THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
THE history of the fifteenth century has long remained but little
known. It is very generally regarded as the “profoundly tragic close
of a great epoch,” and the historian looks back to the golden age of
the thirteenth century as the glorious time of English and of European
history—the culminating period to which all the foregoing generations
slowly mounted, and from whose heights the later sons of men as slowly
and surely declined and went backward. The period of this backsliding
is seen as an age altogether wanting in picturesqueness and moral
elevation, sunk in materialism, sordid and vulgar, a time of confused
and indiscriminate corruption, where “heart and treasure” were linked
in ignoble union, and the political demoralization of the people was
only matched by their private degradation; and the fifteenth century
has long borne the heavy burden of its evil reputation, while its
records have been left comparatively undisturbed by inquisitive
search.[41] For hackneyed as the period of the Wars of the Roses
may seem to the superficial reader, no student has yet adequately
studied the secret of the age in which the great revolutions of the
next century were being prepared—the age which made possible for
England the revival of letters and the reformation, which founded her
commercial greatness, which revolutionized her industrial system, which
cast away the last bonds of feudalism and laid the foundations of the
modern State.
It is indeed true that no great man has made this century illustrious.
No general or warrior of the first rank distinguished wars which were
born in iniquity, and kept alive by greed. No gifted statesman left
his mark on the government or administration of the country. Among
the people themselves interest in national affairs seemed dead; they
made revolutions and set up new kings as they were bidden to do, and
kept stores of badges of the houses of York and Lancaster alike, to be
ready with either sign of loyalty as the fortunes of war turned this
way or that;[42] they forgot the stirring political ballads of former
generations and sang moral ditties instead. In place of the mighty
theologians of an earlier time there came commentators and interpreters
of little significance. Nor did a single religious leader or reformer
or scholar arise to stir the popular thought or conscience: Lollardy
with its questionings and criticisms was still heard of from time to
time in the bigger towns and manufacturing districts, but the people
generally acquiesced in the demands of the authorized religion and
discipline. Literature was well nigh lost as well as the graver kinds
of learning. In the beginning of the century one or two nobles had
collected libraries and brought tidings of the Renascence in Italy,
and later on half a dozen scholars made their way to the Italian
universities; but there was neither poet nor scholar to follow the
masters of an earlier age. In the fifteenth century the very language
in which Chaucer wrote was but half intelligible to the mass of the
people, and his tales must have been unknown out of court circles.
Men were content with rhymes innumerable—on morals, on manners, on
heraldry, on the art of dining, on the rules of thrift and prosperity;
and in all our history there is no time so barren in literature as the
reign of Henry the Sixth.
Even in a democratic age it is not easy at first sight to recognise
where the interest lies of an epoch destitute of all that has made
other times illustrious, and whose significance seems to shrink
in comparison with the struggles and victories of the ages that
preceded, and the splendid achievements of the age that followed
it; and historians finding themselves face to face with so dreary a
century may have been tempted to give it a character of its own for
grossness, for cruelty, for any distinction whatever which will at
least take it out of the range of the absolutely commonplace. But
the distinguishing mark of the fifteenth century lies neither in its
crime nor in its vulgarity. We must judge this period in fact as a
time of transition in many ways extraordinarily like our own. In the
centuries between the Great Plague and the Reformation, just as in the
nineteenth century, the real significance of our history lies in the
advent of a new class to wealth and power, as the result of a great
industrial revolution. The breaking up of an old aristocratic order,
and the creation of a middle class to be brought into politics and
even into “society,” the enormous increase of material wealth, the new
relation of the various ranks to one another, and the failure under
altered circumstances of traditional rules of conduct, the varied
careers suddenly opened to talent or ambition, the reproach for the
first time attached to incompetence and poverty, the vulgarization of
literature and morality which followed on their adaptation to a class
as yet untrained to criticism or comparison, the extension of a habit
of religion closely related to a plain morality—all these things
recall to us many of the experiences of our own days, and may make us
more tolerant of the unpicturesque and Philistine element whether then
or now. If the chief centre of interest had once lain in the offices
of the royal palace it might now be seen rather in the new Town Hall
which was being built in almost every borough in England, or in the
office where the mayor’s clerk was busied in making his copies of Magna
Charta or extracts of Domesday, or in translating from the old French
the customs and ordinances of the town, or in hunting up the rolls
of the itinerant judges; or over the country-side where estates were
being sold and bought with the development of a provincial instead of
a national nobility and the rise of new men to possess the old acres,
and where the quickening of the struggle for life was reflected in the
stormy conflicts and significant concessions of the manor courts. The
new middle class of shopkeepers and farmers had indeed no chroniclers
and no flatterers, for it was long before men could realise how rapidly
and completely the weight of influence was being transferred from the
old governing class to the mass of the governed, and chroniclers still
went on mechanically retailing events now comparatively trivial and
unimportant. It was not till the next century that they turned from
spinning out these worthless annals to a discussion of matters really
important which had by that time forced themselves on the dullest
apprehension.
