THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
A FRENCH proverb of the twelfth century tells us what the world thought
in old days of the origin and uses of a navy. “Point de marine sans
pelerinages,” men said, seeing in pious penitents its means of support,
and in the shrines of St. James or St. Peter or the Holy Sepulchre its
destinations. Trade in those days avoided the way of the ocean, and
followed the well-known land routes across the heart of Europe, and
where the land came to an end took the very shortest way over the water
to the next point of solid earth.
And slowly as commerce by sea developed in Europe it developed yet more
slowly among the English. All goods that came to them from abroad were
carried to their shores by powerful confederations of foreign merchants
who controlled the great continental trade routes of the north-west.
The “men of the Empire” or the Hanse of Cologne, masters of the
highway of the Rhine and of Cologne, the great seaport of the Empire,
commanded the whole Eastern trade which then for the most part passed
through Germany.[109] The Flemish Hanse of London,[110] which included
all the great towns of Picardy and Flanders, and perhaps at one time
even Paris itself, carried over sea the wares that were gathered from
half of Europe to the great fairs of Champagne. Through these two great
companies England first exchanged her wool for certain necessaries such
as salt and fish and iron and wood, and for a few luxuries such as
spices and silks from the Levant.
And even when commerce swept beyond the narrow seas and passed out
of the hands of the men of Cologne and the Flemish Hanse, it was not
Englishmen who took their place. If the waterway of the Rhine was
forsaken of half its trade as merchants of Northern Italy abandoned
the old route across Europe, and instead of sending their goods to
the warehouses of Cologne despatched fleets through the Straits of
Gibraltar to the ports of the Channel and to Bruges; if the fairs of
Champagne languished when armies encamped on its plains and turned
them into battle-fields, and the Flemish Hanse of London slowly sank
into insignificance—it was only to make way for other competitors of
foreign blood. Commerce with the East through the Mediterranean and
the Bay of Biscay was seized by the ships of Florence and Genoa and
Venice.[111] The towns of the German Ocean and the Baltic gathered
under the banner of Lübeck into a new Hanseatic League[112] which broke
the supremacy of Cologne, claimed the whole carrying trade of the
Northern seas, and opened a new line of communication with the Levant.
Novgorod became the centre of the Baltic trade, as Alexandria was the
centre of the Mediterranean traffic, and the merchants of the Teutonic
Hanse offered to the English trader the silks and drugs of the East,
with skins and hemp and timber of Novgorod, and the metals of Bohemia
and Hungary.
The Mediterranean merchant was the great minister to the growing luxury
of mediæval England. “The estates and lords of the realm” and bishops
and prelates and parish priests bought from him cloth of gold, rich
brocades, vestments of white damask powdered with gold of Venice,[113]
and precious work of goldsmiths and jewellers, new-fashioned glass,
and many other fine things—articles that “might be forborn for dear
and deceivable,” grumbled the English dealer in homely goods of
native manufacture. The whole luxurious traffic down to the “apes
and japes and marmosettes tailed, nifles, trifles, that little have
availed,”[114] roused the bitter jealousy of the home trader; and even
statesmen foretold with alarm the perils that must come to the nation
from a commerce which filled the land with fancy baubles and vanities,
and carried away in exchange the precious wealth of the people, their
cloth and wool and tin, sucking the thrift out of the land as the wasp
sucks honey from the bee. But in spite of the hostility of English
dealers needy kings anxious to win favour with the great banking
companies of Italy diligently encouraged the trade; and (always in
consideration of adequate tolls for privileges) freed merchants
who came from beyond the Straits from the vexatious control of the
Staple;[115] allowed their vessels to put into port undisturbed at
Southampton instead of being forced to go to Calais; and their agents
to travel through the country and buy and sell at will.
It was Florence which in the first half of the fourteenth century took
the lead in the trade of the Mediterranean with England,[116] and whose
merchants lent to Edward the Third the money which alone enabled him
to carry on the war with France. But when Edward declared himself
unable to pay his debts and repudiated the whole of the Florentine
loans ruin fell on the city; its trade was paralyzed, and commercial
disasters ended in political revolution. Bankers of Lübeck took the
place of its financiers as the Rothschilds of the mediæval world; and
ship-masters of Genoa seized the commerce which fell from its hands.
Though the winning of the port of Leghorn in 1421 brought a fresh
outburst of trading activity to Florence,[117] though its merchants
established depots and banks and commercial settlements in all the
great towns of the North, though cargoes of wool were again shipped to
its harbour (one English merchant alone in 1437 selling to an agent of
the Albertine Company wool to the value of almost £12,000),[118] the
supremacy of the Republic in the Mediterranean trade was never restored.
For its great competitors, Genoa and Venice, were now fairly in the
field. Through their station on the Black Sea the Genoese held until
the Turkish conquest the chief market in the East for European cloth;
and their fleets laden with cloth of gold, silk and spices of the
Levant, with alum and mastick from the subject islands of Chios and
Phocœa, with the woad of Toulouse, and the wines of Provence, sailed
to Southampton to exchange their cargoes for English cloth, which
they sometimes carried back direct to the Black Sea, and sometimes
took on to sell at the Flemish markets, and so make a double profit
on their journey.[119] For their world-wide business the Bank of St.
George was founded at Genoa in 1407, with a system of credit notes of
acknowledgement for money deposited which could be transferred from
hand to hand.
The great galleys of Venice, however, were formidable rivals of the
carracks of Genoa. For Venice, hidden away in the Adriatic, with
nothing of its own save salt to offer, showed in perhaps a higher
degree than any other Italian State what might be achieved by a lavish
system of State protection.[120] It was the State that built its
merchant fleets; the State that leased out the vessels every year to
the highest bidders for trading purposes; the State that ordered the
conduct of their business for the greatest public wealth; the State
that protected them from competition by forbidding its citizens to
send out their spices by the overland route, or to take in cloth from
England that had not been carried in Venetian galleys by long sea.
By the authority of its government Venice had been made the emporium
of the Mediterranean, and Italian traders obediently carried cloths
or tin or bales of skins from England to Venice, and from Venice to
Corfu. Fortune favoured the most astute among her wooers, and showered
on Venice the coveted blessings of trade. Her ships travelled far, and
Italian merchants who had once been only known in England as financial
agents employed by the Papal Court to collect the tribute due to Rome,
now flocked to the island on business of a very different character.
