Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2

“Ne had the grace of guile gone among my wareIt had been unsold this seven year, so me God help,”[140]

the merchant in Piers Ploughman admits frankly. His wife who made the cloth for sale was diligent in her sphere of economies, ordering her spinning women to spin the yarn out to great length, and paying for it by a pound measure that weighed a quarter more than her husband’s weighing machine – when he weighed true. At the draper’s he was taught how to stretch out the list of the cloth, or to fasten rich pieces together with a pack needle, and lengthen them out with pressers till ten or twelve yards reached to thirteen; and to get rid of his goods at Winchester and Wayhill fairs he carefully learned to lie and use false weights. To add to these resources he would go to the Lombards for lessons in clipping coin and in lending money out at usury.[141] Weaknesses of remorse troubled him little.

“‘Repentedst thou never?’ quoth Repentance, ‘nor restitution madest?’‘Yea, once,’ quoth he, ‘I was y harboured with a heap of chapmen,I arose and rifled their mails when they a’rest were.’‘That was a rueful restitution,’ quoth Repentance, ‘forsooth!’”

No age, indeed, has a monopoly of clever dealers, and every artifice practised in earlier days was familiar to the fifteenth century, and so loudly resented by the consumers, that many people, mistaking the signs of a public zeal to check abuses for the evidences of a growing audacity in evil, have discovered in the later middle ages an accumulating mass of corruption which gradually covered with its blackness the felicity of a purer age.[142] But whether from “the grace of guile,” or from sheer ability, the traders prospered on every side. Langland looking out over all classes of men sees how with them above all lay the secret of fatness and good cheer:

“And some chose chaffer, they cheved [prospered] the better,As it seemeth to our sight that such man thriveth.”[143]

The large sums that passed from hand to hand – the imposing debts registered in the town accounts – the complaints of a master being in arrears to his apprentice for a sum of £100, or an apprentice to his master for £138 – the leasing out of the customs of a great port like Southampton to a single merchant – all these things indicate the new plutocracy that was beginning to appear.[144] Drapers and clothiers were admitted into the select circles of privilege; in the towns the rank of “gentleman” became the appropriate reward of a successful cloth merchant,[145] and even in the county society the clothier was beginning to oust the old proprietors. The Tames of Gloucestershire were ordinary dealers who made cloth and traded at Cirencester till about 1480 when John Tame rented great tracts of land at Fairford for his flocks of sheep, and in the new industrial centre which he developed there, wool was collected to feed the Cirencester manufactory. All over the country he bought at a cheap rate lands which the ruined nobles could no longer hold; and his enormous wealth increased yet further under his son Edmund, who took his place among the “gentry” by becoming High Sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1505, receiving the reward of knighthood in 1516, and entertaining Henry the Eighth at his house at Fairford in 1520.[146]

The most wealthy folk in the towns, however, were probably the class that had grown up with the developement of foreign commerce and the export trade[147]– the merchants who forsook handicrafts and lived wholly by “grete aventour.”[148] Their lot was not altogether an easy one in a society perplexed by the mighty rush of the new commerce, where men trained in an earlier system looked with a mixture of fear and dislike on the intrusion of a dubious profession not vouched for by familiar custom – “covetous people who seek their own advantage,” and who not only lay under suspicion as men who refused to work, but were reproached with the destruction of trade by underselling the goods of English artizans with cheaper foreign wares. The government was concerned lest by their dealings the merchants should diminish the stock of gold to be kept in the country;[149] while, on the other hand, Church and people unanimously saw in bargains with bills and pledges and sums bearing interest, which were then known as “dry exchange,” something not to be distinguished from the sin of usury, and called on the government to declare void all such “damnable bargains grounded in usury, coloured by the name of new chevesaunce contrary to the law of natural justice” – “corrupt bargains which be most usually had within cities and boroughs.”[150] To the delicate conscience of theologian or social preacher trade could only be defended on the ground that honestly conducted it made no profit.[151] As for the “poor commons,” they held that while a man might live by trading, and perhaps make a modest competence, he had no right to grow rich;[152] his gains represented to the people the wages of iniquity, and the hungry toiler sitting over his mess of beans and bacon-rind comforted himself as best he could with thoughts of the weary ages merchants must at last count in purgatory, watching kings and knights and bishops pass out of its gates, while they themselves still lingered to pay the penalty of great oaths and innumerable taken

