certain English ships with merchandize for those prohibited places, and there to take fish and other goods in return.' And Canning's ships were about the largest hitherto known in England. Under date 1460, we read that during eight years he employed on an average eight hundred mariners in the navigation of ten vessels, with an aggregate burthen of 2,930 tons. The names of these ships were the Mary and John,' of 900 tons, the 'Mary Redcliffe,' of 500, and the 'Mary Canning,' of 400, which cost him in all 4,000 marks, worth considerably more than 25,000l. in our money; the Mary Bat,' and the 'Katherine of Boston,' of 220 tons burthen apiece; the Margaret of Tylney,' of 200 tons; the Katherine,' and the 'Little Nicholas,' of 140 each; and the 'Galiot,' of 50; besides one of about 160 tons burthen, which was lost in Iceland.

It was not alone to Iceland that Canning sent his great ships. In 1449 Henry VI. addressed letters of commendation to the master-general of Prussia and the magistrates of Dantzic, inviting their favour towards his factors established within their jurisdictions, and especially towards William Canning, his beloved and eminent merchant of Bristol.' In going to these parts, Canning was opening up a branch of commerce almost new to Englishmen, and treading ground hitherto all but monopolized by the Flemish merchants. In 'The Libel of English Policy,' written in 1436, we read:

:

'Now beer and bacon are from Prussia brought
Into Flaunders, as loved and dearly sought;
Iron, copper, bow-staves, steel, and wax,
Boars' hides and badgers', pitch, tar, wood, and
flax,

And Cologne thread, and fustian, and canvas,
And card and buckram,-of old time thus it was.
Also the Prussians make their adventure
Of silver plate, of wedges good and sure
In greatë plenty, which they bring and buy
Out of Bohemia and of Hungary;
Which is increase full great unto their land,
And they be laden, as I understand,
With woollen cloths, all manner of colours,
By dyers' crafts full diverse, that be ours;'

That is, with dyed cloths exported from England by the Flemings.

The favours shown to Canning

by Henry VI. were not altogether unselfish. The last and worst of the Lancastrian kings, more extravagant and not less needy than his predecessors, followed their fashion of exacting aid from wealthy subjects and paying them by conferring special privileges connected with trade. There is no record of payments made by Canning to Henry, but that they were made is hardly to be doubted. We know that he was a zealous Lancastrian, and served his king by all the means in his power, having been made bailiff of Bristol in 1431, sheriff in 1438, and mayor in 1441 and 1449. In the latter year-the same year in which he was recommended to the Prussian and Dantzic authoritieshe used his influence with the Common Council towards putting the town in a proper state of defence against the threatened attacks of the Yorkist party, rapidly gaining ground in the west of England. In 1450, 15. were spent in repairing the walls of Bristol, and 40l. in the purchase of certyn gonnes and other stuffe necessarie for the defence of the said town,' being 20 botefull of warpestones, all the saltpetre that may be founde in the towne, and a dozen brasyn gonnes, to be made shetying (shooting) peletts as grate as a Parys ball or less, and every gonne with 4 cham

bers.'

In 1451, Canning was sent to Westminster as M.P. for Bristol, two shillings a day being allowed by the city authorities for his expenses; and while there he took part in some memorable business. The business most concerning us at present was the voting of 1,000l. to be levied from the more important seaport towns, and used in equipping a fleet for the protection of trade.' The money was to be made up of subsidies on all wine imported at 3s. a ton from native merchants, and 6s. a ton from foreigners, and of 18. in the pound on the value of all other merchandize, with the exception of cloth, imported or exported during three years from April, 1454. The proportions in which the 1,000l. was to be levied give us some clue to

the relative importance of English trading towns in the middle of the fifteenth century. London was to contribute 300l., and Bristol, next in importance, had to furnish 150l. Southampton was assessed at rool., York and Hull at rool. between them, while another 100l. was to be collected at Norwich and Yarmouth, and another at Ipswich, Colchester, and Maldon. The contribution of Lynn was reckoned at 50l., while 50l. more was to come from Salisbury, Poole, and Weymouth, 30l. from Boston, and 20l. from Newcastle-on-Tyne.

Parliament dissolved in 1455, and on the summons for a new one, Canning was at once re-elected by the Bristol men. In 1456 he served as mayor for the third time; and in this year we find him entertaining Margaret of Anjou, coming to Bristol to try and quicken the interest of the western people in the dying cause of her husband. He himself was not slack in his allegiance. 'A stately vessel, only for the war, we read under date of 1457, is made new at Bristol, and the said town, with the west coasts, will do their part.'

These efforts, however, were not successful. Having been again made mayor in the autumn of 1460, Canning had in the following spring to entertain the new king, Edward IV., when he came on a visit to those parts. The entertainment was in princely style, and a quaint pageant, illustrating Edward's many virtues and great generosity, was prepared for his amusement. But the king did not come to be amused. His chief business in Bristol was to inquire into the wealth of its various merchants and see what benevolences could be obtained from them. Canning, the richest of the number, and doubtless the most zealous supporter of the Lancastrian party, was found to possess the nine ships already named, and had, in consequence, to pay no less a sum than 3,000 marks, representing about 20,000l. of money at its present value, 'for the making of his peace.'

