THE MERCHANT AND HIS MARK
In the course of the preceding chapter reference was made to the
illiteracy of our ancestors in its bearing upon trade usages. In the
present chapter we propose to supplement this allusion by drawing
attention to a feature of commercial life which was certainly influenced
by, if not actually due to, the prevailing lack of education. The
combination "Merchants' Marks" is so familiar as to suggest that such
marks were used by merchants alone. This was by no means the case.
Farmers also had their marks. "When a yeoman," says Mr. Williams,
"affixed a mark to a deed, he drew a signum by which his land, cattle,
etc., were identified"; and in Sussex, we are informed, the post-mortem
inquisitions from the time of Henry VII. to that of Charles II. exhibit
a large number of yeomen's marks--"other than crosses"--which were
employed as signatures. Masons' and printers' marks are further
varieties of the same mode of identification.
All these are distinctively trade uses, but the astonishing thing is
that, in Germany at any rate, marks were affixed, in conjunction with
regular signatures, by ecclesiastical dignitaries and secular nobles,
probably as an additional guarantee. They were also used on shields, and
in England were frequently impaled with the owners' arms.
Marks, then, were in no sense the exclusive characteristic of the
merchant class; and yet, owing to the fact that these devices were
necessarily more used by traders, they may be considered on the whole as
belonging to their domain. As we have seen, every baker in the City was
obliged to stamp his loaves with his own proper mark; and in other
branches of commerce men would value their mark as a means of
advertisement. As persons engaged in commerce were commonly debarred
from the privilege of armorial bearings, marks were freely employed not
only in relation to special callings, but also for ornamentation or
commemoration in any and every sphere in which merchants desired to
leave the impress of their personality and interest. They were to be
found on the fronts of houses, over the fireplace in halls, on seals, on
sepulchral slabs and monumental brasses, and on painted windows. In his
description of a Dominican convent--printed in full in Prof. Skeat's
"Specimens of English Literature" (a.d. 1394-1579)--the author of "Peres
the Ploughman's Crede" speaks as follows:
Than I munt me forth the minster to knowen
And awayted a wone wonderly well y-built,
With arches on every hall & belliche [beautifully] y-carven
With crochets on corners, with knots of gold,
Wide windows y-wrought, y-written full thick,
Shyning with shapen shields to shewen about,
With _marks of merchants_ y-meddled between,
Mo than twenty and two, twice y-numbered;
There is none herald that hath half such a roll,
Right as a ragman hath reckoned them new.
Another circumstance has to be noted--namely, that merchants' marks were
entirely distinct from shop signs, such as that of the Golden Fleece,
which, though serving the same purpose of aiding or enlightening the
unlearned, were more pictorial in character. Dr. Barrington, in his
"Lectures on Heraldry," defines merchants' marks as "various fanciful
forms, distorted representations of _initials of names_," which, he
says, were "placed upon articles of merchandise, because armorial
ensigns could not have been so placed without debasement."
To those merchants who had no arms--and they were doubtless the vast
majority--the mark served as a substitute, and was regarded with the
same feelings of pride and attachment as the ensigns of the nobility and
gentry. But unquestionably its chief value was strictly commercial, as
is proved by an instance of litigation in the twenty-second year of
Queen Elizabeth's reign, which is thus narrated by Mr. Justice
Doddridge: "An action was brought upon the case in common pleas by a
clothier, that, whereas he had gained reputation by the making of his
cloth, by reason whereof he had great utterance to his great benefit and
profit, and that he used to set his mark to his cloth, another clothier,
perceiving it, used the same mark to his ill-made cloth on purpose to
deceive him, and it was resolved that an action did lie."
Merchants' marks appear to have been especially common in towns
depending on the manufacture of wool. It so happens that one of those
towns was that in the immediate neighbourhood of which these chapters
were written; and, agreeably to what has been stated, the Church of St.
Peter, Tiverton, which owed much to the munificence of the old
merchants, carries a number of such marks. East Anglia is particularly
rich in such marks, as is shown by Mr. W. C. Ewing's papers in the
"Transactions of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society" (vol.
iii.). Mr. Dawson Turner, in his Historical Introduction to Colman's
"Engravings of Sepulchral Brasses in Norfolk and Suffolk," after stating
that merchants or burgesses were probably the only classes except the
military that were represented on monuments, goes on to observe that
"these are chiefly to be found in borough towns or the parochial
churches of large commercial counties where the woollen manufacture
flourished." And, as we have pointed out, the merchant's mark very often
accompanied him to his grave.
We have now reached the borderland, where from urban customs we pass to
those of the country; and it will form a natural transition if we
conclude the chapter and the section with some remarks on the rural use
of marks, which is still common in regard to stock. In this Connexion
they are generally styled yeomen's marks; and, from the circumstances of
the case, it seems certain that the adoption of such symbols took place
on the farm long before they were employed on the mart. The point has
been raised whether so-called "pictorial marks" are, and have always
been, nothing more than rude drawings of familiar objects. Mr. J. H.
Scott has dealt with this problem in an examination of Homeyer's theory
that marks were originally runic forms, and he expresses the opinion
that, assuming this to be true of certain types of marks, "they lost
their character at an early period and were regarded merely as signs or
symbols not as letters of an alphabet." As regards "pictorial marks," he
holds that the similarity to various objects is accidental. If so, this
is rather in favour of Homeyer's derivation of marks from runes, the
forms in some cases being identical. Moreover, as Homeyer notes, "signa"
for identifying cattle, horses, trees, clothes, and as boundary marks,
are referred to in the Lex Salica, the Edictum Rotharis, and the
Anglo-Saxon laws, so that we have here something like a pedigree of the
custom.
RURAL