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CHAPTER XIV.
COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY IN THE MIDDLE
AGES
DuRing the ninth and tenth centuries the decay of the Carolingian Empire and
the raids or conquests of Northman, Saracen, Bulgarian, and Magyar had hindered
the economic consolidation of new peoples and checked intercourse both among
Mediterranean lands and between those lands and the North. Byzantium—the great
city, the luxurious capital—remained the depositary, and as
yet unrivalled elaborator, of the industrial and commercial traditions
of the ancient world. But Byzantium faced East; though she conducted an active
trade with her Muslim neighbours, and trade of a kind with the inchoate peoples
of the North and West, her economic influence westward and northward was, as it
were, involuntary. Her chiefest luxuries might not
be exported, and she allowed Italian seamen to fetch what they were permitted
to take. Her direct influence on Italy, above all on Venice, in the tenth and
subsequent centuries was great; though the lines of
its action are not always easily traced. At least equally great was the direct
influence of Italy on the lands over the mountains. It would therefore be
possible to resolve the history of European trade and industry in the Middle
Ages into a series of tableaux illustrating the outward spread of Byzantine and
Italian influences. But that history cannot be so resolved; although it would
be distorted, and some of its most significant features would be obscured, were
it painted with a Northern rather than a Southern light. In matters economic,
as in much else, the homes—even the pillaged homes—of the older culture usually
led, and very often they gave; but the newer peoples also were really, if
rudely, creative.
What little is known of the intricate
commercial and industrial life of tenth-century Byzantium provides, for the
most part, rather contrasts with simpler contemporary conditions and subsequent
growths elsewhere than suggestions as to the roots from which those growths may
have sprung. But, if only for the contrast’s sake, that little should not be
overlooked. It is drawn mainly from the so-called Prefect’s Edict of Leo the
Wise, which, though it deals only with the greater organised trades and
professions, over which the State exercised a special control, still throws
some light into the streets and shops and counting-houses of the city. These State-dominated trades are the bankers, notaries, jewellers, dealers in raw silk,
silk-throwers, silk-weavers, dealers in silken garments, linen-dealers—who buy
for money in Pontus and Thrace and by way of barter from the Bulgarians—dealers
in unguents who buy from the East, dealers in wax, in soap, general dealers, leather-workers, and all the trades connected with the
food-supply of a great capital. Other trades, such as marble-workers, painters,
and carpenters, are mentioned; but whether or not they
were organised into gilds or colleges is uncertain and immaterial. They shew
clearly enough a complex subdivision of labour and trade in the service of a
luxurious community. The organised trades, though subject to rigid government
control, are yet not in the almost servile position once occupied by the collegia under the declining Empire of the fourth
and fifth centuries. Moreover they are developing in
ways unknown to the classical collegium. The beginnings of an apprentice
and journeyman system; rules for testing the qualifications of new members;
attempts on the part of government to prevent prosperous traders from making
gain in more than one line of business; and provisions for
purchases by whole “gilds” collectively, anticipate familiar aspects of the
gild-life of the West in the high noon of the Middle Ages.
There may have been—in Italy there
almost certainly was—a measure of continuity between late imperial “gilds,”
whether of the Byzantine or of some other type, and those “gilds” of traders or
craftsmen which come into being—or into the light—throughout Europe, from the
latter part of the eleventh century onwards. Ravenna, where evidence of such
continuity would most naturally be sought, supplies a series of references to
technical scholae and their officials—in the sixth century the bakers;
in the ninth and tenth the notaries and merchants; in the eleventh the fishers
and victuallers. Rome had her schola of gardeners early in the eleventh
century, and there are similar isolated references from Naples and elsewhere,
until the blacksmiths’ community of Brescia appears as a well-organised body in
1101. Of the industrial life of these scholae in the dark ages really
nothing is known, and the continuity, if continuity there were, in Italy or
possibly in parts of Gaul, is of little real significance; for there is no
reason to suppose that either these scholae or those of Byzantium were
deliberately copied by other communities in Italy, still less by transalpine
communities. What is of great significance is the mere existence of any such
“gild” at a given time or place, proving, as it does, commercial or industrial
specialisation and suggesting the existence of wide markets.