The harbour of Southampton was crowded with galleys, in which cunning
tailors sat day and night cutting the bales of material bought into
garments, so as to save the export dues on cloth.[121] In the time of
Richard the Second a Genoese merchant who had leased the castle as a
storehouse for his wares proposed to the King to make of Southampton
the greatest trading port of the west, and he might well have carried
out his promise if the London merchants had not prudently sent a
messenger to murder him at his own door.[122] Notwithstanding the
inhospitable and grudging welcome given by London itself the Lombards
found means by the King’s help to maintain a thriving settlement, and
in the fifteenth century the Venetian Consuls gathered letters for the
regular mail to Venice once every month.[123]
What the Venetians were to the commerce of the Mediterranean that
the merchants of the Hanseatic League were to the commerce of the
Baltic and the German Ocean. A double strength had been given to the
confederation of towns which Lübeck had drawn under its banner by
its union with the Teutonic Order—an order which had originated in
Bremen and Lübeck and then settled on the Baltic to create the trading
prosperity of Danzig and Elbing. These Prussian cities, while they
owned the Grand Master of the Order of Teutonic Knights as their feudal
chief, were still dependent on Lübeck.[124] And with them were joined
a multitude of towns so imposing in their very numbers alone that
when the ambassadors of the Hanseatic League in England in 1376 were
asked for a list of the members who made up their vast association,
they answered scornfully that surely even they themselves could not be
supposed to remember the countless names of towns big and little in all
kingdoms in whose name they spoke.[125] Under the strangely diverse
lordship of Kings, Dukes, Margraves, Counts, Barons, or Archbishops,
they found a link in their common union in the Holy Roman Empire,
and ever counted England, cut off from that great commonwealth, as a
“foreign” nation.[126]
In war or in commercial negotiations this mighty confederation, with
its members disciplined to act together as one body, dealt proudly
as a nation on equal terms with other peoples, and in the strength
of its united corporation it was in fact a far more formidable force
than the jealous and isolated Republics of the South. Denmark was
laid at its feet by a triumphant war. Norway was held in complete
subjection. It forced the English traders in the North Sea to bow to
its policy and fight at its bidding. So powerful was the League in the
fourteenth century, that when Edward the Third had ruined the banks of
Florence it was the merchants of Lübeck who became his money-lenders;
they were made the farmers of the English wool-tax; they rented the
mines of the northern counties and the tin-works of Cornwall.[127]
The whole carrying trade of the northern seas lay in their hands.
It was vessels of the Hanse that sailed from Hull or from Boston to
Bergen with English wares and brought back cargoes of salt fish;[128]
that fetched iron from Sweden, and wine from the Rhine vineyards, and
oranges and spices and foreign fruits from Bruges; and that carried out
the English woollen cloths to Russia and the Baltic ports, and brought
back wood, tin, potash, skins, and furs. Within the strong defences of
their Steel-yard[129] on the banks of the Thames by London Bridge, the
advance guard of the League lived under a sort of military discipline,
and held their own by force of the King’s protection against the hatred
of London traders and burghers, which now and then burst into violent
riots.
Thus throughout the fourteenth century it was strangers who held the
carrying trade to England along the two great commercial routes—the
passage by Gibraltar to the harbours of Italy and thence to Alexandria,
and the passage by the Sound to the Baltic ports and so to Novgorod.
All the profits of transit as of barter were secured by alien dealers
who travelled from village to village throughout the country in search
of wool or cloth to freight the foreign vessels that lay in every
harbour—vessels bigger and better built for commerce than any of which
England could boast.[130] Moreover, the English government was content
to have it so, and Kings who wanted to build up alliances for their
foreign wars, or to replenish their failing treasury at home, in all
commercial regulations showed their favour mainly to foreign traders
and left the native shipowner to do as best he could for himself. Once,
indeed, in the reign of Richard the Second, a solitary attempt was
made to encourage the shipping industry, and the first Navigation Act
passed in England ordered “that none of the King’s liege people do from
henceforth ship any merchandise in going out or coming within the realm
of England but only in ships of the King’s liegance.”[131] This Act,
however, after the fashion of the time, was only to be in force for a
few months; and after very brief experience Parliament wisely decided
that the law need only be obeyed when “the ships in the parts where the
said merchants shall happen to dwell be found able and sufficient ...
and otherwise it shall be lawful to hire other ships convenient.”[132]
With this the experiment of State protection came to an end for the
next century; and against the great confederations and State-protected
navies of the Continent English merchants were left to wage singly as
best they could their private and adventurous war.