The whole interest of the fifteenth century thus lies in the life
of very common folk—of artisans and tradesmen in the towns, and in
country parts of the farmers, the tenants of the new grazing lands,
the stewards and bailiffs and armies of dependents on the great
estates, who did all the work at home while the lord was away at
the wars or at the halls of Westminster. If the century produced no
great administrator or statesman, it did create a whole class of
men throughout the country trained in practical affairs, doing an
admirable work of local government, active, enterprising, resolute,
public-spirited, disciplined in the best of all schools for political
service. If there was no great writer, the new world of the middle
class was patiently teaching itself, founding its schools, learning its
primary rules of etiquette and its simple maxims of morals, reading its
manuals of agriculture or law or history, practising its Latin rhymes,
and building up in its own fashion from new beginnings a learning
which the aristocratic class had been too proud, too indifferent, or
too remote to hand on to it.[43] If no religious revival shook the
country, the new society was solving in its own way the problem of
helping the sick and poor;[44] it was earnest in religious observance,
it was framing its English litanies and devising its own plans for
teaching the people an intelligent devotion.[45] The burghers began
to perform in the national economy the work which in earlier centuries
had been performed by the great monastic societies. The extension of
trade and manufacture had fallen into their hands; they were busied
in the gathering together and storing up of the national wealth.[46]
They gave to labour a new dignity in social life and a new place in
the national councils. From the towns came a perpetual protest against
war and disorder; throughout the troubles of the fifteenth century,
civil war, court intrigues, the tyranny of usurpers and the plots of
the vanquished, local raids of private revenge or of land hunger,
their influence was always thrown on the side of peace and quietness.
Art found in them patrons; illuminators and painters, architects and
bell-founders, the makers of delicate shrines and images,[47] engravers
of seals, goldsmiths and workers in brass, whether of English birth or
brought from foreign parts, prospered within their gates; while their
harpers and minstrels doubtless had a part in the musical developement
of the country at a time when English artists set the fashion of the
best music as far as the court of Burgundy.[48] They laid in fact the
foundations of a new English society. The men of the New Learning, the
men of the Reformation, the men who revealed the New World, were men
who had been formed under the influences of the fifteenth century.
All this activity was the outcome of the great industrial and
commercial revolution which was passing over the country. Until the
middle of the fourteenth century, England had been to Europe what
Australia is to-day—a country known only as the provider of the raw
material of commerce.[49] At the close of the fifteenth century she had
taken her place as a centre of manufactures, whose finished goods were
distributed in all the great markets of the Mediterranean and of the
Northern Seas. It is no wonder that during a change which transformed
the country from a land of agricultural villages into a land of
manufacturing towns, and opened for her the mighty struggle to become
the carrier of the world’s commerce, the whole energy of her people,
thrown into a single channel, should be absorbed in accomplishing their
enormous task. Every one was honestly busy in learning either how to
make or how to sell, and in conquering the difficulties that beset
traders as they strove to push their way into the world’s market on
equal or, if possible, more than equal terms with competitors who had
long held unquestioned supremacy.
From the twelfth century wool had been the one great export of England,
and the one great source of wealth for nobles, churchmen, farmers, even
kings. So important was its sale that statesmen very early saw the
necessity of securing for the national Exchequer a share in the profits
of the main national trade; and in aid of the royal treasury they
devised in the first half of the thirteenth century a system which was
quite peculiar to England, the organization of the Staple.[50]
The Staple was an appointed place to which alone certain goods might be
brought for sale, raw materials such as wool, wool-fells, skins, lead,
or tin, of which wool was far the most important. Fixed for the first
hundred years in some foreign town, generally in Bruges, it was shifted
from place to place by Edward the Third, who from 1353 made various
experiments as to establishing it in England; but finally about 1390,
Calais was decided upon as the most advantageous spot. Thither every
dealer had to carry his wares (unless he was ready to pay a high tax to
the Crown, or to buy at the King’s price a license for free trading);
and he must carry them along certain appointed routes only—from
Lincoln by St. Botolph, from Norwich by Yarmouth, from Westminster by
London, from Canterbury by Sandwich, from Winchester by Southampton,
as the government in its wisdom might decide. In a kind of secondary
sense these places where the wool was gathered for export thus became
towns of the Staple, and certain officers, Mayors and Aldermen of the
Staple were appointed to control their trade. The merchants’ goods,
first weighed at the point of departure, must be weighed again at the
port where they were shipped, and sealed with the seal of the Mayor
of the Staple, while to check fraud there was an elaborate system of
official papers to be sent to the Treasury in London and to the Staple
in Calais for every such transaction of weighing and toll-taking.
Every possible precaution was taken to maintain the position of the
merchants in the European market by rules which practically forced the
wool into the hands of foreign and not native buyers, so that English
traders complained that their interests were sacrificed to courting
the patronage of the Continent. If, for example, the chief Staple town
was for any reason moved from over sea to England, native dealers were
absolutely forbidden to export any Staple wares, so that foreigners
might be forced or encouraged to come and take part in the trade.
