Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1. Green Alice Stopford
in all the great markets of the Mediterranean and of the Northern Seas. It is no wonder that during a change which transformed the country from a land of agricultural villages into a land of manufacturing towns, and opened for her the mighty struggle to become the carrier of the world’s commerce, the whole energy of her people, thrown into a single channel, should be absorbed in accomplishing their enormous task. Every one was honestly busy in learning either how to make or how to sell, and in conquering the difficulties that beset traders as they strove to push their way into the world’s market on equal or, if possible, more than equal terms with competitors who had long held unquestioned supremacy.
From the twelfth century wool had been the one great export of England, and the one great source of wealth for nobles, churchmen, farmers, even kings. So important was its sale that statesmen very early saw the necessity of securing for the national Exchequer a share in the profits of the main national trade; and in aid of the royal treasury they devised in the first half of the thirteenth century a system which was quite peculiar to England, the organization of the Staple.50
The Staple was an appointed place to which alone certain goods might be brought for sale, raw materials such as wool, wool-fells, skins, lead, or tin, of which wool was far the most important. Fixed for the first hundred years in some foreign town, generally in Bruges, it was shifted from place to place by Edward the Third, who from 1353 made various experiments as to establishing it in England; but finally about 1390, Calais was decided upon as the most advantageous spot. Thither every dealer had to carry his wares (unless he was ready to pay a high tax to the Crown, or to buy at the King’s price a license for free trading); and he must carry them along certain appointed routes only – from Lincoln by St. Botolph, from Norwich by Yarmouth, from Westminster by London, from Canterbury by Sandwich, from Winchester by Southampton, as the government in its wisdom might decide. In a kind of secondary sense these places where the wool was gathered for export thus became towns of the Staple, and certain officers, Mayors and Aldermen of the Staple were appointed to control their trade. The merchants’ goods, first weighed at the point of departure, must be weighed again at the port where they were shipped, and sealed with the seal of the Mayor of the Staple, while to check fraud there was an elaborate system of official papers to be sent to the Treasury in London and to the Staple in Calais for every such transaction of weighing and toll-taking. Every possible precaution was taken to maintain the position of the merchants in the European market by rules which practically forced the wool into the hands of foreign and not native buyers, so that English traders complained that their interests were sacrificed to courting the patronage of the Continent. If, for example, the chief Staple town was for any reason moved from over sea to England, native dealers were absolutely forbidden to export any Staple wares, so that foreigners might be forced or encouraged to come and take part in the trade. Foreign dealers were allowed to vote along with them for officials, and so late as 1445 the English merchants vainly prayed that no Stapler might take part in election of Mayor or Constable of the Staple unless he had ten sacks of wool cocketed at Calais.
In thus forcing all the export trade of the country through one narrow channel the first purpose of the State was merely to provide a convenient method of gathering customs into the Exchequer; and in course of time it further discovered that this trading system might be used as a weapon against foreign peoples in case of quarrel. But the very last object of the Staple organization was the convenience of the traders. Nor had the merchants themselves any illusions in this respect. To them the Staple seemed at its beginning contrary to the liberties of Magna Charta;51 and a long experience taught them how its provisions might keep them shut in between the rapacity of those in authority and the hatred of the farmers who produced the wool which they sold.52 They could however still wring a rich advantage out of superficial calamity – the advantage to be found in monopoly and corporate privilege – and this was developed with consummate art. The wool trade gathered into their hands was hedged round with monopolies and regulations, protected by fixed prices and times of sale. The concourse of customers at Calais was diligently maintained; no buyer was allowed to order his work through a commission house, so that traders might be forced to come to the market in person and do their business. By the charter of Edward the Third a Mayor and twenty-four Aldermen chosen by the whole body of merchants absolutely ruled the Staple trade, appointed officers, supervised markets, made regulations as to the treatment of foreigners, the duties of innkeepers, or the general conduct of business, and administered justice according to the Law Merchant with a sworn jury of foreigners or English or both together, according to the case to be tried.53 And since the governing body had general control beyond Calais itself over all English merchants, not only in Bruges but throughout Flanders, while they governed in England through their local officers, the power of the Staple extended far and wide and brought all the scattered merchants under one general organization.54 Formidable through their wealth and power, they could command the support of English kings and Burgundian dukes against rival traders. The profits to be made at Calais tempted the landowners at home,55 and all who were wealthy enough to pay the required dues and fees flocked into their body, till the great association at last included all rich wool-growers and shut out only the poor farmers and people of no account in the country. Their monopoly was so complete, and their discipline so effective, that they could absolutely dictate prices; and a judicious pooling system took away any temptation on the part of the members to break the ranks.56 At last against the original intentions of legislators they even got into their own hands the carrying of the export trade, and so long as wool remained the chief export of England 80 per cent. of this trade passed through their hands.