English shipping, indeed, so far as it existed at all, may be said to
have existed in spite of the law. There was no navy whatever in any
national sense. A few balingers[133] and little coasting vessels lay in
the various ports—some of them belonging to private merchants, some
to the town communities—and when the King wanted ships for the public
service, whether it was to fish for herrings for his household or to
fight the French, he simply demanded such vessels as he needed in any
harbour, kept them and their crews waiting on his will for weeks or
months, sent them wherever he chose, and laid all costs on the town or
the owner’s shoulders.[134] Moreover, the unlucky merchant forfeited
his ship to the Crown for any accident that might happen on it—if a
man died, or fell overboard, or if it struck another vessel or touched
a rock. The masters might suffer ruin, or in mere self-defence give up
the owning of ships, and the sailors might forsake the sea and turn
to other occupations to escape being impressed for war: government
interference to regulate wages only sent men to take service at more
tempting pay in foreign boats.[135] We cannot wonder that towards
the end of the fourteenth century it seems to have been thought more
profitable under these conditions to make ships for others than to
own them, and that builders were selling their vessels to aliens, and
these aliens “by reason of the excessive profits thence arising have
often sold the same to the enemies of the realm.”[136] Henry the Fifth,
indeed, proposed to build up a royal navy, but his plans were cut short
by his death and his ships sold under Henry the Sixth, and matters went
on as before.[137]
English traders, however, did not sit down idly to wait for State
protection.[138] Already in the middle of the fourteenth century a new
life was stirring in the seaports, and before long every one of them
began to send its contingent to the host that went out for the conquest
of the sea. Towns big and little were creating or strengthening their
fleets, made up either of the “common barges” of the community, or
the private ships of their trading companies. Shipbuilding was dear
in England from the want of wood in the country as well as of iron
suitable for the purpose, and cost, if we may believe a contemporary
observer, twice as much as in France.[139] So poor communities
like Lydd that could not afford big ventures made shift by hiring
vessels from Britanny, Sandwich, or London, and fitting them out as
economically as might be, with an old wine-pipe sawed in half to serve
for a bread barrel.[140] On the other hand, prosperous ports like Lynn
added large sums year after year to the town budget for shipping.[141]
A far poorer place, Romney, spent £73 on its common barge in 1381; in
1396 another was bought and fitted out for £82; and a third in 1400 at
over £40; while a few years later yet another ship was procured for
the Bordeaux trade. These vessels sailed to Scotland and Newcastle
and Norfolk and the ports of the Southern coasts; or to Ireland for
wood, to Amiens for sea-coal, to Britanny for salt, to Flanders for the
wares of the Levant, to Southern France for cargoes of wine, and oil,
and wood. In 1400 “the new barge” carried forty-two tuns of wine from
Rochelle; in 1404 it brought forty tuns besides oil and wood, and in a
later voyage carried fifty-six tuns.[142] Everywhere the trading temper
laid hold upon the people. In Rye, where the inhabitants had been wont
to pay their yearly oblations punctually on the 8th of September, there
came a time when so many of them were abroad, some attending fairs,
some fishing in remote seas, “that Divine worship is not then observed
by them as it ought to be, and the due oblations are withheld and
hardly ever paid;” and the day of offering had to be changed.[143]
The more important side of the movement, however, was the growth of
private enterprise as shown in the associations of merchants formed
in all the bigger towns for trading purposes. Already in the time of
Richard the Second there was a “Fellowship of Merchants” in Bristol
who directed the whole foreign trade and the import of foreign
merchandise, and who even then did business on a very considerable
scale, for when in 1375 Bristol ships laden with salt were captured
and burnt in the Channel the losses were set down at £17,739. Before
fifty years were over their trading vessels were known in every sea
from Syria to Iceland. The richer merchants built up by degrees little
fleets of ten or twelve vessels varying from 400 to 900 tons; and one
of them, William Cannynges, an ancestor of Lord Canning, who in 1461
had ten ships afloat (one _The Nicholas of the Tower_ from whence came
Suffolk’s headsman), employed 800 seamen and 100 carpenters, masons,
and artificers.[144] Nor was Bristol singular in its activity. The
Guild of Merchants at Lynn rivalled that of York. “With the Divine
assistance, and the help of divers of the King’s subjects,” John
Taverner of Hull in 1449 built a great “carrack” on the scale of the
mighty ships of Genoa and Venice. Far and wide the movement spread till
the brief tale of 169 merchants which had been counted up by Edward
the Third when he wanted to borrow money from them, expanded towards
the close of the fifteenth century into a company of more than 3,000
traders engaged in sea-commerce alone.[145]
From whatever town they came these traders with foreign ports were all
alike known to the men of the fourteenth century by one significant
name—the Adventurers. For since there was but one protected industry
in England, the Staple, every merchant who was not a Stapler was a
free Adventurer. All trade that lay outside the Staple was for his
winning.[146] Bound to no place or company or government or laws, he
was left to discover for himself a corner in the world’s market, and
to protect himself on sea and land. A perfectly indifferent State gave
him no help in his first ventures to become the carrier of English
commerce, and vouchsafed no encouragement to shipbuilder or master
by offers of special favours or grants of reduced tolls on a first
voyage.[147] He sailed out of port into a sea of peril. Pirates of all
nations, Vitalien Brüder in the Baltic and the North Sea, Likedelers
of Calais,[148] Breton cruisers, vigorous monopolists of the Hanse,
outraged merchants of the South burning for vengeance, lay in wait
on every quarter of the horizon. In 1395 Norfolk traders were robbed
of £20,000 “by the Queen’s men of Denmark, the which was an undoing
to many of the merchants of Norfolk for evermore afterwards;”[149]
and frequent and piteous were the complaints that went up to the
Privy Council from English shippers begging redress and protection
as outrage followed outrage.[150] But a State which was without any
organized naval force was powerless to establish order. Whether
it gave the charge of keeping the peace on the high seas to the
merchants themselves, or to the Staplers, or by special commission
to the Admirals[151] of the coast, or to a committee of lords, or to
the foremost among the offenders, the Captain of Calais himself, its
experiments were equally vain. In self-protection town barges and
merchants’ ships sailed in companies under an admiral of their own
choosing, armed to the teeth like little men of war against the enemy,
and even carrying cannon on board as early as 1407, before any kind
of hand-guns had been invented.[152] If when disaster overtook them
their masters appealed for compensation to the government they did
not wait solely on the State for redress; and English rulers seem to
have been often less perplexed to bring a remedy to their sufferings
than to conciliate the great foreign confederations whose anger had
been roused by their swift and violent retaliation. There were indeed
probably no more formidable pirates afloat than these English cruisers
themselves, for they were hard fighters who took a prompt revenge; and
among foreigners at all events they won the reputation of using their
shipping for no other purpose than to harass all trade of other peoples
in the narrow seas, and “obstruct the utility of commerce throughout
all Christendom.”[153]
Under these conditions we can easily understand that throughout the
century whenever the question of the English navy emerges in Rolls
of Parliament and Statutes and official statements, we have a
contemporary picture drawn in the gloomiest colours.[154] Statesmen
heap up details to show how badly the merchant service fulfils
its vague functions as a royal navy. Ship-owners bring their loud
complainings to prove how ill they have been used by the State. Each
side burns to waken the other to a sense of its duty, and talk of the
decay of English power by sea might be pressed into the service of
either, while the loss of Southern France and the temporary blow which
this gave to English shipping was used to point the argument on both
sides. The sea was our wall of defence, it was said; but now the enemy
was on the wall and where was our old might of ships and sailors? The
very Dutch were laughing at our impotence, and when they insolently
jested at the ships engraved on the coins of Edward the Third and asked
why we did not engrave a sheep on them instead, the pun was felt to
inflict a deep wound on the national honour.[155]
Such judgements, however, should be read in the light of the records
which tell us what English ships afloat upon the sea were actually
doing in those days. For at this very time the unofficial Englishman
seems to have been boasting that his people possessed a greater number
of fine and powerful ships than any other nation, so that they were
“kings of the sea;”[156] and if the boast was a little premature
it lay on the whole nearer to the truth. Even now the fleets of the
Adventurers were going forth to the conquest of the seas, and their
enterprise marks one of the great turning points in our history. It was
in fact during this century that England raised herself from the last
place among commercial peoples to one of the first. At the close of the
fourteenth century, as we have seen, English merchandise was mostly
borne in foreign ships; a hundred years later, English vessels carried
more than a half of all the cloths exported from the country, and about
three quarters of all other goods,[157] and the Navigation Act that
had failed under Richard the Second was put in triumphant operation by
Henry the Seventh.[158]
It was in the Northern Seas that the real stress of the battle lay.