Foreign dealers were allowed to vote along with them for officials, and
so late as 1445 the English merchants vainly prayed that no Stapler
might take part in election of Mayor or Constable of the Staple unless
he had ten sacks of wool cocketed at Calais.
In thus forcing all the export trade of the country through one
narrow channel the first purpose of the State was merely to provide
a convenient method of gathering customs into the Exchequer; and in
course of time it further discovered that this trading system might
be used as a weapon against foreign peoples in case of quarrel. But
the very last object of the Staple organization was the convenience of
the traders. Nor had the merchants themselves any illusions in this
respect. To them the Staple seemed at its beginning contrary to the
liberties of Magna Charta;[51] and a long experience taught them how
its provisions might keep them shut in between the rapacity of those
in authority and the hatred of the farmers who produced the wool which
they sold.[52] They could however still wring a rich advantage out
of superficial calamity—the advantage to be found in monopoly and
corporate privilege—and this was developed with consummate art. The
wool trade gathered into their hands was hedged round with monopolies
and regulations, protected by fixed prices and times of sale. The
concourse of customers at Calais was diligently maintained; no buyer
was allowed to order his work through a commission house, so that
traders might be forced to come to the market in person and do their
business. By the charter of Edward the Third a Mayor and twenty-four
Aldermen chosen by the whole body of merchants absolutely ruled the
Staple trade, appointed officers, supervised markets, made regulations
as to the treatment of foreigners, the duties of innkeepers, or the
general conduct of business, and administered justice according
to the Law Merchant with a sworn jury of foreigners or English or
both together, according to the case to be tried.[53] And since the
governing body had general control beyond Calais itself over all
English merchants, not only in Bruges but throughout Flanders, while
they governed in England through their local officers, the power of the
Staple extended far and wide and brought all the scattered merchants
under one general organization.[54] Formidable through their wealth and
power, they could command the support of English kings and Burgundian
dukes against rival traders. The profits to be made at Calais tempted
the landowners at home,[55] and all who were wealthy enough to pay
the required dues and fees flocked into their body, till the great
association at last included all rich wool-growers and shut out only
the poor farmers and people of no account in the country. Their
monopoly was so complete, and their discipline so effective, that they
could absolutely dictate prices; and a judicious pooling system took
away any temptation on the part of the members to break the ranks.[56]
At last against the original intentions of legislators they even got
into their own hands the carrying of the export trade, and so long as
wool remained the chief export of England 80 per cent. of this trade
passed through their hands.
But so far as the State was concerned all this elaborate system for the
protection of the wool-trade had simply grown out of the fundamental
conception of the Staple as a fruitful source of supply for the royal
treasury; and this theory was carried out to its logical issues. A
fixed sum was demanded from the merchants year by year which they had
to pay whether their trade was good or bad; while in their mercantile
dealings they were terribly hampered by a host of regulations issued as
to the mint in Calais, and invented by financiers who from the middle
of the fourteenth century were haunted by alarms as to a possible
dearth of gold and silver, and arbitrarily used the Staple as a means
of forcing the flow of precious metal into England.[57] Nor was the
drain of taxation at all times legal and regular. Merchants paid money
down for the protection and favour of the king in reiterated loans or
gifts, whether free or forced. The Captain of Calais, as head of the
only standing army which the English kings then possessed, advanced a
kind of public claim on the Staplers’ wealth for the security of his
soldiers’ pay; and the merchants had many a time good reason to tremble
for their wool, and might cry in vain for redress if their whole store
was confiscated to pay the soldiers’ arrears of two or three years, or
if militant lords “shifted with the Staple of Calais” for £18,000 or so
for costs of war.[58]
All these burdens however could be borne so long as business prospered
in their hands. If a Parliament like that of 1258, or a great statesman
like Simon de Montfort, urged that England should herself become an
independent and self-supporting centre of manufactures, these seemed
as idle words to monopolists dealing in wool with command of the
world’s market, who saw no need to forsake their easy path to wealth
at a moment when the growth of manufactures in the Netherlands opened
a vast market for English produce. In the time of Edward the Third it
is said that 30,000 sacks of wool were shipped every year from English
ports.[59]
But before the reign of Edward had closed, the exporters of wool
knew that they had fallen on evil days. Trade began to slip from
their grasp. The revenue they paid from their profits to the King’s
Exchequer fell in the few years from 1391 to 1411 to one-fifth of its
former value,[60] and was still calculated at this melancholy fifth in
1449. Instead of the thirty thousand sacks which they yearly counted in
the fourteenth century, they could not at the close of the fifteenth
century collect more than 8,624 sacks, and in the last year of Henry
the Eighth even this number had shrunk to under 5,000.[61] Taxes which
lay comparatively lightly on them in happy days, fell as an intolerable
burden when their warehouses lay empty, and their ranks were thinned
by bankruptcy and desertion.[62] At the very moment when all England
was being rapidly turned into a land of sheep pastures for the endless
production of wool, the great company of the wool traders was finally
and irrevocably ruined.