Though commercially Byzantium faced
East, her own lands and the Levantine territory of the Crescent attracted
Italian seamen and merchants even in the most perilous days of the tenth
century. By the close of the century, Venetians constantly visited all the
ports of the Eastern Empire. Venetian slave-traders, and Venetian salt or
timber merchants, were in Greece and Egypt certainly in the ninth and possibly
in the eighth century. In the early days of Venice, Amalfi, which recognised
the suzerainty of the Eastern Emperors down to 1075, had been a serious rival;
but by about the year 1000 Venice was undisputed mispress in the Adriatic. She had, also, regular trade relations with Germany and was
sending over the Alpine passes the luxuries of the East into the as yet but imperfectly Germanised frontier-provinces of the
Empire. It was
probably by way of Venice and Mayence that the men of the Emperor procured
the pepper which they paid to Canute to maintain their trade footing in
England. Yet though merchants went to and fro and the
worst days were past, Venice and all other Italian towns, at the close of the
tenth century, were little better than villages, or encampments among the
ruins, when compared with Byzantium's population of at least a hundred thousand
and her diversified industrial and commercial life. It is true that from the
ninth and even from the eighth century onwards faint reports come through to us
of manufacturing industries of more than local importance, in one or other of
these Italian towns, of cloth made in Florence, of silk woven and cloth and
gold wire made at Lucca, or of rich vestments bought—and possibly made—in Rome.
But these are only obscure beginnings or struggling survivals—one cannot tell
which—very different from the industries of the great city which had never been
pillaged.
Though war may waste the fields, and
conquests change and change again the legal and social status of the
cultivator, so long as men must be fed there is less chance of widespread
technical retrogression in agriculture and the rural crafts, during ages of
trouble, than in those urban industries which depend on effective
communications and an extensive or wealthy circle of consumers. Therefore,
although whole districts went out of cultivation in what had been the home
provinces of the Empire between the fourth and the seventh centuries, scattered
evidence from the seventh to the tenth—evidence coming mainly from the Exarchate,
the Patrimonium Petri, and the South—proves at least
the existence of regular leases, arable land owned by small cultivators,
enclosed vineyards and oliveyards, rents paid in
money, and other rents which just because they were paid in kind reveal a very varied
and, so to say, civilised agriculture, an agriculture in sharp contrast with
the primitive simplicity of the contemporary Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic
North; where neither the relics of an old civilisation nor the agricultural
specialisation that commerce brings with it had as yet affected systems of
tillage, which in any case—owing to climatic reasons—could never attain to the
variety of the South.
One force, it is true, must have
worked steadily, even during the darkest ages, in the North—the slow growth of
population or the slow spread of a dominant race, as in England, over the whole
territory available for conquest and settlement. Land was being won from moor
and forest and sea; pastoral or semi-pastoral life was giving way to
agriculture. The ploughman, “the grey-haired enemy of the wood" of
the Anglo-Saxon poet, was everywhere carrying on his slow feud, conquering
those forests from which, as King Alfred wrote, “many a home may be built and
many a fair town stockaded, wherein men may dwell in peace and
quiet.” The free peasants of eastern Flanders, of the Campine, and of Frisia, were laboriously attacking the heath
and the marshes round about their scattered homesteads. In such districts
individual initiative had the freest play; but it was only in later centuries
that they became homes of serious technical progress in agriculture. Throughout
the greater part of Northern Europe settlement was by villages, and
agricultural holdings, whatever the exact status of the holder, were scattered
over the open fields and subject to a common routine which, once
fully established, proved extraordinarily incapable of change.
It is uncertain over how wide an area
what was, generally speaking, the final step in the
development of that routine had been taken by the close of the tenth century;
but the evidence now available suggests that the area was not very wide. That
step was the introduction of the familiar three-field system, in which each of
the great village fields was cropped in a regular rotation of winter grain,
summer grain, fallow. It was first taken apparently, in a few districts, soon
after the final settlement of the Northern peoples. The three-field system was
certainly known and practised in the Empire of Charles the Great, to whom
legend ascribes an order for its general use. But
the less economical two-field system, in which half the arable lay fallow each
year, survived in parts of Germany, the Mosel-land in particular, far into the
Middle Ages. The two-field rotation was common in such a progressive French
province as Normandy during the thirteenth century, and in Central and South-Western France it was universal centuries later; although there one can speak
of a two-field rotation, but hardly of a two-field system, because population
was more scattered and agriculture less communal than in the North. The
two-field system was common too in almost all parts of England in the Middle
Ages, and it survived into modern times far more widely than was at one time
supposed. All this suggests that the three-field rotation won its way very
slowly.
