THE TOWN MARKET
CLOSE under the sheltering walls of the parish church we may look for
the market of a mediæval town, with stalls leaning against the building
where possibly the first beginnings of trade had found shelter, where
before any market was held the people of the neighbourhood assembled on
feast days and sold meat and bread at the church without fear of being
called on for any payment for toll and stallage;[46] and in which,
after the community had been endowed with market rights, the rulers and
governors of the market met, the guardians of its weights and measures,
the makers of its laws, the assessors of its tolls, the supervisors
of its wares. There, while the national government was drifting in
perplexity at the mercy of court factions, agitated by problems of the
King’s civil list, pensions to nobles, and the conquest of France,
the towns were rapidly sketching out their commercial system and
tentatively laying down the main lines into which the national policy
was ultimately to be driven.
The market had long been kept out of view by its more showy predecessor
the fair—the offspring of an immemorial antiquity, whose very name[47]
betrays its origin in the ancient gatherings at feasts heathen or
Christian, and reveals it as an institution derived from old tribal and
national usages. Gradually expanding in later times with the growth
of the royal prerogative and necessities of commerce, and drawing
to its miscellaneous gatherings strange merchants fetched from far
and near, the fair had a brilliant history of its own; it had given
birth to universal commerce and watched over its growth; it became
the foster-mother of the Merchant Law; even now it still appears with
the lavish airs of an antique benefactor casting on the green its
faded gifts of holyday and merry-go-round and quack delights. But as
long ago as the fifteenth century the superannuated fair was already
falling into a slow decrepitude, and giving place to its successor,
the product of a later order of things.[48] For the market had another
origin and might trace back its descent to the traditions of the
Roman _municipia_, and claim the Roman Pandects for its sponsors, and
show itself fortified by customs and modes of administration handed
down to England with many another legacy from the laws of the Frankish
kings.[49] With all its air of being the very work and possession of
the people, the market was by descent no popular or tribal right; it
was the king’s prerogative; its tolls and customs were regulated by
the authority of the Justices of the King’s Bench, and its prices were
proclaimed by the king’s Clerk of the Market.[50]
What kings could not themselves profitably enjoy, however, was
generally to be bought at some reasonable price. The privilege of
holding a market could be transferred as a franchise to a subject, and
the whole market system in England grew up by means of royal grants of
monopolies to individuals or to corporations. Between the years 1200
and 1482, almost 5000 local centres of organized trade were established
by grants of markets and fairs,[51] and the towns were naturally well
to the fore in securing whatever bargains were being distributed. But
the origin of the privilege was always independent in theory of the
ordinary municipal franchises;[52] and in many important boroughs
freedom from the Steward and Marshal of the Household and the royal
Clerk of the Market was one of the last rights given to the people.[53]
Closely connected with the right to hold a market was the right to keep
a Beam or Steelyard with its weights, a yard measure, and a bushel.[54]
On the day that each new mayor entered on his office, he received from
his predecessor the common chest, the town treasure, and the standard
measures; and was required forthwith to send out his councillors to
the house of every shopkeeper, baker, brewer, or innkeeper, that they
might carry all bushels, gallons, quarts, yards, or weights back to
the Mayor’s house to be compared with the standard models and duly
sealed.[55] Thenceforth it was his business to make war on spicers and
grocers who sold by horn or aim of hand or by subtlety deceived the
poor commons, on brewers who used cups and dishes instead of lawful
measures,[56] on drapers who measured after their own devices, on
weavers who used stones and not sealed weights to buy their wool; even
merchants of the Staple and country squires and foreign dealers brought
their wool to the “Trove” or Balance, with a fee for the “Fermour of
the Beme,”[57] as soon as general trade proved the inconvenience of a
variety of local weights, or of the primitive method of using stones
which still survived in the fifteenth century, when a Yorkshire steward
writes to his master, “I have a counterpoise weight of the weight stone
that the wool was weighed with, and that ye see that the stone be kept
that the shipman brings.”[58]
Thus the market with its Beam and measures became the source and centre
of an activity absolutely new—an activity which crowded the roads not
only with merchants and chapmen, but with the new race of carriers
that was created at the end of the fourteenth century to transport the
dealer’s wares throughout the length and breadth of the country.[59]
Dealers and manufacturers gathered in groups round the central Cheap
and its Balance with authentic sealed weights, and gave the names of
their several trades to the alleys in which butchers or milksellers
clustered together, or where spurriers and goldsmiths had their shops,
and grocers, mercers, wool-dealers, and cloth merchants were ranged
in ordered ranks round the Guildhall for the greater convenience of
the municipal officers. What the new movement meant we can see in the
