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 or family or patron, roughly
judged and consigned to his own place in the ranks by the test of
competition in its simplest form, the industrial rivalry between
man and man, the trader had no helper if he did not help himself.
Merchants burdened with little capital, like the trader pictured by
Holbein in his Dance of Death carrying all their store of wealth bound
up on their persons, and free to change their residence as often as
commerce offered brighter prospects elsewhere, wandered from town to
town, leaving no trade unlearned, no fair unvisited at home, and no
market forgotten abroad. Craftmasters equally destitute of money had to
trust to their own wit in the struggle for life, and became practised
in vigilance and patience, thrift and caution, in the contempt of
hardship, in strenuous and ceaseless activity. The discipline of trade
was severe, and the conditions of prosperity hard. If a gentleman
intruder appeared among these men hoping to find an easy way to wealth
in the more respectable forms of business to which the county families
alone condescended, his experiences were watched with contemptuous good
humour by the burghers, who knew the hardships of the road.
“I have made many a knight both mercer and draper,”
says the merchant in a mediæval poem,
“Paid never for their prenticehood not a pair of gloves;
But chaffered with my chevesance, [bargains] cheved [prospered] seldom
after.”[126]
The feeble and incompetent fell away before the severity of the tests
applied, and the trading class was constantly undergoing change.
Perhaps some sturdy Jewish stock, like the Phillips of Birmingham, held
their own for three or four centuries;[127] but more commonly families
spring up into importance and for one or two generations hold the first
place in the payment of taxes, and have control of the chief offices of
government, till after the third generation the name disappears from
the account books.[128] The family has died out, or broken down under
the stress of competition, or it has settled upon an estate bought in
the country and become merged among the county squires; and some new
stock comes in to fight its way with fresh energy and enterprise.
In picturing to ourselves the life of a mediæval borough it sometimes
happens that, with our constant tendency to exaggerate the strangeness
of the past, we perceive only an existence so straitened and humble in
condition that all sense of distinctions is lost, and we create a false
monotony, supposing that because in that remote world business was
carried on in a narrow sphere men’s fortunes were therefore more equal,
or that the general level of commercial prosperity was necessarily
more uniform than it is now. But everything we know of town life,
from the moment when the boroughs come into view, forces home the
conviction of an inequality of circumstance and wealth as sensible as
any that we recognize in the later Middle Ages; of a society which was
at no time either simple or homogeneous, and where the plutocrat and
capitalist held as imposing a place and bore himself in as lordly a
fashion, considering the limits of his stage, as his descendants of
modern times. The secret of wealth was first found, as it was long
kept, by the butchers, brewers, and victuallers of one kind or another.
There were in every borough men like Andrew Bate, the butcher of Lydd,
who became “farmer of Dengemarsh,” and kept the town in a ferment
for years, whether with his herds of cattle which overran the marsh
pastures and trespassed on his neighbours’ fields or commons so that
they could not “occupy in peace,” and would rather sell their land
than be so “grievously hurted by the cattle of Andrew Bate;” or with
his heavy tolls for the “Western men” who came to dry their whiting
on the nesse, and found him a hard “extortioner” who “had driven away
half Dengemarsh”; above all with his ceaseless activity in extending
his borders over the doubtful limits that parted the lands of the town
from the lands of the Abbot; so that though the corporation in 1462
insisted on a careful marking out of their frontiers, and years later
were labouring to have him supplanted in Dengemarsh by another burgher,
Bate was evidently victorious, and ended by seeing his brother, who had
been trained in the law probably with this object, appointed Town Clerk
and practical controller of the affairs of Lydd.[129] In like manner
the rich fishmonger, Daniel Rowe of Romney, who sent his oysters,
crabs, lampreys, and trout to London, the eastern counties, Cambridge,
and along the valley of the Thames as far as Wallingford, and fetched
back in their stead boars, calves, porkers, and bacon, ended by being
made Town Clerk of Romney[130]—as indeed became an educated man, who
kept his daybooks, where all the travelling expenses of men and horses
were carefully set down, in Latin. So also the Romney vintner, James
Tyece, who began life in a very small way in 1387, was important enough
in 1394 to be sent on a deputation to the archbishop; in 1398 he was
Jurat, and in 1414 held so much land that his property was made into a
separate ward named after him in 1432.[131]
In short in every town the bakers, brewers, vintners, cooks,
hostellers, and publicans “built their nests high” buying burgages
out of the pence of the poor,[132] and in spite of law and ordinance
walked the streets in the furred mantles of aldermen, entered the
council chamber, kept the treasure chest as chamberlains—issuing
prudent versions of the town accounts calculated for the public eye,
and themselves regulating the assessments for taxes in the interests