“Against clean conscience, for covetyse of winning.”[153]

Meanwhile their way was made difficult on earth, and along the road to fair or market the wandering merchant or chapman was held to ransom by the rustics, while the harmless messenger who travelled by his side was sent merrily on his road.[154]

To the mediæval mind indeed the merchant burdened with his goods was the very type of the soul laden with sins, and painfully battling its doubtful way to heaven. He passed from peril to peril in the transport of the packages on which he had set the sign that distinguished his wares, the tall cross with shrouds[155] or the flag. No navy protected his vessels on seas that swarmed with pirates, and companies of ships as ready for battle as for commerce, set out together, under command of one of the captains chosen as admiral,[156] to fight their way as best they could, while at home fear beset the owner on every side. If a merchant sent his servant over sea to Bruges, or despatched an apprentice to one of the Baltic ports to gather in the profits due to him or to carry merchandise, no man might comfort him, and no religious thought distract his spirit till his messengers returned;[157] and even when his goods reached port all his experience and cunning were needed to deal with the exactions of the king, who demanded the first choice of his wine or precious cargo, or to baffle the rapacity of the officers of the sheriff, the officers of the staple, the collectors of customs, the treasurers of the town, the searchers, or the clerk of the market.[158]

If, however, the risks of the merchant who dared the “great adventure” increased a hundredfold, so the chances open to courage and skill became more brilliant,[159] and the triumphant trader became the object of national pride. London had its hero —

“The sonOf Merchandy, Richard of WhittingdonThat loadstar and chief chosen flowerWhat hath by him our England of honour?That pen and paper may not me sufficeHim to describe so high he was of prise.”[160]

A brass in the church of Chipping Camden, dated 1401, commemorates the “flower of the wool merchants of all England.” In Dartmouth the long prosperity of the Hawleys[161] was recalled in the local proverb —

“Blow the wind high, blow the wind low:It bloweth good to Hauley’s hoe.”

There were none who surpassed the merchants of Bristol – men who had made of their town the chief depot for the wine trade of southern France, a staple for leather, lead, and tin, the great mart for the fish of the Channel and for the salt trade of Brittany, whose cloth and leather were carried to Denmark to be exchanged for stock-fish, and to France and Spain for wine; who as early as 1420 made their way by compass to Iceland; whose vessels were the first from England to enter the Levant; and who when calamity fell on their business by the loss of Bordeaux, and by the competition of London merchants and the concentration of commerce in the hands of its Adventurers, turned their faces to the New World; sending out in 1480, and year after year from that time, two, three, or four light ships to sail “west of Ireland” in search of the “Island of Brasylle and the seven Cities,” till in 1496 Cabot started with five vessels on his voyage of discovery, whence he came back to live in great honour among his fellow-townsmen, dressing in silk, and known as the “Great Admiral.”[162] The Bristol merchants of those days lived splendidly in fine houses three stories high, the grander ones having each its own tower. Underground stretched vast cellars with groined stone roofs: the ground floor was a warehouse or shop opening to the street; above this were the parlour and bedroom, with attics in the gables; while the great hall was built out behind with a lofty roof of carved timber.[163] In the towers treasures of plate were stored which rivalled those of the nobles, and the walls were hung with the richest tapestries, or with at least “counterfeit Arras.” Perhaps it was some such house which suggested to the poet, born perhaps in a village “cote,” and who knew Bristol well, the idea of an abode which might be offered to the Lord of heaven —

“Neither in cot neither in caitiff house was Christ y bore,But in a burgess house, the best of all the town.”[164]

