BRITIS

RITISH commerce began more than two thousand years ago. The Phoenician and Carthaginian traders, visiting the Scilly Islands and the coast of Cornwall in quest of tin, laid the foundations of that system of merchandise which has done so much to make of our little island of Britain a mighty nation, and to bring under its dominion many of the fairest provinces in every quarter of the world. Coming to our shores as early, we are told by antiquaries, as the fifth or sixth century before Christ, and at first coming only for the tin that was found more plentifully, and better prepared, by the ancient Britons than by any other people, these traders soon included lead and hides in their purchases, and brought in exchange various articles of earthenware, brass manufacture, and salt. When the Tyrian race died out, others carried on the trade, the Cornish marts being replaced by others in the Isle of Wight and on the coast of Kent, whither the commodities were conveyed from the inland districts of England, to be taken in Gallic ships for sale in various parts of the Continent. With the growth of manufactories and marts, increased the number and variety of articles to be sold. Corn, gold, silver, iron, and precious stones, as well as tin and lead, were the chief commodities exported before and after the conquest of Julius Cæsar.

It was the fame of the British pearls, according to one tradition, that first prompted Cæsar to cross the Gallic Straits; and the report of his soldiery speedily opened up a thriving trade with the Kentish towns for oysters to augment the luxuries of Roman feasting, for bears to fill the Roman circus, and for dogs to be used by Roman sportsmen. The establishment of Latin colonies in Britain, of course, gave a great encouragement VOL. V.-NO. XXVII.

to trade. Among the towns that during the first few Christian centuries became most famous, there were, besides London, Canterbury and Rochester, Richborough and Dover, Exeter and Chester, York, Aberdeen, and Dumbarton.

British trade declined after the Anglo-Saxon settlement, but, under English management, these same towns, with many others, prospered more than ever. When Christianity was introduced, and pious men betook themselves to monasteries, they became the special patrons of commerce and agriculture, being labourers and mechanicians themselves, as well as instructors of their lay brethren in the various arts of civilized life. We command,' runs one of Edgar's laws, 'that every priest, to increase knowledge, diligently learn some handicraft;' while smiths and carpenters, fishermen and millers, weavers and architects, are frequently mentioned in old chronicles as belonging to various convents. The smith was the oldest and most honoured of all workmen. 'Whence,' he is made to ask, in a curious collection of Anglo-Saxon dialogues, 'whence hath the ploughman his ploughshare and goad, save by my art? whence hath the fisherman his rod, or the shoemaker his awl, or the sempstress her needle, but from me?' In the same work, the merchant asserts his dignity and the nature of his calling. 'I am useful,' he says, 'to the king and his nobles, to rich men and to common folk. I enter my ship with my merchandise, and sail across the seas, and sell my wares, and buy dear things that are not produced in this land, and bring them with great danger for your good; and sometimes I am shipwrecked, and lose all my wares, and hardly myself escape.' 'What is it you bring us?' one asks. 'I bring you,' he replies, skins, silks, costly gems and gold

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various garments, pigments, wine, oil, ivory and brass, copper and tin, silver, glass, and such like.' 'Will you sell your things here,' inquires the other speaker, 'as you bought them there?' To which the merchant answers, Nay, in truth; else where would be the good of all my labour? I will sell them here dearer than I bought them there, that so I may get some profit, to feed me and my wife and children.'