of their wealthy fellowship—and presided over the courts of justice,
where they administered the assizes of bread and beer for the benefit
of the fraternity; while for their services they required a part of the
common land to be enclosed for their use, or pastured their flocks at
the public expense, and in a thousand ways gathered in for generations
the harvest that then ripened for men in authority.[133] No law could
shut them out from the mayor’s seat; and carrying away from office the
robe of “clean scarlet” which gave them the chief places among the
powerful members of “the Clothing,”[134] they still dominated over a
helpless people, with scarcely any check save from the jealousy of
their fellow traders. Thus all Canterbury was disturbed in 1507 by
the brewer Crompe who, having been mayor for a year, returned to his
former business on leaving office, and went about busily canvassing
the small retailers, promising that if they would sell Crompe’s beer
he would be their “very good master whatsoever they had to do in the
Court Hall,” and that he would see to it that their pots should not
be carried off on charges of short measure to the Hall. In cases of
this kind remonstrance from the people seems invariably to have been
perfectly useless, and the only complaint recorded in Canterbury was
that of the rival brewers, who met Crompe’s competition by an appeal
to a custom of the town that the mayor should altogether forsake the
victualling trades; in the course of the half century there had been,
it was said, at least six mayors who had “lived like gentlemen” for
the rest of their lives after leaving office, and though this polite
profession allowed them to carry on the business of drapers or cloth
manufacturers, it was proved that one ex-mayor who had been a brewer
as well as draper left off his brewery and never returned to it;
while another who was a baker sold his business, hired his house to
another man, and “lived after as a gentleman.” Crompe however remained
obstinate, contemptuously protesting that the alleged “custom” was
but fifty years old (a bit of special pleading on his part since this
was just the age of the mayoralty itself in Canterbury) and, that the
mayors had ceased to be victuallers out of self-indulgence, and because
they preferred to live at their ease.[135]
At the first victuallers and publicans owed their supremacy in the
town society to the fact that among a people needy and thrifty the
trader’s only way to fortune lay in selling the common necessaries
of life. The great bulk of the people lived poorly. In general
perhaps the master craftsman scarcely earned a higher wage than
his journeymen,[136] and may have often eked out his livelihood by
ploughing and reaping his lot of the common land at one time, while at
another he worked at his occupation with two or three helpers—servants
and apprentices “which be of no great having,” and who were by law
compelled to cut, gather, and bring in the corn[137] if they were
employed in a trade “of which craft or mystery a man hath no great need
in harvest time.” The first speculators who were tempted by visions
of a great public with its exhaustless needs and unfathomable purse
pursued their dreams with the guile of petty schemers. If a dealer
proposed to make his fortune in malt he opened proceedings with the
strictest economies. A penny or a half-penny served as earnest money to
the peasants from whom he bought his corn, and who were told to come
to the house for payment. “And when they come there and think to have
their payment directly, the buyer says that his wife at his house has
gone out, and has taken the key of the room, so that he cannot get at
his money; but that the other must go away and come again soon and
receive his pay. And when he comes back a second time, then the buyer
is not to be found; or else, if he is found, he feigns something else,
by reason whereof the poor men cannot have their pay. And sometimes
while the poor men are waiting for their pay the buyer causes the corn
to be wetted,” and then tells the peasant he may take it away with
him if he does not like the price offered.[138] In the same way the
cloth contractor started with a modest business that needed no outlay
of money, taking the raw material which his customers brought to him
and handing it over to weavers, who on their side provided their own
tools and did the work in their own homes. As he prospered in the world
he may have become the owner of a few looms which he let out to the
weavers he employed; or he perhaps added to his trade the keeping of a
little shop or some small pedlar’s business for the sake of such petty
gains as the law, looking in those days with scant favour on dealers,
might allow. Often hard set to carry on his business, he sought to
help out his poverty by cunning, and the expedients to which he was
driven—the giving out of bad material or short weight to his workmen,
the devices to save a few pence here and there by deducting it on one
pretext or another from payments due, the giving wages in victuals or
needles or mercery or the waste trifles of his little shop—must often
indicate the distracting pressure of immediate need under which he
anticipated the devices of the small working employer of to-day.[139]
But from the earliest times it is evident that there were many of the
more successful traders who rose to a position which, in a humbler
degree, closely resembles that of our modern capitalists and employers,
and that this class constantly tended to increase in wealth and in
numbers. They evidently rivalled in astuteness their brethren of
lowlier fortunes.
