Rivers constituted, in the Middle Ages, the most important means of inland
transport. Most of our oldest towns or cities that were not on the route of
one of the Roman roads were set up alongside or within easy reach of some
tidal or navigable stream in order, among other reasons, that full
advantage could be taken of the transport facilities the waterways offered.
So were monasteries, castles, and baronial halls, while the locating of the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge on the Thames and the Cam respectively
rendered them accessible by sea and river to Scottish and other students
from the north who could hardly have made their way thither by land.[3]
It was, however, only a limited number of inland places that could be
reached by water, and other towns or settlements were wanted. The trading
opportunities of the latter were at first restricted to the packhorse, few
of the roads being then adapted for even the most primitive of agricultural
waggons. Long lines of packhorses, with bales or panniers slung across
their backs, made their way along roads or bridle paths often inadequate to
allow of two strings of loaded horses to pass one another, so that many a
quarrel arose, when two teams met, as to which should go into the mud to
allow the other to pass along the path proper.
Traders sending wool or other commodities by the same route were in the
habit of making up companies in order to secure mutual protection against
robbers, and they armed themselves and their servants as if going to
battle. Like precautions were taken by merchants from the north when they
started on their annual business journeys to {16}London--journeys so full
of peril that they were not begun until the merchant had made his will and
earnestly commended himself to the protection both of St. Botolph and of
his own patron saint. The "commercial travellers" of that day carried their
samples or their wares in a bag lying across their horse's back, thus
qualifying for the designation of "bagmen" by which they were to become
known.
In the Middle Ages everyone rode except the very poor, and they had to be
content to trudge along on foot. Kings and nobles, princes and princesses,
gentlemen and ladies, merchants and bagmen all travelled on horseback.
Women either rode astride until the introduction of side-saddles, in the
fourteenth century, or else rode in pillion fashion.
The main exception to riding on horseback, in the case of ladies or of the
sick or infirm, was the use of litters attached to shafts to which two
horses, one in front and one behind the litter, were harnessed. Sometimes,
also, "passengers" were carried in the panniers of the packhorses, instead
of goods.
Certain main routes, and especially those favoured by pilgrims--such as
that between London and Canterbury--must have been full of animation in
those days; but, speaking generally, no one then travelled except on
business or under the pressure of some strong obligation.
Down to the end of the fourteenth century England was purely an
agricultural country, and her agricultural products were exclusively for
home, if not for local or even domestic consumption, with the one exception
of wool, which was exported in considerable quantities to Flanders and
other lands then dependent mainly on England for the raw materials of their
cloth manufactures. In our own country manufactures had made but little
advance, and they mainly supplied the requirements, in each instance, of a
very limited area.
England was, indeed, in those days, little more than a collection of
isolated communities in which the various householders, more especially in
villages at a distance from any main road or navigable river, had to
provide for their own requirements to a great extent. Of retail shops, such
as are now found in the most remote villages, there were none at all at a
period when the replenishing of stocks would have been impossible by reason
of difficulties in transport; so that while the country as a whole was
mainly agricultural, {17}there were more craftsmen in the villages, and
there was greater skill possessed by individuals in the production of
domestic requirements than would to-day be found among agricultural
populations accustomed to depend on the urban manufacturer or the village
stores for the commodities their forefathers had to make, to raise or to
supply for themselves.
Each family baked its own bread, with flour ground at the village mill from
the wheat or the rye grown on the family's own land or allotment; each
brewed its own ale--then the common beverage at all meals, since tea and
coffee had still to come into vogue; and each grew its own wool or flax,
made its own cloth and clothing, and tanned its own leather. What the
household could not do for itself might still be done by the village
blacksmith or the village carpenter. Alike for ribbons, for foreign spices,
for luxuries in general, and for news of the outer world the household was
mainly dependent on the pedlar, with his stock on his back, or the chapman,
bringing his collection of wares with him on horseback; though even these
welcome visitors might find it impossible to travel along roads and
footpaths reduced by autumn rains or winter snows to the condition of
quagmires.
In these conditions many a village or hamlet became isolated until the
roads were again available for traffic, and rural households prepared for
the winter as they would have taken precautions against an impending siege.
Most of the meat likely to be required would be killed off in the late
autumn and salted down--salt being one of the few absolute necessities for
which the mediæval household was dependent on the outside world; while
families which could not afford to kill for themselves would purchase an
animal in common and share the meat. Stores of wheat, barley and malt were
laid in; honey was put on the shelves to take the place of the sugar then
almost unknown outside the large towns; logs were collected for fuel and
rushes for the floors; and wool and flax were brought in to provide
occupation for the women of the household. In the way of necessaries the
provision made by each self-dependent family, or, at least, by each
self-contained community, was thus practically complete--save in the one
important item of fresh vegetables, the lack of which, coupled with the
consumption of so much salt meat, was a frequent source of scurvy.