There from a very early time bands of roving adventurers went cruising
from harbour to harbour to discover what spoils of trade the orthodox
merchants of the Staple or the Hanse had left ungathered, and how the
fertile resources of the lawless free-trader might be used to shatter
these stately organizations. When the older merchants concentrated
themselves in Bruges and Calais the free lances of trade sought out
the neglected markets of Brabant and Holland. Driven from the marshes
of Middleburg they turned to Antwerp which the Staplers had forsaken.
Scarcely had the Hanse merchants under the stress of their Danish wars
withdrawn from Bergen than the Adventurers forthwith slipped into their
place, set up their own Staple, gathering goods there to the value of
10,000 marks, and for years fought steadily against fire and sword
to hold their own.[159] If the Baltic towns fell behind the western
members of the League in maritime enterprize, the Adventurers’ fleets
flocked to their harbours, so that three hundred of them were seen in
the harbour of Danzig alone, carrying dealers in cloth ready to spread
their wares in every market town of Prussia. They pushed their way
into the fish-markets of Schonen, offering bales of cloth instead of
money[160] for salt herrings, and rousing the alarm of the Hanseatic
merchants there also. By the close of the fourteenth century they had
so prospered in the world on all sides that they professed to look on
large branches of trade as their own exclusive property, and to make
a grievance of interference with their profits by other “meddling
merchants who were not content with their own business in which they
had been brought up and by which they were well able to live.”
This was the beginning of a new stage in their history. The Adventurers
now proposed to enter the decent ranks of recognized associations,
and exchange their roving wars for the more formal aggressions of a
chartered company; and at their prayer Henry the Fourth granted them
in 1406, for their better ordering and for their protection from
other “meddling merchants,” a charter by which they took as their
official title their old name of the Merchant Adventurers.[161] The
grant included all dominions over-sea, and allowed them to wander
where they would in the wide world, and to draw within their ranks all
the Adventurers of England.[162] As yet their organization was loose
and free, and was in fact no true incorporation as a Guild. But it
marked the passing away of their free and stormy youth. From this time
privileges came to them from all sides by English grants, by gifts
from foreign towns, by protection of the rulers of various countries.
Finally in 1446 they received a new charter of privileges from the
Duke of Burgundy[163] by which their tolls were fixed, full protection
assured to them, and an organization provided which lasted for the
next century. So confident did they become of their power, that when
Henry the Seventh at his accession raised the tolls required of them
they refused to pay, and he did not dare to enforce the order.[164]
Seeing indeed in their success the triumph of English commerce, he
remained their steady supporter, confirmed their privileges,[165] and
when at Calais they desired greater centralization and a stricter
discipline, he gave them a regular organization after the pattern of
the Staplers under Edward the Third, with governors and a council of
twenty-four assistants.[166] Amid all their successes it was little
wonder that there came a time when they themselves forgot the free
audacity of their adventurous youth. In their maturer years, as the
vehement assertors of monopoly and State protection, they cast behind
their backs the very remembrance of their lawless predecessors, and for
a braver pedigree they traced their greatness back to ancestors made
respectable by a fabled charter from King John himself, and boasted of
Aldermen clothed in scarlet who were supposed to have borne rule over
them in good old times in Antwerp.
The legend was the product of a time when Antwerp was in fact
the capital of the Merchant Adventurers—the home and centre of
their trade. For there in the fifteenth century they entered on an
inheritance which had been left waste when the merchant princes of
the Staple had finally retired to Calais, and had thus practically
abandoned all direct trade between Antwerp and England to private
hands. The Adventurers soon solved the question of who was to carry it
on.[167] In 1407 the city gave them a House in perpetual succession.
Three of their merchants sat in the Toll-hall with the toll-keepers
of the borough to see justice done to their brethren. Known among
the people as “the nation,”[168] they early showed their power, and
in the first half of the fifteenth century privileges in the English
trade were more and more withdrawn from the native traders of the
Netherlands, and gathered into their own hands. They used their powers
to the full, governed firmly, ordered the whole English trade with the
Low Countries, dictated what fair was to be attended, and ruled the
prices, in spite of the loud remonstrances of the unlucky natives.[169]
At the great marts held in the Netherlands four times a year[170] “they
stapled the commodities which they brought out of England, and put the
same to sale,”[171] and by 1436 they could boast that they bought more
goods in Brabant, Flanders, and Zealand[172] than all other nations,
and that if their merchants were withdrawn it would be as great a loss
to the French trade as though a thousand men of war were sent into the
country.[173] The growing jealousy of the manufacturers in Flanders
indeed threatened at times to cut off their entire business; and as
they were the first to bear the rising storm of commercial rivalries,
so again and again they were brought within sight of ruin by the laws
passed on either side the water forbidding all import or export trade.