But the growing luxury of private life is a far less striking feature of the mediæval borough than the splendid tradition of civic patriotism and generosity which seems to have prevailed. Burghers who prospered in the world left their noblest records in the memories of their public munificence; and there were hundreds of benefactors like Thomas Elys, the Sandwich draper, who in 1392 founded the hospital of S. Thomas-the-Martyr, and endowed it with a messuage and 132 acres of land; and within five months after founded the chantry of S. Thomas-the-Martyr;[165] or like Simon Grendon, three times mayor of Exeter, who left money to found a hospital for the poor. Gifts to churches of plate and vestments and books, legacies for chantries or for priests are too numerous to mention;[166] but there was a steady tendency among the townspeople to turn their benefactions into very different channels, and bequeathing their money to the town corporation instead of a religious body, to devote it directly to secular purposes and charities of the new fashion – founding free schools, building walls, repairing bridges, maintaining harbours for their borough, or leaving a fund for the payment of the ferm rent or certain fixed taxes. An Abingdon merchant gave a thousand marks towards the bridges over the two dangerous fords, Borough Ford and Culham Ford, which had to be built by the Abingdon men “at their own cost and charges, the alms of the town, and the benevolence of well-disposed persons,” and which were to make Abingdon the high road from Gloucester to London.[167] In 1421, when the Friars who owned the sources from which Southampton had its supply of water could no longer afford to replace the decayed pipes, a burgher “for the good of his soul” left money for new leaden pipes sufficient for the whole town as well as for the friars.[168] An Ipswich burgess gave the very considerable sum of £140 to relieve his fellow-townsmen of certain yearly tolls;[169] and money was always forthcoming for gates and walls and market crosses, for the buying of new charters, the adorning of the Town Hall, or gifts of plate to the corporation;[170] while as we have seen, a new system of education was practically founded by the free schools which were so largely endowed by their liberality.

For the first time in fact since the expulsion of the Jews from England we find a class of men with money to dispose of; for whatever gold and silver was available for practical purposes was gathered into the coffers of the burghers. The noble “wasters” who with gluttony destroyed what plougher and sower won[171] carried a light purse; while timid country-folk, terrified by the disorder and insecurity of the times, unused to commerce and speculation, buried their treasures in the earth, or laid away bags of “old nobles” with their plate in safe hiding places,[172] industriously hoarding against the evil day that haunted their imagination. But among spendthrifts and faint-hearted economists the burghers came with habits of large winnings and generous outgoings. They became the usurers and money-lenders of the age. When the county families had exhausted all possibilities of borrowing from their cousins and neighbours[173] they had to turn to the shopkeepers of the nearest town, who seem to have been willing to make special and private arrangements on better terms than those of the common usurer.[174] John Paston borrowed from the sheriff of London; Sir William Parr pawned his plate to a London fishmonger for £120, which he was to pay over to him in the church of S. Mary-on-the-Hill beside Billingsgate.[175] From Richard the Second onwards kings borrowed as readily as their subjects from the drapers and mercers of the towns. The prosperous merchant in his prouder moments matched his substantial merits against the haughty pretensions of lords who could go about begging of burgesses in towns and be “not the better of a bean though they borrow ever,”[176] and was not without an occasional touch of disdain for aristocratic poverty. Sir William Plumpton married the daughter of a citizen and merchant of York, who out of her rich dowry of houses in Ripon and York was able to leave large fortunes to her children. One of these wrote a description of a visit she paid to the house of some aristocratic cousins, Sir John Scrope and his daughter Mistress Darcy, and of their supercilious bearing. “By my troth I stood there a large hour, and yet I might neither see Lord nor Lady … and yet I had five men in a suit (of livery). There is no such five men in his house, I dare say.”[177]

