"The original Company of the Merchant Adventurers carried on
trade chiefly with the Netherlands. Their principal mart was
at first Bruges, whence it was removed to Antwerp early in the
fifteenth century. In distinction from the staplers, who dealt
in certain raw materials, the Merchant Adventurers had the
monopoly of exporting certain manufactured articles,
especially cloths. Though of national importance, they
constituted a strictly private company, and not, like the
staplers, an administrative organ of the British government.
The former were all subjects of the English crown; the
staplers were made up of aliens as well as Englishmen. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequent dissensions broke
out between these two bodies regarding the exportation of
cloth. To carry on foreign trade freely in wool as well as in
cloth, a merchant had to join both companies. Much obscurity
hangs over the early history of the Merchant Adventurers. They
claimed' that John, Duke of Brabant, founded their society in
1216 or 1248, and that it originally bore the name of the
Brotherhood of St. Thomas à Becket. But it could scarcely have
existed in its later form before the reign of Edward III.,
when the cloth industry began to flourish in England. The
earliest charter granted to it as an organized association
dates from the year 1407. Their powers were greatly increased
by Henry VII. The soul of this society, and perhaps its
original nucleus, was the Mercers' Company of London. …
Though the most influential Merchant Adventurers resided in
London, there were many in other English towns. … The
contrast between the old Gild Merchant and the Company of
Merchant Adventurers is striking. The one had to do wholly
with foreign trade, and its members were forbidden to exercise
a manual occupation or even to be retail shopkeepers; the
other consisted mainly of small shopkeepers and artisans. The
line of demarkation between merchants and manual craftsmen was
sharply drawn by the second half of the sixteenth century, the
term 'merchant' having already acquired its modern
signification as a dealer on an extensive scale. Besides the
Company of Merchant Adventurers trading to the Low
Countries—which during the eighteenth century was called the
Hamburg Company—various new Companies of Merchant Adventurers
trading to other lands arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, especially during the reigns of Elizabeth and her
immediate successors. Among them were the Russian or Muscovy
Company, the Turkey or Levant Company, the Guinea Company, the
Morocco Company, the Eastland Company, the Spanish Company,
and the East India Company, the last-mentioned being the most
powerful of them all."
_C. Gross,
The Gild Merchant,
pages 148-156._