For in their desperate attempt to save the Flemish weavers from ruin
the Dukes of Burgundy forbade dressers to finish English cloth, or
tailors to cut it in the Netherlands, and laid heavy penalties on any
man in Flanders who was seen dressed in woollen stuffs of English
make;[174] but still the cloth came in, smuggled by speculating dealers
from Antwerp, or scattered broadcast by licensed merchants who had
bought from the authorities leave to evade the law.[175] Once in
consequence of political disputes[176] the Adventurers had to migrate
to Calais, and see the legal trade with the Low Countries given to
the Easterlings, a sight which “sore nipped their hearts;” but first
in “disordered” fashion, then lawfully, they were soon back at their
old occupations.[177] With the steady support of Henry the Seventh,
whose whole policy was directed to develope the trade with Burgundy
and bind England and the Netherlands into a united commercial state,
their prosperity was assured; and before the close of the century
Antwerp, after two hundred years of struggle for supremacy in trade,
took its place as the great centre of commerce[178] in the Netherlands,
while its rival Bruges sank into utter poverty and decay. When at last
after many chances and changes, the English won in 1506 through Henry
the Seventh free trade in cloth throughout all the dominions of the
Archduke Philip save Flanders, they actually found themselves better
off in the Netherlands than the native merchants, paid less tolls
than they, and were in a position whence they might easily overrun
the country with their wares and finally destroy its decaying cloth
industry.[179]
From their central stronghold in Antwerp the Merchant Adventurers
further maintained a lively war to right and left, on the one side with
the Staple at Calais, on the other with the Hanseatic League.
It was practically the jealousy of the Staplers that had first driven
the Adventurers from Bruges, and no sooner did they feel their strength
than they prepared to make their ancient enemies pay the penalty for
old wrongs. Towards the merchants of the Staple the very character
of their trade from the first forced them into a militant attitude.
Shut out from all interest in the sale of wool, their fortune rested
solely on the manufacturing industries, and the more weaving at home
was encouraged the greater were their gains.[180] And since the
wool merchants proceeded both to claim and to practise the right of
exporting and selling cloth as well as wool, they became in a double
sense obnoxious to their rivals. Now, however, the Adventurers could
fight from the vantage ground given them by their new position as a
chartered company. Out of their acknowledged right to demand tolls
on the sale of cloth in their marts, they deduced by a liberal
interpretation of their powers the right to require from each trading
Stapler in addition to the ordinary tolls an entrance fee or hanse of
ten marks, by payment of which he became a freeman of the Adventurers’
Company and was made subject to their laws and courts,[181] and if
he refused to pay they seized his wares, or imprisoned him till
he gave the “hanse.”[182] Wealthy merchants of the Staple who had
taken their wares to Middleburg might find themselves thrown into
prison among felons and murderers infected with odious diseases; the
resolute Adventurers refused bail, and quietly ignored royal letters
of remonstrance.[183] Already in 1457 the Staplers complained bitterly
to the English King and to the Duke of Burgundy, that under colour
of letters patent and charters, their enemies so vexed them both in
their goods and persons as to threaten them with utter ruin.[184] But
the decision of Henry the Sixth that the Adventurers were asserting
unjust claims which were strictly forbidden for the future[185]
scarcely interrupted the battle, and the same series of complaints
and aggressions was brought in 1504 before the Star Chamber, by whose
judgement the Adventurers were again forbidden to go beyond their
right of levying tolls. But if the law was against them they had
on their side their own inexhaustible activity, their unscrupulous
audacity, their large self-confidence, and the weakness of the dying
company of the Staple. Six years later when the Staplers again summoned
them before the King for their “crooked minds and froward sayings”
and lawless deeds of violence, they answered with uncompromising
contempt. The Staplers, they allowed, might have certain privileges
in Calais—but as to talking of rights in Burgundy, that in their
opinion was absurd to urge after the removal of the Staple thence.
Outside Calais the Staplers had no rights. With regard to their claim
to exclusive jurisdiction over their members, “that article might have
been left out of their book, for why every reasonable man knoweth
the contrary.” In spite of such “reasonable men,” however, once more
the law was proclaimed to be against them; but as they knew well the
law was powerless to set up again the ruined company of the Merchant
Staplers.[186]
With the second and more formidable army arrayed against them, the
merchants of the Hanseatic League, the war of the Adventurers had to be
carried on with greater circumspection. Through a couple of centuries
the doubtful conflict was maintained on every sea and in every port
from Danzig to Iceland. For the first hundred years things went ill
for the Adventurers. The League monopolized the whole commerce between
the Scandinavian kingdoms and England;[187] drove out the English
from Schonen, the centre to which all the fishers of the Baltic and
North Seas gathered for the salting, packing, and selling of their
fish;[188] harassed them with fire and sword in Bergen, the Staple
town of the north,[189] scattering them at one time by starvation, at
another by decrees of expulsion; banished them from the Prussian towns
belonging to the Teutonic Order which they were “destroying” with their
cloth,[190] and sought to ruin their trade by issuing an order that no
merchant of the Hanse should buy English cloth outside England itself.
When the League waged war with Denmark and Norway in 1368-9 to confirm
its mastery of the Northern Seas, it dragged the English traders at
its heels into the fight, and at its close threw them off without a
thought.[191] It gave a scornful answer to demands made by Parliament
under Edward the Third and Richard the Second that the tolls exacted
from Hanseatic traders for exporting goods from England should be
increased; and retorted by a decree that all trade with England should
be utterly broken off, thus shutting the great market at Elbing to the
English merchants who had made it the centre of their trade with Russia
and the towns of Prussia.[192]
The English traders, however, took all misfortune with the hardihood
and exuberant courage of youth. Help from their own government was
beyond hoping for, so long as conquering kings like Edward the Third
and Henry the Fifth were bound hand and foot to the great mercantile
houses of Lübeck and the Hanse towns by the loans raised from them
to carry on the French wars; while Henry the Fourth, who, before
he came to the throne, had been in Danzig and seen the troubles of
the English merchants there,[193] and who in his anxiety to win the
support of the trading class, was persistent in negotiations to improve
their position, had not the power to give effect to his desires. The
Adventurers, therefore, could only follow the one obvious course open
to them, and kept up a steady brigandage on the seas and a series of
opportune attacks on the enemy’s out-posts. They held on desperately
at Bergen,[194] and stoutly clung to the formal right which Henry the
Fourth had given them to organize themselves under consuls in Norway,
Sweden, or Denmark, for the carrying on of their trade.[195] Fishing
boats which were shut out from the Baltic or from Bergen sailed on to
Iceland, where, as the island was the private property of the King of
Norway (who was himself the servant of the League) and was allowed
to receive no ships save the King’s, or those licensed by the King,
opportunities for illegal trade were abundant and profits large. A
frugal people, needy and remote, eagerly welcomed smuggled goods from
England in exchange for their fish; and the smugglers carried on a
rough business—outlaws and daring men of their company plundered and
killed and stole cattle and desolated homesteads, and bartered after
their own self-made laws.[196] It mattered nothing to them that Henry
the Fifth, in obedience to the League, forbade the trade, or that in
a storm of 1419 twenty-five English ships were driven on the coast
of Iceland in three hours. Bristol men found their way to its shores
by help of the compass, leaving for us the first record of its use in
England, probably in 1424; and about 1436, in a year when the English
had been expelled from Bergen, so many vessels sailed to Iceland that
they could get no return cargo, and half of them had to come empty
home.[197] But the northern trade was not all violent or lawless.