But so far as the State was concerned all this elaborate system for the protection of the wool-trade had simply grown out of the fundamental conception of the Staple as a fruitful source of supply for the royal treasury; and this theory was carried out to its logical issues. A fixed sum was demanded from the merchants year by year which they had to pay whether their trade was good or bad; while in their mercantile dealings they were terribly hampered by a host of regulations issued as to the mint in Calais, and invented by financiers who from the middle of the fourteenth century were haunted by alarms as to a possible dearth of gold and silver, and arbitrarily used the Staple as a means of forcing the flow of precious metal into England.57 Nor was the drain of taxation at all times legal and regular. Merchants paid money down for the protection and favour of the king in reiterated loans or gifts, whether free or forced. The Captain of Calais, as head of the only standing army which the English kings then possessed, advanced a kind of public claim on the Staplers’ wealth for the security of his soldiers’ pay; and the merchants had many a time good reason to tremble for their wool, and might cry in vain for redress if their whole store was confiscated to pay the soldiers’ arrears of two or three years, or if militant lords “shifted with the Staple of Calais” for £18,000 or so for costs of war.58
All these burdens however could be borne so long as business prospered in their hands. If a Parliament like that of 1258, or a great statesman like Simon de Montfort, urged that England should herself become an independent and self-supporting centre of manufactures, these seemed as idle words to monopolists dealing in wool with command of the world’s market, who saw no need to forsake their easy path to wealth at a moment when the growth of manufactures in the Netherlands opened a vast market for English produce. In the time of Edward the Third it is said that 30,000 sacks of wool were shipped every year from English ports.59
But before the reign of Edward had closed, the exporters of wool knew that they had fallen on evil days. Trade began to slip from their grasp. The revenue they paid from their profits to the King’s Exchequer fell in the few years from 1391 to 1411 to one-fifth of its former value,60 and was still calculated at this melancholy fifth in 1449. Instead of the thirty thousand sacks which they yearly counted in the fourteenth century, they could not at the close of the fifteenth century collect more than 8,624 sacks, and in
For an account of the Staple see Schanz, i. 327 et seq.; von Ochenkowski, Englands Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters, 220; Stubbs, ii. 446-8.
Schanz, i. 329, &c.
Ibid. 657.
Schanz, i. 543; von Ochenkowski, 216-7. For the Law Merchant see Mr. Maitland’s Pleas in Manorial Courts (Selden Soc.), p. 137. For Staple Statutes see 14 R. II. cap. 3, 4.
Schanz, i. 332, 338.
See Paston Letters, iii. 166.
Schanz, i. 501.
Von Ochenkowski, 202, 210; Schanz, 495-500. Petition of merchants in 1442 to be relieved from these rules refused. Proc. Privy Council, v. 217.
In 1442 the merchants of the Staple of Calais begged that payment should be made to the soldiers for the surety of the merchants’ wools. (Proceedings of Privy Council, v. 215, 216.) When the lords seized Calais in 1459, “they shifted with the Staple of Calais for £18,000” to carry on the war with. After Edward’s accession, in 1462, the merchants claimed repayment. Edward refused, and after long efforts the merchant who represented them and had borne the chief charges died a ruined man in sanctuary at Westminster (Fabyan, 635, 652-3).
A sack was 364 lbs. of 16 oz. each (Schanz, ii. 569).
Stubbs, iii. 69, Stat. 27, H. VI. c. 2.