Unfortunately, we are not told what was the estimated wealth of

the other Bristol men, or what were the benevolences exacted from them. But the royal purse must have been tolerably full before Edward left the town. Canning was only the foremost of a crowd of merchant princes then living_in Bristol. One of the chief was Robert Sturmy, mayor in 1450, and some years older than Canning. He lived in princely style, we are told, keeping open house for the traders of all lands. His principal dealings were with the Levant. In his younger days he had gone to Jerusalem, taking a hundred and sixty pilgrims thither in his good ship Anne,' and finding room also for some rare articles of commerce which would more than pay the cost of the journey. But on his return, he was shipwrecked near Navarino, on the Greek coast, and thirty-seven of his companions were drowned. He himself lived to run other risks. In 1458, we read,' as the fame ran that he had gotten some green pepper and other spices to have set and sown in England, therefore the Genoese waited him upon the sea and spoiled his ship and another;' but for this offence the Genoese merchants resident in London were arrested and imprisoned until they consented to make good the value of the lost property, estimated at 9,000 marks. Other merchants contemporary with Canning were the Jays, a large and influential family, famous in two generations. One of them was bailiff of Bristol in 1456, another was sheriff in 1472. In 1480, we read in a contemporary narrative which it is hard to disbelieve, although there is evidently some mistake in the record, 'A ship of John Jay the younger, of 800 tons, and another, began their voyage from King'sroad to the Island of Brazil, to the coast of Ireland, ploughing their way through the sea. And Thlyde was the pilot of the ships, the most scientific mariner in all England; and news came to Bristol that the said ships sailed about the sea during nine months, and did not find the island, but, driven by tempests, they returned to a port on the coast of Ireland for the repose

of themselves and their mariners,' and there, for aught we know, they repose to this day.

Other merchants mustered round Canning and worked with him in making Bristol rich and famous during the disastrous period of the Wars of the Roses. The most important act of his last mayoralty, in 1466, was the forming them into a sort of guild, for mutual protection in regulating the prices of various articles of trade and mutual help in misfortune. Such an association would ill agree with the free-trade principles of modern times; but by this means Bristol was doubtless saved from much misery under the later Plantagenets, and enabled to prosper beyond all precedent under the earlier Tudors.

But Canning, now sixty-seven years old, did not seek for winning any of the benefits to be obtained by the guild. After many years of married life, he had become a widower in 1460, and it is probable that all his children, if indeed any of them passed out of infancy, were dead before this time. He had grown rich, and had now no further need for riches. Much of his wealth he spent in the restoration of the noble church of St. Mary Redcliff, and tradition makes him the founder of many charities. But he was not willing to let it go into the purse of the king, to whose cause he was opposed. The story goes that a project of Edward IV.'s for finding him a second wife, and of course exacting a large sum of money in honour of the marriage, forced him to retire suddenly from the business of this life. At any rate, for some reason or other, in 1467' he gave up the world, and in all haste took orders upon him, and in the year following was made priest and rang his first mass at our Lady of Redcliff.' He was made Dean of Westbury in or near 1468, and died in November, 1475.

With William Canning ends the short series of men who must serve to us as representatives of the great body of English merchant princes under the Plantagenets. Other men there were and must have been worth singling out from the great

mass of traders in the middle ages, either for their special virtues or for their special skill in commerce; but we do not know them. We can learn nothing of the merchants who made such towns as Winchester and Yarmouth, Boston and Lincoln, Beverley and Newcastle famous marts and centres of industry. A few names besides those that we have already mentioned have come down to us, but it is impossible to gather round them even the slenderest materials for orderly sketches of their lives. Concerning John Taverner of Hull, doubtless a worthy successor to the De la Poles, for instance, nearly all we know is contained in a single statement to the effect that in 1449 he, by the help of God and some of the king's subjects,' had built a great ship, the largest ever seen in English waters, which, because of its greatness, Taverner was allowed to call the 'Henry Grace à Dieu,' and to use in conveying wools, woolfels, tin, and all other merchandize, regardless of the rule of the staple, from London, Hull, Sandwich, or Southampton, to Italy, and in bringing thence bow-staves, wax, and any other produce of the country. Of Taverner's great Scotch contemporary, William Elphinstone, father of the bishop who built the university of Aberdeen, we learn only that, by carrying on a large export trade in pickled salmon, he laid the foundation of the commerce of Glasgow; and about two other most famous Scottish merchants of the fifteenth century, George Faulau and John Dalrymple, all we can discover is that they were frequently employed by James II. on embassies and other public business.

Though the men who did the work are almost forgotten, however, there is abundant evidence of the ever-increasing commercial prosperity of our country. The miserable civil wars which brought the Plantagenet rule to a close offered a serious hindrance to the progress of trade, and doubtless drove many men, as they drove William Canning, to abandon it altogether. But ten years after Canning's death, Henry VII. became king of England,