English merchants bought double licenses from the English and the
Norwegian kings, which allowed them to carry on a regular traffic; and
in the middle of the fifteenth century one of the Bristol merchants,
Cannynges, had in his hands the chief trade with northern Europe.
Not only were his factors established in the Baltic ports, but his
transactions with Iceland and with Finland were on so great a scale
that when in 1450 all English trade with these regions was forbidden in
virtue of a treaty with the King of Denmark, Cannynges was specially
exempted on account of the debts due to him there by Danish subjects,
and for two years he had a monopoly of the trade.[198]
Meanwhile the Adventurers watched their opportunity to carry the
war nearer home, for the League, already weighted with the effort to
maintain its monopoly before the rise of Scandinavian powers and the
consolidation of the Duchy of Burgundy, was further troubled within its
own ranks by divided counsels.[199] In the reign of Henry the Sixth,
therefore, the English renewed among other claims their old demand that
the Hanseatic merchants should no longer be favoured at their expense,
but should be treated like any other foreigners and forced to pay the
same tolls on wine and wool. There was a chance of success, for Lübeck
and the western towns finding in their strength and self-reliance
arguments for a policy of peace with England, were generally for
amicable compromise; though the eastern towns led by Danzig, weaker
at sea and peculiarly sensitive to any increase of money burdens,
preferred fighting to submission with its apprehended dangers.[200] The
party of violence won the day and a fierce maritime war followed with
open hostilities and reprisals and lawsuits and endless negociations.
On one occasion the English seized a fleet of 108 sail returning to
Lübeck and Riga, and the men of the Hanse retaliated by laying hands on
rich English prizes. Trade was so ruined that Henry the Sixth declared
himself unable to pay to the Count Palatine the dowry of his aunt Lady
Blanche, because there were now no dues and customs coming into his
Treasury from the German merchants.[201] At last the dispute came to
a climax in 1469, when the English quarrelled with the German traders
in London, summoned them before the courts and imposed a fine of
£13,520,[202] while members of the Steel Yard were thrown into prison,
and the corporation nearly broken up.[203] The answer of Bremen,
Hamburg, and Danzig was given in a fleet which gathered against England
under the leadership of Charles the Bold. But just at this moment came
the English revolution by which Edward the Fourth was driven out of the
country, and all the great trading bodies, the Hanseatic League, and
the Flemish and Dutch corporations, seeing the danger which threatened
their commerce from the new political situation, cast aside minor
quarrels and united to set Edward again on the throne.[204] Such a
service demanded a great reward; and in 1474 a treaty was signed at
Utrecht, by which the Hanse was given back all its earlier privileges,
and secured in possession of its Guild Hall and Steel Yard in London,
and its houses in Boston and Lynn. The Adventurers who made a bold
demand that the Easterlings should renounce the right of carrying out
wool or wool-fells from England can scarcely have expected to succeed;
but they at least gained some measure of peace for their colony in
Danzig.[205]
The Hanseatic League, however, had now come to an end of its triumphs.
From this time the English pressed them hard. A law which forbade
the import of silk and the export of undressed cloths struck a heavy
blow at their trade. Then came the order that Rhine wine must only
be carried in English ships. Officials used their infinite powers of
annoyance with hearty good will, and the merchant who landed with his
goods, harassed first by the relentless officers sitting at the receipt
of custom, and then thwarted in every possible way by the Mayor and
corporation,[206] was at last driven by public abuse behind the walls
of the Steel Yard, so that in 1490 a member of the Hanse dared scarcely
show himself in the streets of London.
Meanwhile the great confederation of Commonwealths itself showed grave
signs of falling asunder. The bigger towns that no longer needed the
protection of the association were quite ready to forsake it, and in
1501 began to refuse to bring their cloth to the Staple at Bruges, and
to look for freer conditions of trade. At the same time the monopoly
of the League was being threatened on all sides. The Prussian and
Livonian towns treated them as enemies. A Dutch fleet competed with
them in the Baltic. A Danish trading company had risen to dispute their
monopoly in Denmark. The Swedes shut them out. The Norwegians made
intermittent experiments at independence. At last in 1478 came the
worst calamity that could befall their trade, the capture of Novgorod
by the Muscovites, with the destruction of its free government and the
ruin of its position as one of the commercial capitals of the world.
With the demolition of the League factory, the loss of all its
possessions in the city, and the whole dislocation of the Eastern
traffic, the supremacy of the Hanseatic Confederation was shattered,
as the supremacy of the Italians in the Southern trade had been
shattered half a century before by the conquest of Alexandria. English
Adventurers naturally saw in every fresh trouble that assailed their
rivals a new argument for aggression, and welcomed in Henry the Seventh
a leader equal to the great occasion. Never had they found a better
friend, or one who so finely interpreted the popular instinct of his
time. How completely his determination to strengthen by every means
in his power the position of the Adventurers in Antwerp against the
Hanseatic traders at Bruges, and to bind England and Burgundy together
into a united commercial state, fell in with the needs and temper of
his people was strikingly shown after a two years’ interruption of
commerce with the Low Countries caused by the affair of Perkin Warbeck,
when a burst of popular joy hailed the renewal of trade, and the wild
enthusiasm of the people gave to the treaty of 1496 which restored the
old kindly relations the high-sounding name of the _Intercursus Magnus_.