Millstones for {18}the village mill might, like the salt, have to be
brought in from elsewhere; but otherwise the villagers had small concern
with what went on in the great world.
Such trading relations as the average village had with English markets or
with foreign traders were almost exclusively in the hands of the lord of
the manor, one of whose rights--and one not without significance, from our
present point of view--it was to call upon those who held land under him,
whether as free men or as serfs, to do all his carting for him. This was a
condition on which both villeins and cottars had their holdings; and
though, in course of time, the lord of the manor might relieve his people
of most of the obligations devolving upon them, this particular
responsibility still generally remained. "Instances of the commutation of
the whole of the services," says W. J. Ashley, in the account of the
manorial system which he gives in his "Introduction to English Economic
History and Theory," "occur occasionally as early as 1240 in manors where
the demesne was wholly left to tenants. The service with which the lord
could least easily dispense seems to have been that of carting; and so in
one case we find the entry as to the villeins, 'Whether they pay rent or no
they shall cart.'"
To the lord of the manor, at least, the difficulties of road transport,
whether in getting his surplus commodities to market or otherwise, must
have appeared much less serious when he was thus able to call on his
tenants to do his cartage.
In the towns the isolation may not have been so great as in the villages;
but the urban trading and industrial conditions nevertheless assumed a
character which could only have been possible when, owing to defective
communications, there was comparatively little movement and competition in
regard either to manufactures (such as they were) or to workers.
The period of internal peace and order which followed the Norman Conquest
led, as Ashley has shown, to the rise in town after town of the merchant
guild--an institution the purpose of which was to unite into a society all
those who carried on a certain trade, in order, not only to assure for them
the maintenance of their rights and privileges, but also to obtain for them
an actual monopoly of the particular business in which they were
interested. Such monopoly they claimed against other traders in the same
town who had not entered {19}into the combination, and still more so
against traders in other towns. The latter they regarded as "foreigners"
equally with the traders from Flanders and elsewhere.
The merchant guilds were found in all considerable towns in the eleventh
century, and they were followed, a century later, by craft guilds which
aimed, in turn, at securing a monopoly of employment for their own
particular members.
Coupled with the guilds there was much local regulation of the prices and
qualities of commodities through the setting-up of such institutions as the
"assize" of ale, of bread and of cloth; while the justices had, in
addition, considerable powers in regard to fixing the rates of wages and
the general conditions of labour.
All this system of highly-organised Protection, not so much for the country
as a whole as for each and every individual town in the country, might
serve in comparatively isolated communities; but it could not prevail
against increased intercourse, the growing competition of developing
industries, a broader area of distribution for commodities made in greater
volume, and a wider demand for foreign supplies. It was thus doomed to
extinction as these new conditions developed; but it nevertheless exercised
an important influence on our national advancement, since it was the
impulse of corporate unity, fostered by the merchant guilds, and
strengthened by the system of manorial courts for the enforcement of the
local laws and customs in vogue in each separate manor before the common
law of the land was established, that led to so many English towns
securing, from King or overlord--and notably in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, when the influence of the merchant guilds was especially
great--those charters which so powerfully stimulated the growth of the
great towns, of English citizenship, of individual freedom, and of national
prosperity. Ashley well says, in this connection:--
"Wide as were the differences between a civic republic of Italy, or an
imperial city of Germany with its subject territory, and a little English
market town, there was an underlying similarity of ideas and purposes. Each
was a body of burghers who identified the right to carry on an independent
trading or industrial occupation with the right of burgess-ship; who
imposed restrictions on the acquisition of citizenship, with the object of
protecting the interests of those already enjoying {20}it; who acted
together by market regulation and intermunicipal negotiation to secure
every advantage they could over rival boroughs; who deemed it meet that
every occupation should have its own organisation and its own
representation in the governing authority, and who allowed and expected
their magistrates to carry out a searching system of industrial
supervision. Municipal magistracy was not yet an affair of routine, bound
hand and foot by the laws of the State."
The general trade of the country in the Middle Ages was conducted mainly
through markets and fairs.
Every town had its market and fixed market day, and such market served the
purpose of bringing in the surplus produce of the surrounding agricultural
district, the area of supply depending, no doubt, on the distance for which
the state of the roads and the facilities for transport on them would allow
of commodities being brought.