The wool, in fact, was being sold at home, and out of the ruin of the
merchants of the Staple the cloth-makers sucked no small advantage.
For the great revolution in trade was rapidly being completed—the
revolution by which England was turned from being a country whose
chief business was exporting wool into a country whose chief business
was exporting cloth.[63] The people had indeed long manufactured
rough cloth for common use.[64] But during the reigns of the three
Edwards the idea had constantly gained ground that by working up their
own raw material[65] Englishmen might easily retain for themselves
the profits which foreigners had till now secured, and manufacturers
were undoubtedly doing a considerable export trade in the middle of
the fifteenth century.[66] Half a century later, in 1411, the very
year when the subsidy on wool fell to a fifth, broad-cloths are first
mentioned in an Act of Parliament; and from this time they became
the chief cloths of trade. As though they had been for a while half
forgotten by the Exchequer, the exporters of cloth found themselves
free from all subsidy tax and only obliged to pay to the indifferent
authorities tolls that amounted to less than two per cent. for natives
and merchants of the Hanse occupied in the trade, and less than eight
per cent. for aliens; and complacently measured this sum with the tolls
of the Staplers—the thirty-three per cent. paid by merchants of the
Staple, or seventy per cent. by all other traders,[67] a tax which
perhaps explains why in 1424 Parliament had to forbid the carrying
of sheep over sea to shear them there. The manufacturers, too, made
alliance with the discontented wool-growers. A farmer who could
sell his wool next door, did not trouble to send it with vexatious
formalities over sea to Calais; and in course of time the cloth
merchants insisted upon laws which gave to them during certain seasons
the first choice of the wool before the Staplers were even allowed to
enter the market.[68]
Under these circumstances trade grew apace. Carracks of Genoa carried
English cloths to the shores of the Black Sea; galleys of Venice
fetched them to the pits of the Venetian dyers; merchants of the
Hanseatic League sold them in the fair of Novgorod; English traders
travelled with them to the inland markets of Prussia, and gave them in
exchange for casks of herrings in Denmark. At the close of the century
the English Merchant Adventurers exported about 60,000 pieces of cloth
yearly; and in the beginning of the sixteenth century the cloth dealers
boasted that never before in the memory of man was so much cloth sold
out of England. The 60,000 bales rose in 1509 to 84,789 pieces, and
in 1547 to 122,354;[69] and the dealers claimed further gratitude
and admiration of their country for the fact that they had “by their
industry” raised by a fifth the price demanded from the foreigner.[70]
Meanwhile the manufacturer was also getting hold of the home market, as
the great religious corporations and landowners who had once provided
on their own estates for all local wants recognized the new condition
of things, and instead of making cloth at home as of old, sent every
year far and wide across the country to the great clothing centres to
buy material for the household liveries,[71] seeking from one place the
coarse striped cloth of the old pattern and from another the goods of
the new fashion. The fine black copes of worsted were favourite gifts
of benefactors to churches, and a patriotic Norfolk gentleman, after
seeing a “tippet of fine worsted which is almost like silk,” decided to
“make his doublet all worsted for worship of Norfolk.”[72]
Nor was the growth of manufacturing enterprise confined to the making
of cloth. For a couple of centuries the iron trade had made of the
Weald the Black Country of those days, and had stirred the Forest of
Dean with the din of its seventy-two moveable forges; and now, what
with the metals and what with the coal of the country, “the merchants
of England maintain and say that the kingdom is of greater value under
the land than it is above.”[73] In the reign of Edward the Fourth when
there was a riot among the Mendip miners, and the Lord Chief Justice
went down to “set a concord and peace upon the forest of Mendip,” it is
said ten thousand people appeared before him at the place of trial.[74]
But for all this miners could no longer keep pace with the demands of
the country, now that new industries on all sides required metal that
had once gone to supply the wants of the farmer only; and though stores
were brought from Sweden and Spain, the price of iron increased to
double what it had been before the Plague.[75] Shipbuilders at the end
of the fourteenth century were fitting out vessels for foreign as well
as for English buyers. English gunsmiths began to send out of their
workshops brazen guns and bombards superior to anything made in France,
and which were said to have given England its success in the French war
under Henry the Fifth.[76] A number of towns, big and little, boasted
of their bell-foundries, as for example London, Salisbury, Norwich,
Gloucester, Bridport, and others.[77] The copper-workers of Dinant had
traded with England since the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth
century had an entrepôt at Blackwall; but in 1455 the founders set
up their industry in England, stealing away secretly from Dinant to
profit by the cheaper labour and ready sale in this country.[78]
Flemish experts taught to Englishmen the art of brickmaking, and native
builders were setting up throughout the country the first brick houses
that had been seen in it since the departure of the Romans.[79] A whole
series of industrial experiments proclaimed the enthusiasm with which
the people accepted the challenge to secure for themselves the profits
of foreign manufacturers. Artificers often more ambitious than skilful
tried to establish a native industry of glass painting.[80] Instead
of fetching from abroad carpets and the tapestry used for churches,
manufactories were set up at Ramsey,[81] whence came perhaps also some
of the “counterfeit Arras” which adorned the humbler tradesmen’s homes.