In those early days, and for many centuries after, the merchant was the captain of his own little ship, and thus had the entire range of his business under his own supervision. He was deservedly held in honour by his countrymen. By a law of Athelstan, published near the middle of the tenth century, it was appointed that every merchant, even though he were by birth a serf, who had made three journeys across the sea with his own ship and goods, was to have the rank of a thane. The ships were mere boats, rude constructions of wood, propelled by eight or ten oars, with the assistance of a single square sail suspended from a single mast, and seldom large enough to hold more than half a dozen men, with two or three tons of cargo. Yet in these poor vessels, having no other compass than the sun and stars, and no proper rudder to direct their motions, our fearless forefathers wandered wherever they would. The silks and pigments, referred to in the dialogue just cited, could hardly have come from a nearer part than Italy or Marseilles. We know that trading voyages were often made to Rome, and that in the eighth century one Anglo-Saxon merchant, at any rate, was settled, and had influential position in Marseilles.

cestors, of buying men and women in all parts of England, and exporting them to Ireland for the sake of gain. You might have seen, with sorrow, long ranks of youths and maidens, of the greatest beauty, tied together with ropes, and daily exposed to sale; nor were these men ashamed-oh, horrid wickedness!to give up their nearest relations, even their own children, to slavery.' It is to be hoped that dealings of this sort were not very common; but it is clear that during these centuries the Irish, or rather, perhaps, the Danes, who were masters of a large part of Ireland, carried on a considerable trade with England. In very early times their merchants brought cloths to Cambridge, and exhibited them in the streets for sale; and Chester was filled during the summer months by Irishmen, bringing marten-skins and other articles to sell, and buying in exchange the various commodities most needed by their own people.

Yet English commerce was still in its infancy. By one of the laws of Lothair, of Kent, living in the seventh century, no one was allowed to buy anything worth more than twenty pennies something like five pounds, according to the present value of money-except within the walls of a town, and in the presence of the chief magistrate, or two

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more witnesses. Another of Lothair's laws appoints that 'If any one of the people of Kent buy anything in the city of London, he must have two or three honest men, or the king's port-reeve, present at the bargain;' and in a third it is written: 'Let none exchange one thing for another, except in the presence of the sheriff, the mass priest, the lord of the manor, or some other person of undoubted veracity. If they do otherwise, they shall pay a fine of thirty shillings, besides forfeiting the goods so exchanged to the lord of the manor.' From such enactments we infer, in the first place, that rogues were so numerous, and false dealings so prevalent, even in these early days, that it was not safe for trade to be carried on in any but the most public manner; and, in the second, that, from the beginning,

states and muncipalities obtained part of their revenues from imposts upon articles of commerce. In Lewes, at the time of the Domesday Survey, a tax of a farthing was levied by the sheriff on the sale of every ox; and when a slave changed hands, the payment due to the town exchequer was fourpence. In most parts of the kingdom, moreover, perhaps in all, a percentage on the price of every article sold for more than twenty pennies was divided between the king and the lord of the manor, half being levied from the buyer and half from the seller. The fairs or markets spread over the kingdom also paid toll to the crown. We read of one in Bedfordshire that yielded seven pounds a year, and of another at Taunton which produced about fifty shillings.

Fairs did the work of shops in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman times, and in doing so they gradually lost the religious character with which they were at first started.

In the beginning of holy church,' it is written in one of the old legends, 'it was so that people came at nighttime to the church with candles burning; they would wake and come with light toward the church in their devotions; but after, they fell to lechery and songs, dances, harping, piping, and also to gluttony and sin, and so turned the holiness to cursedness. Wherefore, holy fathers ordained the people to leave that waking'-a term still retained in the Irish wakes-and to fast at even.' The evening fasts, however, were as unprofitable, from a religious point of view, as those formerly held at night-time. The people who assembled, generally in the churchyards, and often in the churches themselves, of the saints whose merits they came to celebrate, soon turned their meetings into opportunities for amusement, and laid the foundation of those periodical fairs which, despite all the opposition of the clergy and other lovers of good order, have held their ground almost to the present day. But all the money was not spent in feasting and sightseeing. Wherever numbers of people were gathered together, it was natural that

tradesmen should bring their wares for sale; and to the villagers spending most of their time quite out of the reach of the scanty commerce of those ages, it was a great advantage to meet with merchants provided with large collections of useful and ornamental articles of home and foreign production, and willing to barter them for sheepskins and agricultural produce, or any of the rough and tough manufactures of the local workmen. In this way fairs became markets; and markets, that never had been fairs, came to be held at various intervals, yearly, monthly, or weekly, in every part of the land.