Held, as a rule, annually or half-yearly, fairs assumed much more important
proportions than the (generally) weekly local markets. It was to the fairs
that traders both from distant counties and from foreign countries brought
wares and products not otherwise obtainable; and it was at the fairs that
the foreign merchants, more especially, bought up the large quantities of
wool which were to form their return cargoes. Whereas the business done at
the local markets was mainly retail, that done at the fairs was, to a great
extent, wholesale, and the latter represented the bulk of such transactions
as would now be done on the public exchanges or in the private warehouses
of London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and other leading commercial
centres.
Fairs were essentially the outcome of defective means of communication.
Going back in their origin to the days of ancient Greece, they have been
found in most countries in the earlier stages of society, or under
conditions which have not allowed of (1) a ready distribution of
commodities, (2) sufficiently advanced manufactures, or (3) the subdivision
of trade over an adequately wide area. Fairs in England began to decay in
exact proportion as communications and manufactures improved and retail
trade expanded; so that to-day the survivals are either exclusively cattle
fairs, sheep fairs, horse fairs, cheese fairs, and so on, or else are
little more than {21}pleasure fairs, with gingerbread stalls, shows and
roundabouts for their chief attractions--mere reminiscences of old
institutions which, in bygone days, were of supreme commercial importance.
They were, also, greatly influenced by religious festivals, whether in
ancient Greece or in Europe. In Britain itself the commemoration of saints'
days by the monasteries, the dedication festivals of churches or
cathedrals, and the visitation of shrines by pilgrims brought together
crowds of people whose assembling offered good opportunities for the
opening up with them of a trade in commodities which they, in turn, might
otherwise have some difficulty in procuring. It was, indeed, to the
advantage of the Church to offer or to encourage the offering of such
facilities, not only because there would thus be a greater inducement to
people to come to the festivals or to visit the shrines, but also because
when the fair was held on land belonging to the Church or connected with
religious buildings there might be a substantial revenue gained from the
tolls and charges paid by the traders. At one time the fairs were even held
in churchyards; but this practice was prohibited in the 13th year of Edward
I., and thenceforward they were held on open spaces, where stalls and tents
could be erected for the accommodation of the goods on sale and of the
persons who had brought them, various amusements being added, or
encouraged, by way of affording further attractions. The land occupied
might be that of the lord of the manor, but the fairs still continued to be
held chiefly on Saints' days or on the occasion of Church festivals, the
actual dates being generally so fixed as to allow of the foreign or other
traders attending them to arrange a circuit. The time of year preferred for
the holding of fairs was either the autumn, when people whose wants were
not wholly met by pedlar or chapman would be providing against the stoppage
of all traffic along the roads during the winter; or the spring, when they
would want to replenish their depleted stocks. The localities mostly
favoured were towns either on navigable rivers, giving access to a good
stretch of country, or at the entrance to valleys whose inhabitants would
be especially isolated during the winter months by their impassable roads
and mountain tracks.
In course of time the fairs became, as shown by Giles Jacob, in his "Law
Dictionary" (4th edition, 1809), "a matter of {22}universal concern to the
commonwealth," as well as a valuable monetary consideration to those who
had the right to collect the tolls; and they were, in consequence,
subjected to close regulation. No person could hold a fair "unless by grant
from the King, or by prescription which supposes such grant"; the time
during which it could be kept open was announced by proclamation, and
rigidly adhered to; "just weight and measure" was enforced, and a "clerk of
the fair" was appointed to mark the weights.
On the other hand every encouragement was offered to traders to attend the
fairs. "Any citizen of London," says Jacob, "may carry his goods or
merchandise to any fair or market at his pleasure." Mounted guards were, in
some instances, provided on the main routes leading to the fair, in order
to protect the traders from attack by robbers. Tolls were to be paid to the
lord of the manor or other owner of the land on which a fair was held under
a special grant; but if the tolls charged were "outrageous and excessive"
(to quote again from Jacob), the grant of the right to levy toll became
void, and the fair was thenceforth a "free" one. It was further laid down
that persons going to a fair should be "privileged from being molested or
arrested in it for any other debt or contract than what was contracted in
the same, or at least, was promised to be paid there."
An especially curious feature of these old fairs was the so-called "Court
of Pie Powder"--this being the accepted English rendering, in those days,
of "pied poudré"--or "The Court of Dusty Feet." The court was one of
summary jurisdiction, at which questions affecting pedlars or other
(presumably) dusty-footed traders and their patrons, or matters relating to
"the redress of disorders," could be decided by a properly constituted
authority during the period of the holding of the fair in which such
questions or matters arose.