to some wool in Blackwell Hall, in the time of Henry the Eighth, had to defend his rights and won his case.

117

Retaliation in taking of toll is expressly mentioned in the charter of London. Stubbs’ Select Charters, 104.

118

1238. Gross, ii. 173-174.

119

Gross, ii. 256.

120

Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, p. 16. For agreement between Southampton and Portsmouth 1239, Marlborough 1239, Bristol 1260, Netley Abbey 1288, Bishop of Winchester 1312, Lymington 1324, New Sarum 1329, Coventry 1456, see Davies’ Southampton, 225-228; Abbot of Westminster Rot. Parl. i. 20-21. Other instances Rep. on Markets, 40-41. Select Civil Pleas (Selden Soc.), i. 11. Nottingham Rec. i. 55, ii. 349, 362. Gross, ii. 389-90, Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 212.

121

Journ. Arch. Ass. xxvii. 416-7. When a gun was made for Lydd, metal for it was bought at Winchelsea and Hastings. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 516-517, 521.) The Nottingham founder sent to Lincolnshire for his bell metal. (Nott. Rec. ii. 143, 145).

122

Ibid. ii. 179; iii. 19, 21, 29.

123

Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 414.

124

Select Pleas of the Crown (Selden Soc.), i. 89. Rep. on Markets, 50-52.

125

See Calendar of Letters from Corporation of London. 1350-1370, ed. by Dr. Sharpe.