change that passed over the face of English boroughs. The first sight
of a mediæval town must have carried little promise to the visitor. We
have a lively picture of the state of Hythe given by the presentments
of its reforming jury in the beginning of the fifteenth century, from
which it is not easy to understand how the inhabitants ever made their
way about the town at all. Streets were choked with the refuse of the
stable, made impassable by the “skaldynge de hogges,” flooded by the
overflow of a house, drowned by the turning of a watercourse out of
its way or the putting up of a dam by some private citizen heedless
of all consequences to the public road. Timber dealers cast trunks of
trees right across the street, dyers poured their waste waters over
it till it became a mere swamp, builders blocked it up utterly with
the framework of their new houses, and traders made their wharves
upon it. Not only the most thriving and respectable merchants, such
as the Honywodes, but the butcher and swine-keeper as well, threw the
waste of house and shambles and swine-cote into the open street till
there was scarcely any passage left for the wayfarer; or established
a “hoggestok,” “which smells very badly and is abominable to all men
coming to market, as well as to all dwelling in the town,” say the
jury. There was hardly a street or lane which was not described as
“almost stinking and a nuisance.” The “Cherche Weye” was occupied by
the pits of a skinner. “There was no carrying through Brokhellislane.”
The street by which the procession went on Holy Thursday, the day of
perambulation of the town, could scarcely be traversed. Everywhere
gates and bridges were falling to decay, ditches unrepaired, and hedges
overgrown; and one offender who had obstructed a road by neglecting to
repair the ditches found an easy way of escape from his obligations
by a courtesy to the Bailiff—“the dyeing of two cloths that the said
ditches may not have to be repaired.” Worse still the Holy Well was
choked with refuse, and so was the well in West Hythe, and “the water
in the cart of Geoffrey Waterleader by which the whole community is
refreshed” was equally obstructed and spoiled by the refuse of the
butchers’ shambles. It is no wonder that pestilence devastated Hythe in
1412, as throughout the century it swept over one town after another.
But it has been calculated that even without the aid of pestilence the
ordinary mortality of a borough in the Middle Ages was almost equal to
that of a town during a visitation of cholera to-day. Even the first
well-meant efforts of Corporations to shut pigs out of their streets
and banish wandering dogs, by levying fines from any inhabitant who
had an “irrational animal going about” in the churchyard[60] or the
market, doubtless added to the dangers of pestilence by removing the
only scavengers known to the early borough.
Nor was this the condition of the smaller towns only. In Nottingham,
a thriving and prosperous borough, we read in the same way of
streets blocked with piles of cinders cast out smoking hot from the
bell-foundry or the iron workshops, or with heaps of corn which the
householders winnowed, or as they said “windowed,” by the simple method
of throwing it from an upper window or door into the street that the
wind might carry away the chaff.[61] In the yet wealthier manufacturing
city of Norwich the market place was not yet paved in 1507, but a
judicious order was issued that no one should dig holes in it to get
sand without the mayor’s licence.[62] The very attempt to get access
to a town was often not wholly free from peril. In 1499 a glover from
Leighton Buzzard travelled with his wares to Aylesbury for the market
before Christmas Day. It happened that an Aylesbury miller, Richard
Boose, finding that his mill needed repairs, sent a couple of servants
to dig clay “called Ramming clay” for him on the highway, and was in
no way dismayed because the digging of this clay made a great pit in
the middle of the road ten feet wide, eight feet broad, and eight feet
deep, which was quickly filled with water by the winter rains. But
the unhappy glover, making his way from the town in the dusk, with his
horse laden with paniers full of gloves, straightway fell into the
pit, and man and horse were drowned. The miller was charged with his
death, but was acquitted by the court on the ground that he had had
no malicious intent, and had only dug the pit to repair his mill, and
because he really did not know of any other place to get the kind of
clay he wanted save the highroad.[63]
All this heritage of squalor and rough disorder however was no longer
accepted without protest. Old abuses were brought to light and
denounced.[64] Towns were swept and garnished, stately market crosses
set up, and new Guild-halls everywhere built with shops and stalls and
storage rooms for the traders. A new interest was awakened in the state
of streets[65] and lanes and central squares when waggons and pack
horses began to struggle through the mire with their loads on market
day. And as travellers multiplied—busy men intent on bargains, traders
flocking to buy and sell, mayors and clerks of distant boroughs come
to negociate a commercial treaty, men of law having the conduct of a
new charter, common earners—all travellers who no longer cared (and
some of them for very obvious reasons) to depend on the hospitality of
monasteries, the towns with one accord began to provide inns where, to
the greater profit of the community, such men might turn for shelter;
and the more luxurious among them might discover good cheer which
demanded a grateful entry—“paid for our bed there, and it was well
worth it, witness, a feather bed 1_d._”[66] Everywhere a new order