Frames “ordained and made for the making of silk” were at work;[82]
lace-makers and ribbon weavers begged the protection of the government;
and English workers sent into the market large quantities of the linen
called Holland from its first home. The export of raw material fell
altogether out of fashion. Traders no longer carried skins over sea
undressed to be prepared by foreign labour, but had the work done by
English artizans at home. And whereas at the beginning of the fifteenth
century merchants brought beer from Prussia to England, at its close
they were carrying beer from London to Flanders.[83]
What with the inland and the outland trade, riches gathered into the
hands of the merchants with bewildering rapidity, and with results
which alarmed good conservatives. A statute of Parliament passed
in 1455 lamented the good old days when Norfolk and Norwich used to
employ only six or eight attorneys at the King’s Court, “in which
time great tranquillity reigned in the said city and counties.” This
“tranquillity” was broken by the manufacturing and export trade, for
now a body of eighty or more lawyers busily frequented every fair and
market and assembly, moving and inciting people to lawsuits, and while
having nothing to live on but their attorneyship yet prospered so well
that a wise legislature had to order that Norfolk should henceforth as
of old have only six attorneys and Norwich two.[84] Nor does it seem
that Norwich was exceptionally wicked, even though in Piers Ploughman
Covetousness is represented with a “Norfolk nose,”[85] for about the
same time we read in Nottingham of twenty-four rolls written within
and without with the pleas concerning trading questions of a single
year. The whole country in fact shared in traders’ profits from king to
peasant. It is calculated that in the reign of Henry the Eighth English
exports so far exceeded imports as to bring about £50,000 yearly into
the country, and the balance of trade inclined yet more strongly in
favour of England under Henry the Seventh.[86] Not only did the king
lay up vast treasure, but the very goldsmiths’ shops in London were
reported by a foreign traveller to contain more precious metals than
all those of Rome, Milan, Florence, and Venice taken together.[87] So
far as the middle class is concerned evidence of accumulating wealth
is to be found on every side, and the masses of the people in spite
of the drain of war taxation shared in the general prosperity. In the
middle of the fifteenth century Chief Justice Fortescue contrasts their
state with that of the French commons. “These drink water; they eat
apples with bread right brown made of rye. They eat no flesh, but if it
be right seldom a little lard, or of the entrails and heads of beasts
slain for the nobles and merchants of the land. They wear no woollen
but if it be a poor coat under their outermost garment made of great
canvas and called a frock. Their hosen be of light canvas and pass not
their knee, wherefore they be gartered and their thighs bare. Their
wives and children go barefoot; they may in none otherwise live....
Their nature is wasted and the kind of them brought to nought. They go
crooked and be feeble, not able to fight nor to defend the realm; nor
they have weapon nor money to buy them weapon withal.... But blessed be
God, this land is ruled under a better law; and therefore the people
thereof be not in such penury, nor thereby hurt in their persons but
they be wealthy and have all things necessary to the sustenance of
nature.” “In France the people salt but little meat except their bacon,
for they would buy little salt” unless the king’s officers went round
and forced every household to take a certain measure, such as they
thought reasonable. But “this rule would be sore abhorred in England,
as well by the merchants that he wont to have their freedom in buying
and selling of salt as by the people that use much to salt their
meats.”[88]
An industrial revolution on such a scale as this brought a political
revolution in its train. The English population, says a writer of
about 1453, “consists of churchmen, nobles, and craftsmen, as well as
common people.”[89] It was a novel and significant division. Traders
and manufacturers took their places somewhat noisily beside their
fellow politicians of older standing, filling the whole land till it
seems for a moment as if nothing counted any more in English life save
its middle class—a busy, hard, prosperous, pugnacious middle-class.
Slowly emerging from its early obscurity, in this century it had
arrived at power definitely, ostentatiously, carrying a proud look
and a high stomach, intent on its own affairs, heedless of the Court,
regardless of ministers save when it had to bribe them, irreverent to
the noble, the “proud penniless with his painted sleeve,”[90] tolerant
of ecclesiastics and monks only so long as they could be kept rigidly
within their allotted religious functions.[91] Henceforth in the
workshop and the market-place home politics and foreign affairs were
discussed from a new point of view—the interest of the trader and the
manufacturer; and the middle and working classes presently began to
fling to the winds the old statecraft whose maxims had done service
before their advent among the makers of the national policy.