“Ne had the grace of guile gone among my ware
It had been unsold this seven year, so me God help,”[140]
the merchant in Piers Ploughman admits frankly. His wife who made the
cloth for sale was diligent in her sphere of economies, ordering her
spinning women to spin the yarn out to great length, and paying for
it by a pound measure that weighed a quarter more than her husband’s
weighing machine—when he weighed true. At the draper’s he was taught
how to stretch out the list of the cloth, or to fasten rich pieces
together with a pack needle, and lengthen them out with pressers till
ten or twelve yards reached to thirteen; and to get rid of his goods
at Winchester and Wayhill fairs he carefully learned to lie and use
false weights. To add to these resources he would go to the Lombards
for lessons in clipping coin and in lending money out at usury.[141]
Weaknesses of remorse troubled him little.
“‘Repentedst thou never?’ quoth Repentance, ‘nor restitution madest?’
‘Yea, once,’ quoth he, ‘I was y harboured with a heap of chapmen,
I arose and rifled their mails when they a’rest were.’
‘That was a rueful restitution,’ quoth Repentance, ‘forsooth!’”
No age, indeed, has a monopoly of clever dealers, and every artifice
practised in earlier days was familiar to the fifteenth century, and
so loudly resented by the consumers, that many people, mistaking
the signs of a public zeal to check abuses for the evidences of a
growing audacity in evil, have discovered in the later middle ages
an accumulating mass of corruption which gradually covered with its
blackness the felicity of a purer age.[142] But whether from “the grace
of guile,” or from sheer ability, the traders prospered on every side.
Langland looking out over all classes of men sees how with them above
all lay the secret of fatness and good cheer:
“And some chose chaffer, they cheved [prospered] the better,
As it seemeth to our sight that such man thriveth.”[143]
The large sums that passed from hand to hand—the imposing debts
registered in the town accounts—the complaints of a master being
in arrears to his apprentice for a sum of £100, or an apprentice to
his master for £138—the leasing out of the customs of a great port
like Southampton to a single merchant—all these things indicate
the new plutocracy that was beginning to appear.[144] Drapers and
clothiers were admitted into the select circles of privilege; in the
towns the rank of “gentleman” became the appropriate reward of a
successful cloth merchant,[145] and even in the county society the
clothier was beginning to oust the old proprietors. The Tames of
Gloucestershire were ordinary dealers who made cloth and traded at
Cirencester till about 1480 when John Tame rented great tracts of land
at Fairford for his flocks of sheep, and in the new industrial centre
which he developed there, wool was collected to feed the Cirencester
manufactory. All over the country he bought at a cheap rate lands
which the ruined nobles could no longer hold; and his enormous wealth
increased yet further under his son Edmund, who took his place among
the “gentry” by becoming High Sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1505,
receiving the reward of knighthood in 1516, and entertaining Henry the
Eighth at his house at Fairford in 1520.[146]
The most wealthy folk in the towns, however, were probably the class
that had grown up with the developement of foreign commerce and the
export trade[147]—the merchants who forsook handicrafts and lived
wholly by “grete aventour.”[148] Their lot was not altogether an easy
one in a society perplexed by the mighty rush of the new commerce,
where men trained in an earlier system looked with a mixture of fear
and dislike on the intrusion of a dubious profession not vouched for
by familiar custom—“covetous people who seek their own advantage,”