English

commerce was in a healthier condition just before than just after the Norman Conquest. Under Edward the Confessor, merchants were highly esteemed; they travelled much in France and Germany, and brought back foreign goods of every description; while the merchants of other countries not only came to trade in England, but had already begun to find the advantage of making it their home. But trade was scorned by the Normans, and, although their habits, more extravagant and ambitious than those of the Anglo-Saxons, in due time led to its further extension, their violent coming at first very greatly hindered its progress. The English merchants,' says William of Poictiers, William the Conqueror's own chaplain, and too stanch a hater of Anglo-Saxons to say more in their favour than he could help, 'to the opulence of their country, rich in its own fertility, added still greater riches and more valuable treasures. The articles imported by them, notable both for their quantity and their quality, were either to have been hoarded up for the gratification of their avarice, or to have been dissipated in the indulgence of their luxurious inclinations. But William seized them and bestowed part on his victorious army, and part on the churches and monasteries, while to the Pope and the Church of Rome he sent an incredible mass of money in gold and silver, and many ornaments that would have been admired even

in Constantinople.' It was not, however, until a curb had been put upon royal extortion and injustice, that the English merchants were able to pursue their ways with ease and profit. For the half-century following the Conquest we know little of the history of commerce, and it is probable that little progress was made in it. In the charters granted by the two Williams and Henry I., no reference is made to merchandise; and the public documents of these kings show only that they levied heavy tolls both on shipping and on inland trade.

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One beneficial measure, however, is to be set to the credit of Henry I. In 1110 he founded a settlement of Flemings in the neighbourhood of Ross in Pembrokeshire. hardy colonists were invited chiefly with the view of checking the lawlessness of the marauding Welsh, and this they did with excellent result. But they did far more for England. Giraldus Cambrensis speaks of them as a people notably skilled both in the business of making cloth and in merchandise, ever ready with any labour or danger to seek for gain by sea or land.' For centuries English sheepskins had been bought up by traders from the Continent to be taken abroad and converted into woollen garments. With the Flemish settlers, however, came to England the Flemish art of woollen manufacture, and henceforth this trade, a most important element in British commerce, was naturalized among us.

Colonists of another and very different class were also encouraged in England at about the same time. These were the Jews, a fair sprinkling of whom had been mixed with the Anglo-Saxons from a period prior to Edward the Confessor's reign, and of whom great numbers began to cross the Channel immediately after the coming of the Normans. By William Rufus they were especially favoured, and Henry I. conferred on them a charter of privileges. They were enabled to claim, in courts of law, the repayment of any money, lent by them, as easily as Christians, and, while Christians were forbidden to charge

any interest for their loans, there were no restrictions to the avarice of the Jewish capitalists. It was to the interest of the sovereigns that the Jews should be rich men, as then more gold could be forced from them, for the quelling of enemies abroad or of insurrections at home, whenever there was need of it. England itself also profited by this arrangement. The gathering up of wealth, to be spent in large schemes of traffic, is a great advantage to society; and in the main the Jews did this work honestly and well. In no worse spirit than actuated their Christian contemporaries, they taught sound lessons of economy and prudence to the world, and therefore are entitled to the hearty praise of posterity.

During the first half of the twelfth century, Scotland-undisturbed by Norman invasion, but, on the contrary, greatly benefited by the disasters which sent many peaceable and enterprising southerners to try their fortunes in the north-was commercially in advance of England. Under the wise guidance of the best of its kings, David the First, who reigned from 1124 to 1153, it passed at once from what was very like barbarism to as much civilization as could be claimed for any nation in that time. Foreign merchants were invited by David to visit his ports, and every encouragement was given to his own subjects to cross the seas on errands of trade. One of his laws exempted the property of all persons trading with foreign countries from seizure on any claim whatever during their absence, unless it could be shown that they had left their homes with the purpose of evading justice. He gave special encouragement makers of woollen cloths; and we are told by one contemporary writer that at the end of his reign, and in that of his successor, the towns and burghs of Scotland were chiefly filled with Englishmen, many of them skilled in the art lately brought over by the Flemish colonists.