But the constant fusion of classes which went on steadily throughout the century showed how solid were the reasons which drew together the rich traders of the towns and the half bankrupt families of the county. Impoverished country gentry were tempted by the money made in business, just as the “merchants and new gentlemen” hoped to reach distinction by marriage into landed families. Squires built for themselves houses in the neighbouring boroughs, turned into traders on their own account, and commonly took office at last in the municipal government;[178] while on the other hand successful city merchants were becoming landed proprietors all over the country, were decorated with the ornaments of the Bath, and distinguished by fashionable marriages,[179] in spite of the fretful sarcasms of a “gentle” class consoled in the hard necessities of poverty by a faint pride. “Merchants or new gentlemen I deem will proffer large,” Edmund Paston wrote when a marriage of one of his family was in question; “well I wot if ye depart to London ye shall have proffers large.”[180] He seems to have preferred that the Pastons should look out for good connections; and possibly this anxiety was especially present in the case of the women, for the family seem to have been rather excited when Margery Paston in 1449 married one Richard Calle, and went, as John said, “to sell candles and mustard in Framlingham.”[181] But John Paston felt no hesitation about marrying the daughter of a London draper. One brother considered the solid merits of a London mercer’s daughter, and another was very anxious to secure as his wife the widow of a worsted merchant at Worstead, who had been left a hundred marks in money, a hundred marks in plate and furniture, and £10 a year in land.[182] The money side of marriage with a substantial burgher must have had its attractive side also to the county ladies. In Nottingham, according to the “custom of the English borough,” half of the property of the husband passed at his death to his widow;[183] and a London mercer setting up in business promises in his contract of marriage “to find surety that if he die she to have £100 besides her part of his goods after the custom of the city.”[184]

All interests in fact conspired in effacing class distinctions to an extent unknown in European countries; and in a land where “new men” had long been recognized among the king’s greatest officials, and where law created no barriers in social life, all roads to eminence lay open before the adventurer. Notwithstanding this freedom, however, the English merchant never rose to the same height of wealth and power as the great traders of the Continent. We have no such figures as that of Jacques Cœur,[185] burgher of Bourges, whose ships were to be seen in England carrying martens and sables and cloth of gold; or trading up the Rhone; or competing with rivals from Genoa, Venice, and Catalonia for the coasting trade of the Mediterranean; or sailing to the Levant, each vessel laden with sixteen or twenty thousand ducats for trade adventures. Three hundred agents in various towns acted as his factors in business; and his ambassadors were to be found at the court of the Egyptian Sultan, or sitting as arbitrators in the quarrels of political parties in Genoa. “I know,” he writes with frank consciousness of power, “that the winning of the San Grail cannot be done without me.”[186] He had bought more than twenty estates or lordships, had two houses at Paris, two at Tours, four houses and two hotels at Lyons, houses at Beaucaire, Béziers, Narbonne, S. Pourçain, Marseilles, Montpellier, Perpignan, and Bourges. In 1450 he had spent 100,000 crowns of gold on the new house he was building out of Roman remains at Bourges, and it was still unfinished. As Master of the Mint at Bourges and at Paris, and as the greatest capitalist of his nation, he practically controlled the whole finances of France; and, indeed, held in his hands the fortunes of French commerce, and even of the French nation, for it was his loans to the King that alone enabled Charles to drive the English out of Normandy. At a time when all trade was strictly forbidden to the noble class, a grateful monarch, mindful of timely loans and of jewels redeemed from pawn by his useful money-lender, ennobled Jacques Cœur, with his wife and children. His eldest son was Archbishop of Bourges; his brother was Bishop of Luçon; his nephew and chief factor was Councillor of King Réné, and Chamberlain of the Duke of Calabria. But just as far as he went beyond the English trader in his glory and success, so far he exceeded him in the greatness of his ruin. The same arbitrary power which had set him above his fellows could as easily be used to cast him down; and after twenty years of prosperity Jacques Cœur was a State prisoner, robbed of all his goods, and condemned to perpetual exile. Transforming banishment into opportunity for new ventures, he set off eastward at the head of a crusade in 1456 to die on the journey, and find a grave in Chios.[187]