reigned under the busy rule of the municipal officers, as they leased
out the market stalls and sheds,[67] appointed the corresponding
pews in the church, allotted storage rooms in the Guildhall, issued
licenses to alien traders, and controlled the wayward will of the
sellers by regulating their prices and their profits. Goods landed at
the wharves of a seaport were delivered up to the public porters and
measurers of the Strand[68] employed by the town to unload vessels
with pulleys and ropes supplied at the common expense, and to carry
them to the appointed place for toll or for inspection; and the
town brokers—public officers sworn to make no private profit while
they held their posts—conducted bargains in the name of the whole
community,[69] freighted vessels, and measured cargoes of corn or
canvas or cloth. Before the mayor the endless officials of the market
were sworn—the clerk of the market who had to search and survey
all victuals, the sergeant who carried the toll-box on market days
after the bailiffs,[70] the “leave-lookers,” the “decennaries,” the
“prud’hommes,”[71] the butchers chosen to oversee the meat market,
the men appointed to control the sale of fish and poultry, the common
weigher, and so on through the long and various list of officials.
A vast system of ingenious and elaborate regulations[72] marked the
long effort of the townspeople to carry out in their new markets the
apparently simple end which lay at the heart of the democracy, that
food and necessaries of life both good and cheap should be within the
reach of every man. According to the theory which still held its ground
in the sixteenth century that “victual being a necessary sustenance
for the body should not be esteemed at the seller’s liberty,”[73] a
fixed price was set on all provisions. Hence the Assize of Bread[74]
(apparently quite neglected by the feudal lords[75]) and the Assizes
of Beer and of Wine were secured by the towns, whether as a part of
their market rights or as an independent privilege.[76] Victuallers
were closely watched lest in selling meat, eggs, butter, or oatmeal
they should take “excess lucre upon them, selling that is to say more
than 1_d._ in the shilling;”[77] innholders were allowed a penny of
gain on every bushel of corn and a half-penny on every seven pounds of
hay, so that if a man could buy a bushel of corn[78] for 2_s._ 8_d._
he was not allowed to sell it for 3_s._; tavern-keepers might have
twopence profit on a gallon of white or red wine, and on sweet wines
brought by Italian merchants, fourpence;[79] cooks must make their
meat “well seasoned and wholesome, and sell it for reasonable winning,
and that they reboil nor rebake no meat in hurt of the King’s people;”
while fishmongers—a class most important in the mediæval world, and
among whom it was impossible to prevent the growth of the middleman,
were subjected to endless regulations.[80] In the unceasing effort to
save themselves from dearth or from fraud the poor commons had their
authorized protector in the Mayor—a protector who on entering office
took oath before the community not only to obey the King but also
to serve the people, and to “keep truly correction on all bakers and
brewers and taverners and cooks and such like people.” No sooner was
the Mayor of Bristol installed than he was bound to call all the bakers
of the town to the Guild Hall, to understand from them what stuff they
had of wheat, to counsel them in their buying and bargaining with the
“Bagers” who brought corn to the town, and to decide on the size of the
loaves. Then all the Bristol brewers were summoned before him, that
he might commune with them about the cost of malt, and decree a fixed
price which no brewer might evade or alter. In like manner he proceeded
to set a price on wood “by his wise discretion,” and to order the hours
of its sale; and he had to examine the colliers’ sacks, and to assure
himself that standard measures for coal were set in the proper places
of the town. Further, throughout the year it was his duty constantly
to watch that his ordinances were duly observed. Occasionally his
walk was extended along the river side, that he might keep an eye on
the timber trade and observe whether the great wood called Berkeley
wood was discharged at one quay, and the smaller faggots at another
landing-place; and that he might from spring to spring watch prices,
and see that there was small wood enough to supply the poor people with
bundles at 1/2_d._ or 1_d._ kept at the “Back,” a waterside street
where the merchants’ stores were piled. At divers times he went to
oversee the quality of the bread and try its weight (for which perhaps,
as at Sandwich, he engaged a goldsmith who was liberally paid for his
experience at the scales); while at Christmas, or whenever there was
holiday or a pilgrimage in the town, it was his business to make sure
that there was bread enough in the shops to supply all needs. And in
order to know certainly that the brewers not only made good ale for
the rich but also a cheap small drink for the poor, on Wednesdays and
Saturdays he was “used to walk in the mornings to the brewers’ houses,
to oversee them in serving of their ale to the poor commons of the
town, and that they have their true measures; and his ale-konner with
him to taste and understand that the ale be good”[81]—a very necessary
task if we accept the picture given us in Piers Ploughman of the
typical beer-seller of his day—
“Yea, bawe,” quoth a brewer, “I will not be ruled,
By Jesus, for all your jangling after _spiritus justicie_;
Nor after conscience, by Christ, for I could sell
Both dregs and draff, and draw at one hole
Thick ale and thin ale, and that is my kind,
And not to hack after holiness; hold thy tongue, Conscience!