In the matter of our foreign relations we see the drift of public
thought and discussion reflected in a pamphlet by which one of the
King’s ministers, Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, sought to appeal to
the popular imagination and define our right attitude to continental
peoples. His Libel (or Little Book) of English Policy, published about
1445, was clearly designed for the vulgar use.[92] Written, as the
common taste of the day demanded, in rhyming form where the absence
of poetic art and the inspiration of a plain common-sense constituted
a double claim on public attention, it made its frank appeal to the
prejudice of the stall-holder in the market and of the craftsman who
lived by making his homely English wares—men who saw in foreign
products articles whose sinful extravagance could only be matched by
the worthlessness that distinguished all work not turned out by an
Englishman. With vigorous strokes the Bishop sketched the outlines of
England’s trading interests with every nation in Europe, and at the end
of each paragraph passionately drove home his moral. Laying hold of the
fundamental axiom that the sole and undivided concern of England in all
her foreign relations was the protection of her commerce, he maintained
that so long as she kept a firm hold on the narrow seas between Dover
and Calais, she might rule the trade of the world. For there all
commerce from north to south or south to north had to pass through the
strait gate held by her sentinels on either side; so that while an
inexorable fate drove the nations into her net, England safely hidden
behind her wall of defence, the stormy Channel, need have no care so
long as she looked well to her navy and kept it swift to seize her prey
and strong to drive her enemies back from looking over the wall. At its
very outset the commercial society had thus its Cobden to preach after
his kind the doctrine of non-intervention and the kingdom of the seas.
The exponents of a new home policy pressed hard on the heels of the
founders of a new diplomacy. About thirty years after the Libel of
English Policy, another “Libel” was composed in imitation of the first
tract.[93] Less pretentious and elaborate than the first, the new
poem was probably the work of some person of less exalted rank, whose
converse had been with the working men of the country rather than
with merchants of London or peers of the realm and ministers of the
King, and who was far more troubled about our industrial policy at
home than our commercial policy abroad. His view of our position was
also finely optimistic. For, seeing that foreign traders were bound,
whether they would or no, to come to us either for wool or for cloth,
and thus depended on England for one of the first necessaries of life,
we, who were put in this happy position of universal provider, were
clearly “by God’s ordinance,” destined first to satisfy ourselves, and
then “to rule and govern all Christian kings,” and make paynims also
“full tame”;[94] and so “of all people that be living on the ground”
were most bound to pray and to please God. The recognition of these
inestimable blessings should bring of course its corresponding sense of
our duty to sell our goods as dear as we could; to “restrain straitly”
the export of wool so that “the commons of this land might have work
to the full”;[95] and in any case to export only the coarsest wool, on
the working of which the margin of profit must be small—but a fifth
in fact of what might be made on good material. “The price is simple,
the cost is never the less; they that worked such wool in wit be like
an ass.” Above all, the working men must be protected by law in the
conditions of their labour, so that “their poor living and adversity
might be altered into wealth, riches, and prosperity,” and that for
the profit of the whole realm. The growth of industry was already
bringing in its train a modern theory that “the whole wealth of the
body of the realm riseth out of the labours and works of the common
people.... Surely the common weal of England must rise out of the works
of the common people.”[96]
From this time therefore the policy of England was to be the policy
of a great industrial state. But the new way on which its people
were thus striving to enter was not to be a way of good-will at home
or of harmony with the nations. Merchant and burgher might remain,
as they did, absolutely indifferent to all schemes of mere military
aggrandizement[97] such as the conquest of France, so that after the
taking of Bordeaux by the French in 1445 not a single cry was raised
for the recovery of our lost possessions; and they might rather look
for the extension of their trade to the bold enterprising genius
of trading companies and pirates exulting in freedom from royal
interference and military restrictions, and only calling on the State
for diplomatic aid in the case where this proved convenient for the
winning of a commercial treaty. But the secret of peace was not yet
found, nor was the settlement of industrial frontiers to prove simpler
than the definition of military borders.
For as yet England had wakened no jealousies simply because she had
never been a competitor with other nations; but obvious trouble
lay in wait for her people so soon as they were fairly swept into
the commercial struggle of the Continent, and introduced by their
manufactures to their first real trade disputes. The weaver of the
Netherlands, for example, had gladly welcomed the English trader as
the inexhaustible provider of his raw material; but it was another
matter when the Englishman came as a rival manufacturer laden with
bales of cloth, grudging the old supply of wool, and setting up stalls
in Flemish markets to seduce away his ancient customers. The Flemish
towns had seen an end to their prosperity, and towns in such a case
were bitter in negotiations with their rivals.[98] Bruges which in the
thirteenth century had 40,000 looms, was at the end of the fifteenth
century offering citizenship at a mere trifle to draw back inhabitants
to its deserted streets; Ypres, which in 1408 had a population of
from 80,000 to 100,000, and from 3,000 to 4,000 clothworkers, had in
1486 only from 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, and twenty-five to thirty
cloth-factories; and in Ghent matters were little better. Against all
the misery of a century of slow death in Flanders—a misery on which
the English weaver throve and fattened—the doomed manufacturers set up
hasty barriers on this side and on that, taxes and tolls and municipal
ordinances and State decrees to shut English cloth out of Flanders,
which were met by angry English rejoinders forbidding Flemish cloth
in the English markets. Similar difficulties followed everywhere the
appearance of the English trader with his goods. The Hanseatic League
drove him out of Denmark, and the Teutonic Order banished him from
Prussia. Moreover while disputes of manufacturers kept the North in a
tumult, commercial quarrels disturbed the South, and English merchant
vessels met the Genoese or the Venetians in the seas of the Levant
to fight for the carrying trade of the Mediterranean. No limit was
set to the pirate wars that raged from Syria to Iceland till a great
statesman, Henry the Seventh, made his splendid attempt to discover
through international treaties the means of securing a settled order
for the new commercial state.