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A race of Stephens would soon have depopulated England. Henry II., however, did his utmost to remedy the evils caused by the civil

wars which led to his being made king, and his reign was one of commercial prosperity never before equalled. London, containing at this period between thirty and forty thousand inhabitants, the most populous town in the kingdom, and now, for the first time, the fixed abode of the king and his court, was of course the emporium of foreign and domestic trade. No city in the world, according to William FitzStephen, the biographer of Becket, sent so far and to so many quarters its wealth and merchandise; and none was so largely the resort of foreign dealers. Gold, spice, and frankincense were brought to it from Arabia; precious stones from Egypt; purple cloths from India; palm oil from Bagdad; furs and ermines from Norway and Russia; weapons from Scythia; and wines from France. 'Let there,' wrote Henry II. to the Emperor Frederick of Germany in 1157, 'be between ourselves and our subjects an indivisible unity of friendship and peace, and safe trade of merchandise; and the Germans were not slow in using the advantages offered them. London,' says William of Malmesbury, 'is filled with goods brought by the merchants of all countries, but especially with those of Germany; and, when there is scarcity of corn in other parts of England, it is a granary where the article may be bought more cheaply than anywhere else.' Its citizens, called barons, to distinguish them from the dwellers in other towns, were separated from all others by the elegance of their dress and bearing, and the grandeur of their festivities.

After London the most thriving city was Bristol, famous, as we have seen, in Anglo-Saxon times, and the chief port for vessels trading with Ireland and Norway. From Henry II. its burgesses received a charter exempting them from tolls and some other impositions throughout England, Wales, and Normandy. Chester was another great receiving-place for the commodities of Ireland, while much was also imported from Gascony, Spain, and Germany; 'so that,' writes one, being comforted

of God in all things, we drink wine very plentifully; for those countries have abundance of vineyards.' England had vineyards also in those days; and Gloucester and Winchester were noted for their trade in excellent wines of native production. Exeter engrossed much of the trade of the south. It is described as a port full of wealthy citizens and the resort of no less wealthy foreigners, who came for the minerals dug up in the surrounding districts, and gave in exchange abundance of every foreign luxury that could be desired. Ön the eastern coast, Dunwich, now more than half washed away by the violence of the Suffolk seas, was a flourishing port, stored with every kind of riches,' while Yarmouth was rapidly growing into importance as a fishing station. Lynn, the dwelling-place of many wealthy Jewish families, had much trade with the cities of Germany and northern France; and Lincoln-made accessible to foreign vessels by means of a great canal, connecting the Trent and the Witham, which had been constructed by Henry I.'s orders in 1121-was now becoming one of the most extensive seats of commerce in England. York had been so much devastated by war at the time of the Conquest, and by many dreadful fires in later years, that its trade had been seriously impaired. It was still, however, visited by many vessels from Germany and Iceland, while Grimsby was a favourite resort of merchants from Norway, Scotland, the Orkneys, and the Western Isles, and Whitby and Hartlepool were prosperous towns. Berwick, the frequent cause of contention, during the middle ages, between the northern and southern kingdoms, was at this time the chief port of Scotland, one of its citizens, a man of Danish origin, named Cnut, being so wealthy that when a vessel belonging to him, with his wife on board, was seized by a piratical earl of Orkney, he was able to 'spend a hundred marks in hiring fourteen stout ships, suitably equipped, with which to go out and punish the offender. Other grow

ing towns of Scotland were Perth.