and who not only lay under suspicion as men who refused to work, but
were reproached with the destruction of trade by underselling the
goods of English artizans with cheaper foreign wares. The government
was concerned lest by their dealings the merchants should diminish the
stock of gold to be kept in the country;[149] while, on the other hand,
Church and people unanimously saw in bargains with bills and pledges
and sums bearing interest, which were then known as “dry exchange,”
something not to be distinguished from the sin of usury, and called on
the government to declare void all such “damnable bargains grounded in
usury, coloured by the name of new chevesaunce contrary to the law of
natural justice”—“corrupt bargains which be most usually had within
cities and boroughs.”[150] To the delicate conscience of theologian
or social preacher trade could only be defended on the ground that
honestly conducted it made no profit.[151] As for the “poor commons,”
they held that while a man might live by trading, and perhaps make
a modest competence, he had no right to grow rich;[152] his gains
represented to the people the wages of iniquity, and the hungry toiler
sitting over his mess of beans and bacon-rind comforted himself as
best he could with thoughts of the weary ages merchants must at last
count in purgatory, watching kings and knights and bishops pass out of
its gates, while they themselves still lingered to pay the penalty of
great oaths and innumerable taken
“Against clean conscience, for covetyse of winning.”[153]
Meanwhile their way was made difficult on earth, and along the road to
fair or market the wandering merchant or chapman was held to ransom by
the rustics, while the harmless messenger who travelled by his side was
sent merrily on his road.[154]
To the mediæval mind indeed the merchant burdened with his goods was
the very type of the soul laden with sins, and painfully battling its
doubtful way to heaven. He passed from peril to peril in the transport
of the packages on which he had set the sign that distinguished his
wares, the tall cross with shrouds[155] or the flag. No navy protected
his vessels on seas that swarmed with pirates, and companies of ships
as ready for battle as for commerce, set out together, under command
of one of the captains chosen as admiral,[156] to fight their way as
best they could, while at home fear beset the owner on every side.
If a merchant sent his servant over sea to Bruges, or despatched an
apprentice to one of the Baltic ports to gather in the profits due to
him or to carry merchandise, no man might comfort him, and no religious
thought distract his spirit till his messengers returned;[157] and
even when his goods reached port all his experience and cunning were
needed to deal with the exactions of the king, who demanded the first
choice of his wine or precious cargo, or to baffle the rapacity of the
officers of the sheriff, the officers of the staple, the collectors of
customs, the treasurers of the town, the searchers, or the clerk of the
market.[158]
If, however, the risks of the merchant who dared the “great adventure”
increased a hundredfold, so the chances open to courage and skill
became more brilliant,[159] and the triumphant trader became the object
of national pride. London had its hero—
“The son
Of Merchandy, Richard of Whittingdon
That loadstar and chief chosen flower
What hath by him our England of honour?
That pen and paper may not me suffice
Him to describe so high he was of prise.”[160]
A brass in the church of Chipping Camden, dated 1401, commemorates the
“flower of the wool merchants of all England.” In Dartmouth the long
prosperity of the Hawleys[161] was recalled in the local proverb—
“Blow the wind high, blow the wind low:
It bloweth good to Hauley’s hoe.”