Nor was the question of home politics more easy of solution. Under the
steady pressure of public feeling the government was gradually forced
out of the early simplicity of its view of regulating commerce as a
financial expedient in aid of the Treasury, and began to concern itself
anxiously about the protection of industry in the interests of the
community. Cloth manufacturers in particular entered on a period of
protected security such as the Staplers had never known, when kings
became the nursing fathers of their trade, and its prosperity was
considered an absorbing charge to the government. But when Parliament
began in 1463 (almost the very year in which the second “Libel”
appeared) to concern itself very actively with industrial problems,[99]
the question of trade legislation had already become extremely complex
and difficult. As soon as the village weaver began to make cloth for
the Prussian burgher or the trader of the Black Sea instead of for his
next door neighbour, the old conditions of his trade became absolutely
impossible. The whole industry was before long altogether re-organized
both from the commercial and the manufacturing side. The exporting
merchants, as we shall see later, drew together into a new and powerful
association known as the Merchant Adventurers. Meanwhile the army of
workmen at home was broken up into specialized groups of spinners,
weavers, carders, fullers, shearers, and dyers. The seller was more and
more sharply separated from the maker of goods. Managers and middlemen
organized the manufacture and made provisions for its distribution and
sale. The clothier provided the raw material, gave out the wool to be
made up, and sold again to the draper.[100] And the draper “lived like
a gentleman,” and sold to the big public, despising the lower forms
of trade. Old-fashioned economists and timid conservatives looked on
aghast at the accelerating changes, and declared that the country was
being brought to certain ruin by the reckless race of its people to
forsake handicrafts or the production of wealth, and press wholesale
into the ranks of merchants or mere distributors.
With this division of labour and the quickened contest for profits,
there started into life rival interests more than enough to break
up the whole community into groups of warring factions. The “upper
classes” generally, statesmen, treasury officials, nobles, the greater
proprietors lay and ecclesiastical—in fact all the wealthy owners of
flocks who could enter the company of the Staplers and share their
profits—desired an abundant export of wool; while the small farmers
and the yeomen, shut out by poverty from the association, and bitterly
hostile to the wealthy monopolist, sided with the townsfolk to whom
visions of wealth had first dawned in the manufacturing industries
and the export of cloth, and who would gladly have kept all the wool
of the country at home.[101] Merchants and manufacturers had their
own special controversy, for while the foreign trader was boasting of
his energy in raising the price of cloth, the middlemen and makers
at home, whose whole interest lay in rapid sales, complained that
people in the Netherlands would no longer buy English goods owing to
the increased cost, and that the English towns were thus brought to
destitution.[102] Moreover the great London merchants were making a
determined effort to force the whole foreign trade of England through
their warehouses in London, and to shut all channels of commerce save
those provided by themselves;[103] and demanded that all cloth for
the Netherlands, that is practically one-third of all the cloth then
exported, must be carried by the maker to London, and there sold, as
was averred, to the exporting merchants either for credit or below
cost price.[104] Here of course they came into conflict with the local
dealers who wanted frequent and convenient markets for their wares,
and liberty to make their own bargain with foreign buyers visiting
their town; for to the clothier this question of distribution was
all-important, since it was in vain for him to increase production by
machinery, or by the improved organization of labour, or by division of
toil among groups of skilled artizans, unless he could find his profit
in a corresponding developement of the means of sale. The exporting
merchants had also a quarrel with the artizans, who naturally desired
to keep the dressing and finishing of cloth in their own hands, while
the merchants insisted on the advantages of a free trade in undressed
cloth; in their judgement the cloth-dressers, seeking but their
“singular and private wealth,” forgot that more men lived by making
and selling cloth than by dressing it, and that therefore the rapid
developement of exports by carrying out material in the rough to be
finished in the Netherlands was really for the enriching of the whole
realm.[105] These same dealers, however, looked more leniently on the
“singular and private wealth” that went into their own pockets through
the profits of the export trade, and also found themselves set at
variance with the big public of consumers who were always anxiously
on the watch against the raising of prices. At times the manufacturer
had his grievances against the municipal authorities, whenever he
found himself worried and fettered by the traditional wisdom of Town
Councils, who for a variety of reasons of their own wanted to keep the
ultimate control over his trade so as to draw a profit for the town.