The two-field system itself was only
one of several growths from that most primitive form of agriculture in which
fields have no permanent existence, but revert periodically into rough pasture
or, it may be, into woodland. All over Europe remnants of this earliest system
survived to modern times, side by side with remnants or variants of perhaps its
most important offshoot other than the two and three-field systems: that is the
system in which an “infield” near the village or homestead is permanently
cultivated, while a series of “outfields” are cropped in turn so long as they
will bear, and are then allowed to revert to the
waste. In the tenth century the primitive system of shifting fields, or its
first modifications, must have been widespread. It was the typical agriculture
of Wales as revealed in her earliest laws; it became a permanency in many parts
of Norway. In its “infield” and “outfield” form it remained the basis of
Scottish agriculture down to the eighteenth century, and left traces on the
agriculture of many English counties. It was long the dominant system in most
of the Alpine valleys; it has a modern history
in the lowlands of the North Sea
coast. Owing to the very flexibility of its rude practice it proved less
obdurate, when a stimulus to improvement was forthcoming, than the relatively
perfect and very rigid organisation of the two or three-field system; but in
the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages it must still
have been a mere unprogressive barbarism.
During the dark centuries, the old
cities of the Western Mediterranean and of Southern France had
fallen even lower than those of Italy. In Northern France and in
England, where the perfected citylife of the old
world had never come into being, as in the greater part of Germany, in
Scandinavia, and in the Slavonic lands, where there had never been city-life at
all, the humble beginnings of that life in its medieval form had to face every
kind of difficulty. But around court, cathedral, or monastery, at the nodal
points of roads and waterways, and at the chief harbours, a scanty industrial
life had persisted through the times of trouble or was coming into existence as
society became once more accustomed to a measure of security, so that
population, and that luxury among the great which has so often been the cause
of industrial specialisation, had once more chances of growth. Even in the
ninth century a small Frankish monastic town had its streets of the merchants,
the smiths, the armourers, the saddlers, the bakers, the shoemakers, butchers,
fullers, furriers, wine-merchants, and inn-keepers; in the tenth century
scribes made copies of technical treatises; and at the beginning of the
eleventh the reeve, or lord’s bailiff, on a great estate in England controlled,
ideally and perhaps in fact, a plumber and a mill-wright besides the more
primitive types of artisan. But a street need neither be long nor full; a
treatise may be copied yet not much read; and the industrial dependents of a
great ecclesiastical or lay establishment were not a new social phenomenon.
The raids and conquests of the
Northmen had stimulated commerce and town life both directly and indirectly.
Themselves great traders, though also great destroyers, their inroads extended
both the range and the intensity of European commerce. In the ninth century
they joined hands with the East, behind the back of Europe as it were, securing
political control of the old trade route down the Dnieper to the Black Sea, and
of its profitable commerce in furs, honey, wax, and, above all, slaves.
Treasure and Eastern wares came up the route to the Baltic, so that the
influence of this “Arab” trade can be clearly traced in Western Germany during
the tenth century. Their ships and settlements brought the whole of the British
Isles, and to some extent the remote lands of the North-West, into close
relations with the continent. In or about the year 1110, York is described as
full of merchants from every quarter especially from the people of the Danes.And though their raids had so wasted the Flemish and Frisian shores that, about
the same date, the land beside the mouths of the Rhine and the Meuse was almost
uninhabited, yet the needs of self-defence had called into being there, as in
other regions subject to their depredations, strong places—stockaded boroughs
in the English Danelaw, or fortified monasteries, like the castrum coenobium Gandense of St Bavon—which
were to become in time centres of urban civilisation.
To these new centres, as to the old,
came the wandering merchants of many races whom every great Northern ruler of
these centuries, an Otto or an Alfred, appreciated and
encouraged. Moving usually in groups, in their ships or with their caravans,
through lands which as yet for the most part had no organised commercial life,
they seem often to have travelled farther than did their successors of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; though few can have rivalled those
ninth-century Jews who are said to have journeyed constantly from Erankland to China, sometimes by the coasting routes of
Southern Asia, sometimes overland from the Levant, finding at innumerable
points of the great journey communities of their own people to aid and protect
them. Among these wandering merchants, men bound to no soil and by the law of
no single community, there grew up habits of co-operation and a custom of the
merchants which was to become the Law Merchant of later centuries.