There were none who surpassed the merchants of Bristol—men who had
made of their town the chief depot for the wine trade of southern
France, a staple for leather, lead, and tin, the great mart for the
fish of the Channel and for the salt trade of Brittany, whose cloth
and leather were carried to Denmark to be exchanged for stock-fish,
and to France and Spain for wine; who as early as 1420 made their way
by compass to Iceland; whose vessels were the first from England to
enter the Levant; and who when calamity fell on their business by the
loss of Bordeaux, and by the competition of London merchants and the
concentration of commerce in the hands of its Adventurers, turned their
faces to the New World; sending out in 1480, and year after year from
that time, two, three, or four light ships to sail “west of Ireland” in
search of the “Island of Brasylle and the seven Cities,” till in 1496
Cabot started with five vessels on his voyage of discovery, whence he
came back to live in great honour among his fellow-townsmen, dressing
in silk, and known as the “Great Admiral.”[162] The Bristol merchants
of those days lived splendidly in fine houses three stories high, the
grander ones having each its own tower. Underground stretched vast
cellars with groined stone roofs: the ground floor was a warehouse or
shop opening to the street; above this were the parlour and bedroom,
with attics in the gables; while the great hall was built out behind
with a lofty roof of carved timber.[163] In the towers treasures of
plate were stored which rivalled those of the nobles, and the walls
were hung with the richest tapestries, or with at least “counterfeit
Arras.” Perhaps it was some such house which suggested to the poet,
born perhaps in a village “cote,” and who knew Bristol well, the idea
of an abode which might be offered to the Lord of heaven—
“Neither in cot neither in caitiff house was Christ y bore,
But in a burgess house, the best of all the town.”[164]
But the growing luxury of private life is a far less striking feature
of the mediæval borough than the splendid tradition of civic patriotism
and generosity which seems to have prevailed. Burghers who prospered
in the world left their noblest records in the memories of their
public munificence; and there were hundreds of benefactors like
Thomas Elys, the Sandwich draper, who in 1392 founded the hospital
of S. Thomas-the-Martyr, and endowed it with a messuage and 132
acres of land; and within five months after founded the chantry of
S. Thomas-the-Martyr;[165] or like Simon Grendon, three times mayor
of Exeter, who left money to found a hospital for the poor. Gifts to
churches of plate and vestments and books, legacies for chantries or
for priests are too numerous to mention;[166] but there was a steady
tendency among the townspeople to turn their benefactions into very
different channels, and bequeathing their money to the town corporation
instead of a religious body, to devote it directly to secular purposes
and charities of the new fashion—founding free schools, building
walls, repairing bridges, maintaining harbours for their borough, or
leaving a fund for the payment of the ferm rent or certain fixed taxes.
An Abingdon merchant gave a thousand marks towards the bridges over
the two dangerous fords, Borough Ford and Culham Ford, which had to
be built by the Abingdon men “at their own cost and charges, the alms
of the town, and the benevolence of well-disposed persons,” and which
were to make Abingdon the high road from Gloucester to London.[167]
In 1421, when the Friars who owned the sources from which Southampton
had its supply of water could no longer afford to replace the decayed
pipes, a burgher “for the good of his soul” left money for new leaden
pipes sufficient for the whole town as well as for the friars.[168]
An Ipswich burgess gave the very considerable sum of £140 to relieve
his fellow-townsmen of certain yearly tolls;[169] and money was always
forthcoming for gates and walls and market crosses, for the buying of
new charters, the adorning of the Town Hall, or gifts of plate to the
corporation;[170] while as we have seen, a new system of education was
practically founded by the free schools which were so largely endowed
by their liberality.
For the first time in fact since the expulsion of the Jews from England
we find a class of men with money to dispose of; for whatever gold
and silver was available for practical purposes was gathered into
the coffers of the burghers. The noble “wasters” who with gluttony
destroyed what plougher and sower won[171] carried a light purse; while
timid country-folk, terrified by the disorder and insecurity of the
times, unused to commerce and speculation, buried their treasures in
the earth, or laid away bags of “old nobles” with their plate in safe
hiding places,[172] industriously hoarding against the evil day that
haunted their imagination. But among spendthrifts and faint-hearted
economists the burghers came with habits of large winnings and generous
outgoings. They became the usurers and money-lenders of the age. When
the county families had exhausted all possibilities of borrowing from
their cousins and neighbours[173] they had to turn to the shopkeepers
of the nearest town, who seem to have been willing to make special
and private arrangements on better terms than those of the common
usurer.[174] John Paston borrowed from the sheriff of London; Sir
William Parr pawned his plate to a London fishmonger for £120, which
he was to pay over to him in the church of S. Mary-on-the-Hill beside
Billingsgate.[175] From Richard the Second onwards kings borrowed as
readily as their subjects from the drapers and mercers of the towns.