Of _spiritus justicie_ thou speakest much and idle.”[82]
The Nottingham jury a century or two later would have drawn the same
picture. “Master Mayor,” they cry, “we beseech you to be good master to
us, and see a remedy for our brewers, for we find us grieved with them
all.”[83]
Nor did legislation stop here. The moment a trader came within reach
of a town he became the object of universal suspicion lest he should
be a dealer travelling with an alert intention to outwit the public
and force an artificial value in the market by some contrivance of
forestalling or regrating or engrossing—that is of intercepting
goods on the way to market in order to buy them more cheaply; of thus
buying at advantage to sell at increased prices; or of keeping back
goods bought at wholesale prices in order to sell them later at a
better value. A jealous watch was kept on him. He was not allowed to
do any business secretly or outside the proper limits, but “openly
in the market thereto assigned,” and even there he was ordered to
stand aside till the townsmen had come back from early mass and had
first been served with such stores of corn and malt, of butter and
poultry and meat as their households needed, and the bell struck the
hour when he might take his turn for what was left.[84] And as he
bought so must he sell only in the established and customary place;
and food once displayed on his shelf or stall could not be taken out
of the town unsold without leave of the bailiffs.[85] Any citizen who
helped a “foreign” merchant by buying or selling goods for him under
his own name lost his freedom.[86] Men who lived “upland”[87] were
rejected from the society of privileged traders of the towns, and
sharp distinctions such as we find at Worcester between the “citizens
denizen” and the “citizens foreign”[88] separated the folk within and
without the walls.[89] In one borough strangers’ stalls in the market
were separated from those of the burghers[90] so that they might not
hinder the townsfolk in their business; in another they were forbidden
to carry their wares from house to house;[91] here they might not sell
their goods with their own hands, there they must dispose of them
wholesale, or forfeit their entire stock to the town if they attempted
to sell by retail; elsewhere they had to wait for a given number of
weeks after their arrival before they could offer their merchandise
to the buyer; if for public convenience aliens were allowed to bring
into the market victuals[92] and a few other articles, the monopoly of
all valuable trade was kept in the hands of the burgesses or of their
Merchant Guild.[93]
It is however needless to multiply instances of monopoly. The system
was universal, and a curious attempt which was once made to establish
free trade at Liverpool died almost as soon as it was born. The
charter of Henry the Third contained the usual provision that members
of the Guild alone might trade in the borough, unless by consent of
the burgesses, but in a new charter of Richard the Second for which
he was paid £5 this clause was left out and free trade practically
established. No sooner however did Henry the Fourth appear in 1399
than the burgesses bought from him for £4 a fresh grant of privileges
with the former clause restored, and the old monopoly was consequently
reasserted, till oddly enough an outburst of religious bigotry
abolished trade restrictions; for seeing that the Liverpool Protestants
were shutting out Roman Catholics from their market, Queen Mary in 1555
proclaimed anew the charter of Richard the Second and the right of free
commerce.[94] Sometimes a lively smuggling trade betrays the weak side
of the monopolists’ position; as when Bristol claimed entire control of
all ports and creeks as high as Worcester, and the only lawful trade
left to Gloucester was the shipping of supplies, mostly of corn, to
Bristol. The shippers of Gloucester saw their chance of a rich lawless
traffic; small boats quickly and easily laden and drawing little water,
shot out of the channel by shallow passages where the bigger Bristol
ships could not follow them, and Irish vessels made their way direct to
Gloucester and escaped the heavy dues at the Bristol port; and while
Gloucester traders grew rich fast, the Bristol folk made complaint that
they were threatened with ruin.[95]
This elaborate system of trade regulation was no doubt mainly due
to the effort which men were forced to make, as centres of thicker
population grew up in a country where the carriage of goods[96] was a
slow and difficult matter, to protect themselves from violent changes
in the price of food;[97] while it is also possible that a society
which dictated wages and profits was naturally drawn on to undertake
the corresponding duty of fixing the value in food and clothing of
these wages and profits. It would seem that for some centuries the
cost of mere subsistence remained almost stationary; and even in
exceptional cases, like the Jubilee of 1420 which brought a hundred
thousand pilgrims to Canterbury, the corporation which had charge of
the preparations was able to ensure that there should be no increase in
the ordinary price of provisions.