Lastly, the working class had begun to feel difficulties springing
from the new methods of industrial organization, and troubles about
wages and prices and the relation of employer to employed assailed
the authorities both at Westminster and in the municipal councils.
Artificers of all kinds, it was constantly declared, could no longer
live of their occupation and were in great misery;[106] in fact, to
judge by preambles to Statutes, and the loud complaints as to his
condition, the working man believed himself to be in such bad case as
to need all the aid of the State to keep him supplied with employment.
This old industrial revolution in short brought with it difficulties
which bear to us the familiar look of our own constant and persevering
visitors—visitors that force their entrance at every breach in the
accustomed order by which trade is fenced round, and that appear as
the unwelcome escort of every new form of industrial competition.
Moreover, to add to the troubles of the mediæval legislator, the
consumer of those days was always insisting on his vested right to the
first consideration of the government, as the ultimate dictator for
whose benefit the whole colossal structure of trade had been reared,
and by whose approval alone it was allowed to remain at that ambitious
elevation. With every fresh enterprise of manufacturer or merchant,
the problem with which the law-makers had to deal became more subtle
and complex. Driven hither and thither by the new conflict of public
opinion and the passion of rival interests, baffled by the insoluble
problem of how to frame laws which should benefit equally all the
claimants for its aid, the government hesitatingly felt its way along
an ill-defined path, veering from side to side according to the
direction of the last impelling force. Even Edward the Fourth had no
fixed policy of protection, and passed laws now on this side, now on
that, as the imperious necessity of the moment seemed to demand.
But with a rapidly increasing trade, and with a House of Commons
three-fourths of whose members were burghers personally concerned
in these questions, it was impossible to stand still; and the new
industrial legislation gradually became the expression not of the
autocratic rule of kings, but of a self-conscious government of
the people.[107] A long series of Statutes illustrates this great
experiment. The new protection devised by burghers and merchants
for the fostering of industry was altogether different from the old
protection devised by a Court mainly occupied with the problem of
re-filling an empty Treasury. The English manufacturer and the English
working man were its recognized charge, and in their interest no
measure was considered too heroic and no detail too insignificant,
whether the matter in hand was the closing of English markets to a
whole people, or the decision of how big a piece of leather it might be
well in the interest of the shoemaking trade to allow the cobbler to
buy for the patching of an old boot. All native trades were “protected”
by laws which declared that none of the wares which Englishmen could
manufacture at home might be imported from foreign parts, and that
none of the raw material they used might be carried out unwrought, or
even half finished, to be worked up abroad. The whole people, save
a few of the “great estates” and mighty men, must go simply clad in
honest goods of English make, and so save themselves from waste, and
English workers from poverty. As to the long dispute about admitting
foreigners to trade in England, in which the King and the people had
ever been in strong opposition, that matter was now more and more
regulated according to the desires of the traders. England ceased to
be the acquiescent host of guests who, in the vulgar opinion, came
to thrive and fatten on her wealth; and a determined resistance was
declared against the competition of strangers, till the Hanseatic
trader scarcely dared show his face outside the strong walls of his
Steel-yard citadel, and the Lombard vainly struggled to protect his
last privileges from the assaults of his enemies.
The theory of State protection of industry grew fast, and by the time
of Henry the Seventh its triumph was complete, and the foundations
of a new national policy were firmly laid—a policy which was to be
largely guided by industrial interests and to represent the claims
of an elaborate industrial organization established by law and built
into vast proportions by international agreement. The new relation
of a sovereign to his people in such a State was seen at the end of
the century in the first peaceful king of England whose subjects had
submitted to his rule, the only English monarch till then who had
not been a strong leader in war and who had yet escaped murder or
imprisonment at the hands of his people. It has been the singular
misfortune of one of our greatest rulers, Henry the Seventh, to be
the first sovereign of the modern pattern who ruled over Englishmen,
and his memory has in consequence come down to us shorn of all the
conventional glory that tradition had until then declared proper
to royalty. He has remained in history as we see him in one of
his portraits, a dim obscure figure, sadly looking out from the
background of a canvas where the big blustering figure of his son,
set squarely in front, seems to elbow all virtue save his own out of
recognized existence. But in the delicate, careworn, refined face
with its suggestion of unrecorded self-effacement, in the penetrating
intelligence devoted to the apprehending of the new problems and the
infinite labour spent in solving them, in the inscrutable acquiescence
with which, “loving to seal up his own dangers,”[108] he carried the
burdens that were henceforth to fall to the lot of kings, and the
unflinching resolution of his methods, we recognize a new type of royal
dignity, and measure the work demanded of rulers who saw the power of
mere personal dominion founded on force gradually passing from their
hands, and in the changing order of the world were called to take up
the leadership of the new commonwealth that was to be.