The prosperous merchant in his prouder moments matched his substantial
merits against the haughty pretensions of lords who could go about
begging of burgesses in towns and be “not the better of a bean though
they borrow ever,”[176] and was not without an occasional touch of
disdain for aristocratic poverty. Sir William Plumpton married the
daughter of a citizen and merchant of York, who out of her rich dowry
of houses in Ripon and York was able to leave large fortunes to her
children. One of these wrote a description of a visit she paid to the
house of some aristocratic cousins, Sir John Scrope and his daughter
Mistress Darcy, and of their supercilious bearing. “By my troth I stood
there a large hour, and yet I might neither see Lord nor Lady ... and
yet I had five men in a suit (of livery). There is no such five men in
_his_ house, I dare say.”[177]
But the constant fusion of classes which went on steadily throughout
the century showed how solid were the reasons which drew together the
rich traders of the towns and the half bankrupt families of the county.
Impoverished country gentry were tempted by the money made in business,
just as the “merchants and new gentlemen” hoped to reach distinction
by marriage into landed families. Squires built for themselves houses
in the neighbouring boroughs, turned into traders on their own account,
and commonly took office at last in the municipal government;[178]
while on the other hand successful city merchants were becoming landed
proprietors all over the country, were decorated with the ornaments of
the Bath, and distinguished by fashionable marriages,[179] in spite
of the fretful sarcasms of a “gentle” class consoled in the hard
necessities of poverty by a faint pride. “Merchants or new gentlemen I
deem will proffer large,” Edmund Paston wrote when a marriage of one
of his family was in question; “well I wot if ye depart to London ye
shall have proffers large.”[180] He seems to have preferred that the
Pastons should look out for good connections; and possibly this anxiety
was especially present in the case of the women, for the family seem
to have been rather excited when Margery Paston in 1449 married one
Richard Calle, and went, as John said, “to sell candles and mustard in
Framlingham.”[181] But John Paston felt no hesitation about marrying
the daughter of a London draper. One brother considered the solid
merits of a London mercer’s daughter, and another was very anxious to
secure as his wife the widow of a worsted merchant at Worstead, who
had been left a hundred marks in money, a hundred marks in plate and
furniture, and £10 a year in land.[182] The money side of marriage with
a substantial burgher must have had its attractive side also to the
county ladies. In Nottingham, according to the “custom of the English
borough,” half of the property of the husband passed at his death to
his widow;[183] and a London mercer setting up in business promises in
his contract of marriage “to find surety that if he die she to have
£100 besides her part of his goods after the custom of the city.”[184]
All interests in fact conspired in effacing class distinctions to an
extent unknown in European countries; and in a land where “new men”
had long been recognized among the king’s greatest officials, and
where law created no barriers in social life, all roads to eminence
lay open before the adventurer. Notwithstanding this freedom, however,
the English merchant never rose to the same height of wealth and power
as the great traders of the Continent. We have no such figures as
that of Jacques Cœur,[185] burgher of Bourges, whose ships were to
be seen in England carrying martens and sables and cloth of gold; or
trading up the Rhone; or competing with rivals from Genoa, Venice, and
Catalonia for the coasting trade of the Mediterranean; or sailing to
the Levant, each vessel laden with sixteen or twenty thousand ducats
for trade adventures. Three hundred agents in various towns acted
as his factors in business; and his ambassadors were to be found at
the court of the Egyptian Sultan, or sitting as arbitrators in the
quarrels of political parties in Genoa. “I know,” he writes with frank
consciousness of power, “that the winning of the San Grail cannot
be done without me.”[186] He had bought more than twenty estates or
lordships, had two houses at Paris, two at Tours, four houses and two
hotels at Lyons, houses at Beaucaire, Béziers, Narbonne, S. Pourçain,
Marseilles, Montpellier, Perpignan, and Bourges. In 1450 he had spent
100,000 crowns of gold on the new house he was building out of Roman
remains at Bourges, and it was still unfinished. As Master of the Mint
at Bourges and at Paris, and as the greatest capitalist of his nation,
he practically controlled the whole finances of France; and, indeed,
held in his hands the fortunes of French commerce, and even of the
French nation, for it was his loans to the King that alone enabled
Charles to drive the English out of Normandy. At a time when all
trade was strictly forbidden to the noble class, a grateful monarch,
mindful of timely loans and of jewels redeemed from pawn by his useful
money-lender, ennobled Jacques Cœur, with his wife and children.