The big name has, as usual, imposed a little on later generations, and
greater treaties have gone unnoticed for want of an equally pompous
title. At first, indeed, amid the political disquiet and the trade
depression which marked the early years of his reign, Henry went to
work slowly and patiently, and in 1486 even confirmed the Utrecht
treaty of 1474 which ensured a number of privileges to the Hanse. But
this policy of peace was only assumed for a brief space while he was
making ready for war. In 1486 he renewed the commercial treaty made by
Edward with Britanny in 1467.[207] The real campaign, however, may be
said to have opened by the Navigation Act of 1489, when the shipping
trade was definitely taken under State protection. And what that State
protection implied was at once shown in a series of commercial treaties
with almost every trading country of Europe, whether its traffic lay in
the northern or the southern seas. Building up on every hand alliances
against the Hanseatic Confederation he steadily drew to himself the
friendship of the Scandinavian peoples tired of the domination of the
League. In 1489 he sent an embassy (two of the deputation being Lynn
merchants), to make terms for a commercial alliance with Denmark and
Norway, and won from the Northern powers freedom of trade for the
English in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, with the right to acquire
land, to form corporations and choose aldermen, and to be under special
protection of the Danish King.[208] To defeat the pretensions of Danzig
he turned to the Livonian towns, and by treaty with Riga attempted to
secure a Russian trade which might open the way of Novgorod and the
East to English Adventurers—an attempt which however was frustrated
a few years later.[209] A conference was held in 1491 at Antwerp with
the Hanseatic envoys, whom Henry with diplomatic insolence kept idly
waiting for four weeks till the messengers he had sent to Denmark with
friendly proposals of a treaty as unfavourable as possible to the
interests of the Hanse, returned with their answer. The promise of this
inauspicious opening for the League was amply fulfilled in the long
negotiations which lasted at Antwerp from 1491 to 1499, and in which
the foreigner was consistently humbled before the triumphant Merchant
Adventurer, all his compromises rejected so far as they tended to limit
the freedom of the English trader, and the League compelled to accept
terms ruinous to its interests and disastrous to its great tradition of
supremacy.[210]
The story of these Antwerp negotiations gives us a true measure of the
place gained during the last hundred years by the Merchant Adventurers
in the North, where, having dealt the last blows to the ancient company
of the Staple, and broken the power of the Hanseatic League, their
fleets now sailed triumphantly on every sea. And yet this was but half
their work; for the North was a small thing to win unless they could
also load English vessels with the cargoes of the East and the tribute
of the great commercial cities of the Mediterranean. Until the middle
of the fifteenth century the trade of the eastern Mediterranean had
been altogether carried on by Italians.[211] It was only in 1432 that
the French merchant Jacques Coeur (the stories of whose wealth and
power read like fables beside the modest doings of our native traders),
had sent out some ships to take part in the Eastern trade; and the
Levant was not really opened to Western merchants till 1442, when the
Venetians were driven out of Egypt and the monopoly of the Italians
broken up. It was very soon after that a Bristol merchant, Sturmys,
fitted out probably the first English ship that visited the Eastern
shores of the Mediterranean. But the new inheritors of the East were
received with bitter jealousies. Rival vessels fought for the spoils
and carried off the booty like common pirates; and the Genoese traders
in their anger seized Sturmys’ ship on its return voyage and robbed
it of its cargo of spices and green pepper. He reckoned his loss at
6,000 francs, and on his complaint to the government all the Genoese
merchants in London were thrown into prison until they should give
bonds for the payment of this sum.[212]
The question of the Mediterranean was thus vigorously opened. In
London, indeed, the Italians might securely reckon on hard treatment.
Merchants just beginning to feel their strength, half-ruined Staplers,
London shopkeepers and manufacturers, all alike hated their Italian
rivals with a common hatred, and were crying out for the most decisive
measures against foreign competition. Less careful than their King
of nursing political alliances[213] in view of foreign wars and
complications, the traders boldly proposed a bill in the Parliament
of 1439 to forbid the Venetians from carrying any wares save those of
their own manufacture—a measure which if it had passed would have
practically annihilated the whole Venetian trade to England. Their
next proposal was a law to forbid selling anything to the Genoese or
carrying anything to their port. Steadily supported as the Lombards
were by the King against the people, they nevertheless saw their
privileges from this time limited step by step; and once after the
persecution of 1455 in London even attempted to leave the capital for
ever. The great days of their trade monopoly were gone. Edward the
Fourth and Richard the Third laid heavy burdens on them. Henry the
Seventh kept them dependent on his arbitrary will for a very slight
increase of freedom, such as he might see fit to grant from time to
time, tried to limit their gains, and in the very first year of his
reign forbade them to carry French woad or wine, or silk goods, and
further hindered them in the export of wool.
At this time the population of the Venetian Republic was bigger
than that of all England, and English traders had a good many other
affairs on their hands beside their quarrel with Venice. The dispute,
nevertheless, did not languish. No sooner were Henry’s regulations
proclaimed in 1485 than English merchants set sail for Crete, bought
up the stores of malmsey there,[214] and carried them off to the
Netherlands under the very eyes of the Venetian captains. Venice passed
a law against such traffic, and in the stress of anxiety as to the
English competition took to building better ships to maintain her own
carrying trade; while England retorted by setting up a monopoly of her
own wool in revenge for the Venetian monopoly of wine.