Beside such a career as this, and measured by the prizes that hung before the adventurers of the Continent, the life of the English trader was indeed homely and monotonous. Triumph and ruin alike were on a modest scale. No great figure stands out from the rest as the associate of princes or the political agent of kings. No name has come down to us glorified by a vast ambition, or dignified by an intellectual inspiration, or made famous for turning the balance of a political situation. And it is just in this fact that we discover the essential character of the new commercial society in England. Instead of colossal fortunes we find a large middle class enjoying everywhere without fear a solid and substantial comfort. And, perhaps as a consequence of the widespread diffusion of material prosperity, the republic of traders had succeeded in developing a marvellous art of organization, with all its necessary discipline. The triumphs of the English merchants were won by a solid phalanx of men alike endowed with good average capacity, possessing extraordinary gifts of endurance and genius for combination, and moving all together with irresistible determination to their ends. The uniformity and regularity of their ranks was never broken by the intrusion of a leader of genius pre-eminent among his fellows; and whether in towns or in commercial fraternities, the little despotisms that were set up were despotisms, not of a single master, but of groups of men who had devised a common policy and by whose voluntary and united efforts it was sustained. In fact the very spirit of the people seemed to have entered into the great industrial system which had sprung up in their midst – a growth free and independent, nourished out of the common soil from which it came, obedient to its own laws, expanding by the force of its own nature.

No doubt there was loss as well as gain for a society so constituted. The special genius of the people, their remoteness from outer influences, the concentration of the national forces on the pressing industrial and commercial problems of the moment; all these things evidently affected the developement of the national life, and tended in many ways to leave civilization still rude and imperfect. But in addition to this we are also conscious of the influence of a certain prevailing mediocrity of station. The horizon of the trading and industrial classes was bounded by a practical materialism where intellect had as little play as imagination. Neither the glamour of ancient Rome nor the romance of a crusade ever touched the fancy of an English merchant, busy with the problems of the hour. There is no stately dwelling of those days to show the magnificent conceptions which might occupy a merchant builder, and a “palace of King John” at Nottingham,[188] or a turreted house at Bristol, “the best of all the town,” telling their tale of a comfortable domesticity, contrast strangely with the famous building of Bourges. So far as we know no trader or burgher possessed a library; out of the lost past not so much as a line of Horace found an echo among even the more lettered men of business till over a hundred years later; not a picture was carried home from the schools of Italy or the Netherlands; of the mighty commerce of the world beyond the sea the trader knew everything, of its culture nothing; and England remained without any distinguished patrons of the arts or fosterers of learning save those found in bishops’ palaces. And not only was the trader limited on the side of art and letters; in the hurry of business he had no time and less attention to give to political problems that lay beyond his own parish or his industrial domain. Fortunately for his country he reaped an exact reward. His business prospered, but the work of statesmanship in its finer sense was given to others; and in the political and commercial crises through which England had to pass she for a time chose her leaders from men trained in another and more comprehensive school. It was only in the next century that the merchant by degrees began to enter on a new dominion in the world of politics. Under the early Tudors it became the custom to appoint as representatives of England in foreign countries traders resident in the place, and though the system is commonly put down to the niggardliness of the Court, it was more probably due to the ruler’s sagacity. In England itself it was with Thomas Cromwell, the clerk of Antwerp, the wool merchant of Middelburg, scrivener, banker, and attorney, that for the first time the man of business made his vigorous entry into the Court, struck aside at a blow the venerable traditions that had gathered there round Church and State, and from the wreck and ruin of the past proclaimed the triumph of a new age.[189]

CHAPTER IV

THE LABOUR QUESTION

Perhaps no complaint is at first sight so startling amid the vigorous growth of manufacture and commerce which marked the fifteenth century, and in a society where pestilence and plague apparently kept population stationary, as the complaint of surplus labour; and the elusive way in which the problem appears and vanishes again makes it yet more bewildering. People complained at one moment of labourers unemployed, and at the next they modified old laws because they could not get workmen enough. Masters on all sides were evading the regulations which limited the number of their apprentices and journeymen, and still cried to the State for protection for their craft because the artizan could find no work to do. Men talked of foreign competition and too many workers in every trade, and took forcible measures to keep down prices and wages. The lawmakers were forbidding the import of foreign goods so as to give employment to destitute artizans at home, and the artizans were conspiring to limit their output and raise their prices. That there was some real trouble whose indeterminate presence can be felt behind all these conflicting appearances we cannot doubt; but it may be questioned whether the trouble was that of labour for which there was no demand.