It has been commonly held, however, that the old trade laws were not
only invented to protect the people’s food, but to protect wages
and profits as well; and they have been denounced as the outcome of
an ignorant selfishness; and as proving the belief of the mediæval
burghers that the industrial prosperity of the whole community could
only be assured by their securing so complete a monopoly of the entire
trade of the borough that they might themselves reap all the fruit
of their enterprise and gather wealth undisturbed—a belief to which
modern democracies (with one great exception) still cling, though
they throw a grander air over their creed now-a-days by discussing
protection in continents instead of protection in a little market
town. But it seems likely that protection in the modern sense had
scarcely anything to say to the great mass of mediæval legislation
about trade. No doubt it was the natural ideal of every craft to have
the State for its nursing-mother; but the voice of the crafts was lost
in the monotonous reiteration by the general public of their dominant
principle, that manufactures and commerce only existed for the benefit
of the whole community—the “poor commons of the realm,” to use the
phrase of that day. It was for _their_ protection that no unlicensed or
unregulated trade should be allowed to exist, that there should be no
fraudulent manufactures, no secret breaking down of barriers set up by
Parliament for the orderly division and control of crafts, no buying
and selling by forestallers, public enemies to the community and to
the country, hastening by land and by water to oppress the poor;[98]
and rules devised to check a public mischief or secure a public good
are no more to be classed as protective than regulations for the sale
of drugs or the licensing of public houses in our own day. Such rules
indeed were often as unsolicited by the trader as they were agreeable
to the public, and all his cunning was exerted to elude them. Some
little margin of profit was to be won beyond the city boundaries where
there was freedom from the city law and from the city tolls. Therefore
the London corporation complained that the butchers of London “who
have bought their freedom and are sworn of the franchise, do rent
their houses at Stratford and round Stratford, and never come at any
summons nor bear their part in the franchise of the city; but shut
out the citizens (resident butchers) in divers markets where they
ought to buy their wares, so that through them no wares they can get
to the great undoing of the citizens.”[99] Bakers withdrew themselves
“into the foreign” to avoid punishment for frauds.[100] Candlemakers
established themselves in the suburbs, and butchers were presented
“for selling of his tallow into the country and will not sell it to a
man within the town,”[101] or for carrying tallow in sacks at night
out of the city for the making up of candles; and being punished were
ordered to leave candle-making to the chandlers, who on their part were
commanded to keep within the boundaries. In Canterbury, where owing to
the great number of ecclesiastical tenants the main burden of taxation
was thrown on a part only of the population, and where doubtless taxes
were correspondingly high, there came a time at last when traders of
every kind, cloth-makers and brewers and bakers, carried their business
outside the “liberties,” so that according to the story of the mayor
and council “formerly there were divers and many habitations in which
of time past were kept good and notable households, by the which many
men and women were relieved and had their living and increase, being
now uninhabited and greatly decayed, and some of them fall to ruin and
utter destitution ... and it is well understood and known that the
principal cause thereof” was this wicked device of the independent
dealers, by which the tradesmen in the city who had to pay “tax,
tallage, and other impositions,” could not compete with those outside
and “have not the sale and utterance of their bread and ale, as they in
times past have had, to their great impoverishing, and manifold hurt
and prejudice to the commonweal of the said city.” The suburban bakers
sold their goods to “divers and many simple and evil disposed persons
of the city as well to Scots, Irish, and other, which in no wise will
apply themselves to any labour or other lawful occupations, but only
they live upon sale and huckstry of the said bread, beer, and ale, and
for that they have resorting unto them many vagabonds ... whereby many
well disposed persons be greatly annoyed and grieved.”[102] To restore
trade to its primitive simplicity a law was passed with clauses against
the mercenary Scotch and Irish, the troublers of the city’s peace,
and dealers were forbidden to sell their provisions “to no inhabitant
within the said city, but only to such persons as shall be thought by
the mayor and aldermen of good disposition and conversation.”[103]