His eldest son was Archbishop of Bourges; his brother was Bishop of
Luçon; his nephew and chief factor was Councillor of King Réné, and
Chamberlain of the Duke of Calabria. But just as far as he went beyond
the English trader in his glory and success, so far he exceeded him
in the greatness of his ruin. The same arbitrary power which had set
him above his fellows could as easily be used to cast him down; and
after twenty years of prosperity Jacques Cœur was a State prisoner,
robbed of all his goods, and condemned to perpetual exile. Transforming
banishment into opportunity for new ventures, he set off eastward at
the head of a crusade in 1456 to die on the journey, and find a grave
in Chios.[187]
Beside such a career as this, and measured by the prizes that hung
before the adventurers of the Continent, the life of the English trader
was indeed homely and monotonous. Triumph and ruin alike were on a
modest scale. No great figure stands out from the rest as the associate
of princes or the political agent of kings. No name has come down
to us glorified by a vast ambition, or dignified by an intellectual
inspiration, or made famous for turning the balance of a political
situation. And it is just in this fact that we discover the essential
character of the new commercial society in England. Instead of colossal
fortunes we find a large middle class enjoying everywhere without fear
a solid and substantial comfort. And, perhaps as a consequence of the
widespread diffusion of material prosperity, the republic of traders
had succeeded in developing a marvellous art of organization, with all
its necessary discipline. The triumphs of the English merchants were
won by a solid phalanx of men alike endowed with good average capacity,
possessing extraordinary gifts of endurance and genius for combination,
and moving all together with irresistible determination to their ends.
The uniformity and regularity of their ranks was never broken by the
intrusion of a leader of genius pre-eminent among his fellows; and
whether in towns or in commercial fraternities, the little despotisms
that were set up were despotisms, not of a single master, but of
groups of men who had devised a common policy and by whose voluntary
and united efforts it was sustained. In fact the very spirit of the
people seemed to have entered into the great industrial system which
had sprung up in their midst—a growth free and independent, nourished
out of the common soil from which it came, obedient to its own laws,
expanding by the force of its own nature.
No doubt there was loss as well as gain for a society so constituted.
The special genius of the people, their remoteness from outer
influences, the concentration of the national forces on the pressing
industrial and commercial problems of the moment; all these things
evidently affected the developement of the national life, and tended
in many ways to leave civilization still rude and imperfect. But in
addition to this we are also conscious of the influence of a certain
prevailing mediocrity of station. The horizon of the trading and
industrial classes was bounded by a practical materialism where
intellect had as little play as imagination. Neither the glamour of
ancient Rome nor the romance of a crusade ever touched the fancy of
an English merchant, busy with the problems of the hour. There is no
stately dwelling of those days to show the magnificent conceptions
which might occupy a merchant builder, and a “palace of King John”
at Nottingham,[188] or a turreted house at Bristol, “the best of all
the town,” telling their tale of a comfortable domesticity, contrast
strangely with the famous building of Bourges. So far as we know no
trader or burgher possessed a library; out of the lost past not so much
as a line of Horace found an echo among even the more lettered men of
business till over a hundred years later; not a picture was carried
home from the schools of Italy or the Netherlands; of the mighty
commerce of the world beyond the sea the trader knew everything, of its
culture nothing; and England remained without any distinguished patrons
of the arts or fosterers of learning save those found in bishops’
palaces. And not only was the trader limited on the side of art and
letters; in the hurry of business he had no time and less attention
to give to political problems that lay beyond his own parish or his
industrial domain. Fortunately for his country he reaped an exact
reward. His business prospered, but the work of statesmanship in its
finer sense was given to others; and in the political and commercial
crises through which England had to pass she for a time chose her
leaders from men trained in another and more comprehensive school.
It was only in the next century that the merchant by degrees began
to enter on a new dominion in the world of politics. Under the early
Tudors it became the custom to appoint as representatives of England in
foreign countries traders resident in the place, and though the system
is commonly put down to the niggardliness of the Court, it was more
probably due to the ruler’s sagacity. In England itself it was with
Thomas Cromwell, the clerk of Antwerp, the wool merchant of Middelburg,
scrivener, banker, and attorney, that for the first time the man of
business made his vigorous entry into the Court, struck aside at a
blow the venerable traditions that had gathered there round Church and
State, and from the wreck and ruin of the past proclaimed the triumph
of a new age.[189]