Meanwhile, the quick-witted Florentines, driven out of traditional
routine by the intensity of the long competition for supremacy, had
begun to doubt the value for them of the old policy of naval protection
which the city had shared with Venice and Genoa; and had frankly
adopted in 1480 a system of free-trade. In Constantinople and Egypt
Florence began again to hold her own against Venice and to win back
command of Eastern markets, and she eagerly welcomed English wool
merchants to her port at Pisa.[215] In 1485, the year when England
entered into the lists with Venice, these had become so numerous and
powerful a body that a consul was appointed over them; and five years
later, Henry made a commercial treaty with Florence which was one
of the most remarkable acts of his reign. By its provisions English
merchants undertook to carry every year to Florence sufficient wool
to supply all the Italian States save Venice, and in return they were
given every privilege their hearts desired.[216] The only resource left
to the Venetians was to forbid that any wine should be shipped from
Crete to Pisa, so that English vessels which went out laden with wool
finding no return cargo should be driven to sail home empty. Henry
immediately set such heavy import duties on malmsey in England that the
Venetians, seeing their wine-trade on the point of ruin, bowed at last
to the inevitable. The victory of the English merchants was finally
proclaimed when Henry in 1507 only consented to renew the charter that
gave Venetians rights of trade in England on condition that they bound
themselves to do no carrying trade between the Netherlands and England,
but to leave that to the Merchant Adventurers.[217]
Meanwhile, in all the ports visited by English ships between the
Mediterranean and the Channel the same buoyant spirit of successful
enterprise vanquished every obstacle. Englishmen had always traded much
with their fellow-subjects in Aquitaine. From the days of St. Thomas
Canterbury had dealings with the wine-growers of the south.[218] Ships
of Bordeaux were known in every port of the Channel, and in 1350, 141
vessels laden with wine sailed thence to London alone,[219] while the
early wealth of Bristol had been created by the cargoes of wool carried
from its port to feed the Gascon manufactories, and the casks of wine
sent back to fill its cellars. Conditions so pleasant for the Bristol
burghers were rudely changed when in 1445 Bordeaux fell into the hands
of the French, and English traders instead of being the masters had
to go humbly at the bidding of the men of Bordeaux with a red cross
on their backs, doing business only in the town, or going into the
country under the guardianship of a police agent. But if the burghers
of the later fifteenth century cared nothing for the re-conquest of
the French provinces, on the other hand they were determined not to
lose their trade. The wool dealers, shut out of Bordeaux, turned to
the North, to Rouen and Calais, changed their wool there for the wine
of Niederburgund, and so started the woollen manufactures of Normandy,
while those of Bordeaux declined. By a succession of commercial
treaties[220] and by the Navigation Act of 1489, which shut out Gascon
ships from the English wine trade, Henry secured for English merchants
in Bordeaux such adequate protection that the efforts of Louis the
Twelfth to limit their freedom of trade by passing a Navigation Act of
his own were utterly vain. The Bordeaux citizens, filled with impotent
rage, watched the English traders going up and down the land, 6,000
to 8,000 of them, as they averred, armed with sticks, and scouring the
country for wine.
The ports of Spain and Portugal also were visited by increasing
numbers of English vessels on their way to the Mediterranean, and old
trading alliances were renewed with countries whose harbours were such
valuable resting places.[221] There had long been commercial treaties
with Castile and Catalonia, who competed for the profits to be won by
carrying to England Spanish iron and fruits along with the wine and
woad of neighbouring lands. But Henry the Seventh took the occasion of
the negotiations for the Spanish marriage in 1489 to stipulate anew for
freedom of trade and protection of English ships; while at the same
time the English merchants asserted that by the new Navigation Act the
whole export trade was now their exclusive right, and under the plea
that their ships could not make the voyage to Spain unless they had a
certainty of coming back well laden, forbade the carrying of Toulouse
woad and Gascony wine in Spanish ships. By this time the Englishman had
as usual roused the fear and hatred of the native merchants, and the
Spaniards violently resisted the new policy. Heavy tolls were imposed
on either side to ruin the trade of the other, and in one season eight
hundred English ships were sent home empty from Seville because the
patriotic Spanish dealers with one accord refused their wares to the
enemy. Again fortune came to help the pertinacity of the Adventurers.
In 1492 Spain drove the Jews and Moors from her shores. But their
business simply fell into alien hands waiting to receive it, and the
hated English merchants flocked to Spanish harbours now swept of their
old rivals, and sailed back to England laden with the gold of the New
World.[222]
Nor was the good chance that favoured them in Portugal less wonderful.
With the traders of Lisbon and Oporto England had entered into a
commercial treaty in the middle of the fourteenth century—a treaty
which was altered in 1386 to include the whole of Portugal.[223] But by
some happy destiny whose favours strewed the path of English traders,
they asked and obtained in 1458 a revision of old agreements so as
to secure the utmost advantage for their own interests, and all this
had been completed just before the discovery of the Cape route gave
to Portugal its enormous naval importance and threw Eastern commerce
into a new channel. The quarrel with Venice inspired the English with
increased ardour in their friendship for the new masters of the spice
trade; and when Portuguese dealers invited English merchants to make
their bargains for Eastern wares in Lisbon instead of journeying to
Venice, these gathered in such numbers to the new emporium of Indian
goods that their own shipping failed to carry the wealth offered to
them and the merchants had to hire Portuguese vessels.[224]
Thus it was that in the face of the powerful confederations that held
the trade of the Northern and the Southern Seas English merchants were
laying violent hands on the commerce of the world. They had vanquished
their rivals in the north, while in the south they had firmly planted
themselves in every important trading port along the western coast of
Europe, and competed with the Italian Republics not only for their
own carrying trade but for that of the Netherlands as well. If in the
reign of Edward the Third practically the whole of the foreign commerce
of England was carried in foreign vessels, in the reign of Henry the
Seventh the great bulk of the trade had passed into English hands.
British merchants were to be found in every port from Alexandria to
Reykjavik, and wherever they touched left behind them an organized and
firmly established trade. As we have seen, their battle for supremacy
in commerce had in its beginnings been fought by free-traders and
pirates warring against the orderly forces of organized protection; but
the final victory was awarded to them in their later stage of a company
of monopolists sustained and cherished by the State. The question,
indeed, of how far protection contributed to the success of the English
or to the loss of the foreigner is far from being a simple one. For
in its first stages the work done by protection may possibly consist
for a time mainly in the _abolition_ of privilege, and this process may
pass by very slow and imperceptible degrees to its last stage, that of
_conferring_ privilege. It is, therefore, hard to decipher the lesson
when we are studying a commerce where protection has but begun its
work in conflict with a commerce when that work is perfected. In the
history of the later fifteenth century, moreover, the problem is yet
further complicated by the present working of those vast forces which
make or unmake the fortunes of continents, and before which the wisest
policies of States, policies of protection or of free-trade or of any
other elaborate product of human intelligence, are powerful as an army
of phantoms.