The prejudice against unregulated trade was no doubt reinforced by
the hostility of the town dealer to competitors who throve at his
expense on illegal profits; but it was probably the governing body
of the town which maintained the most serious opposition to all
traffic that depended on the cheating of the common treasury of the
borough.[104] For no trifling part of the town revenue came, as we see
from the Nottingham records, from fines paid yearly by non-freemen for
the privilege of holding a stall in street or market. In Canterbury
“Tollerati” paid for the right of buying and selling during a limited
period, and at the end of the time renewed the right by a fresh payment
of what was called “Tolleration money”;[105] alien traders living
without the liberties, there known as “intrantes,” took in Romney the
name of “extravagantes.” Some towns shewed a jealousy of strangers,
dictated no doubt by special circumstances; as in Preston, where the
“Foreign Burgesses,” as distinguished from the “Inn Burgesses,” were
drawn from the country gentry and squires and some inhabitants of the
town,[106] and were merely freed from toll[107] for any goods bought
for the use of their families, but were allowed no other profits of
trade, and even though they were inhabitants had no right of common on
marsh or moor, nor could they join in the election of any town officer
nor be themselves elected;[108] while even with these restrictions no
trader who lived outside the walls was admitted among them,[109] and it
was only in course of time that alien dealers were gradually allowed
on payment of a fine to set up stalls in the market-place and carry on
their business under the name of “stallingers.” In general, however, an
open purse was all that was needed to commend a stranger; and if the
charge on it was sometimes excessive it seems to have been enforced
mainly as a means of persuasion to enter the Merchant Guild.
But for whatever reason the regulation of trade was thought desirable,
whether to protect the consumer’s pocket or to fill the town treasury,
it certainly was not intended to keep buyers and sellers at home, to
hamper their enterprise, or to abolish competition. If protection and
monopoly were allowed to look big, they were never allowed to get
seriously in the way of business. In theory and sometimes in fact iron
chains might be flung across the King’s highway, bars thrown athwart
the river, and custom house officers set at the gate to levy toll and
stallage.[110] But gates and bars and chains swung open everywhere
before the trader “if he have the penny ready to take to;” the guilds
enlarged their rolls for foreigners,[111] the towns granted them
their privileges liberally. Since a man could hold citizenship in
more than one borough a speculator or merchant doing business in a
large way might always circumvent the rules against foreign dealers
by being made citizen in some convenient trading centre as well as in
his own town,[112] and so obtain power to carry on the business proper
to an alien speculator with all the privileges of a resident burgher.
Every pedantic hindrance, indeed, was removed out of the way of his
enterprise, for a very slight study of town records disposes of the
idea that mediæval trade was ultimately governed by the formal laws of
statute books. Monopoly was broken through whenever it was advisable
or convenient for special occasions. Bakers and victuallers who rose
to municipal offices turned the assize of bread and the inspection
of cooking houses and fish stalls into an idle tale. In the hands of
merchants the laws of buying and selling were manipulated so as to
interfere neither with the free circulation of goods nor with the
instinct of the dealer to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the
dearest; and it was still left possible to carry food where it was most
needed, whether to supply a manufacturing centre such as Norwich or a
city which was rapidly doubling its population like London.[113] If
the law ordained that the forestaller was to be heavily fined for the
first offence; for the second to lose his merchandise and be put in the
pillory; and for the third to be deprived of the freedom of the city,
the law was simply ignored, or some trifling fine was inflicted—a
paltry sum which a prosperous trader might easily disregard.[114] In
fact it would almost seem that the actual result of the trade laws was
mainly to give the rich wholesale merchant an additional advantage over
the poor trader. Forestalling and regrating became the fashionable
privilege of town councillors and magnates who through their position
and their wealth found it doubly easy to evade local ordinances, of
London merchants who were buying all over the country to supply the
needs of the growing city, and of dealers on a large scale interested
in the export trade; while the terrors of 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.