The developments and changes in
transport and intercourse, between the dark earlier centuries and the age (c. 1250-1350) for which information is comparatively abundant, and with which this
chapter is mainly concerned, were affected more profoundly by political events
than by technical achievement of any kind. True, the trade of Bruges in her
great days owed much to the mighty artificial waterway to the sea at which
Dante marvelled; the pass of the St Gothard might have remained only a second
or third rate Alpine highway, and the federation of the Forest Cantons might
not have acquired so great an economic and political importance, had not some
nameless engineer—about the year 1225—hung “the bridge of spray” in the gorge
of the Reuss above Goschenen; improvements in
seamanship, by the fourteenth century, rendered the long voyage from Italian
ports to the Channel an ordinary rather than an extraordinary occurrence. But
such technical gains were to some extent offset by corresponding losses—an
undoubted decay of Roman highways, as for instance in England; siltings up of harbours and waterways with which medieval
engineering was unable to cope; lost memories of possible trading routes, such
as those revealed by the more distant explorations of the Northmen. And in any
case these technical gains had not economic significance comparable—to take examples
from varied spheres—with that of the political consolidation of England or of
France; the cutting off of Russia from the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean, to which Russian ships had penetrated in the tenth
century, by the invasion of the Patzinaks from Asia during the eleventh; the
counter-offensive of Genoa and Pisa against Muslim piratical sea-power in the
Mediterranean which preceded the First Crusade; the destruction of the
sea-going trade of Ferrara by Venice early in the thirteenth century, which
marks an important stage in the concentration of the trade, and so of the
industry, of north-eastern Italy in the territory of St Mark; the creation of
the Mongol empire which opened the overland routes to the Far East for Marco
Polo, routes which had been so well trodden by 1315 that Pegolotti the Florentine could write of one of them—which started from the northern
shores of the Black Sea—“e sicurissimo, e cio lo dicono tutti i mercanti che Fhanno usato.” Within a
generation political events closed them again, and. the lands of the “ Grand Cham” became lands of fable.
There is one major exception to this
general conclusion. The technique of the warehouse and the counting-house, of
the money-changer’s table and of the moneyer’s art, made notable progress with
the growing volume and complexity of commerce and the growing capacity of
governments to protect and encourage it. This progress, unlike that in the
means of transport and the opportunities for trade, is not counterbalanced by
any parallel retrogression. It can best be examined in connexion with the
spread of commercial influences from Italy. But before any such examination is
attempted, the fundamental industry of agriculture, as it had come to be
practised in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, claims attention—not
merely because the Middle Ages were essentially agricultural, but because
important problems, connected with the accumulation and distribution of wealth
and with the relations of urban and rural industry, must first be viewed, as it
were, from the fields.
In its broad outlines the agriculture
of Europe changed but little between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries.
Not till the end of the thirteenth century was the agricultural occupation of
their territory by the Northern nations approximately complete, a process of
which the Villeneuves, the Newtons, and the
innumerable villages created by the Germans in the process of their
colonisation southward and eastward, are the permanent record. To what extent
the creation of new villages was accompanied by improvements in the laying out
of the fields in France or England is not yet known; though the planning of new
towns can be studied in the French bastides of the thirteenth century,
or in Edward I's bastides in North Wales, at New Winchelsea,and at Hull. In Germany, it is possible to
trace with some certainty the effect of the constant creation of villages and
towns on the arts both of town and of village planning. The semi-agricultural
towns of the North and East, such for instance as. Breslau, have a systematic
rectangular ground-plan which recalls Roman or American colonial enterprise.
Modern field-maps of the villages bevond the Elbe,
as compared with those of the older settled territory further West, often shew
a forethought and system which must have contributed to agricultural
efficiency. The directors of the various colonising movements were men who
understood their business. They
brought to their aid specially
qualified pioneers. The marsh, lands about Bremen, for instance, began to be
settled and laid out with an admirable regularity and efficiency by expert
peasants from Flanders and Holland early in the twelfth century. These
Low-German and other West-German colonists carried their skill as far eastward
as Hungary; and it is not unlikely that the agriculture—together with the
industries—of England profited by the close relations with Flanders which
followed the Norman Conquest.
The gradual adoption of the
three-field system, already referred to in connexion with an earlier period, is
an English parallel to this technical progress during the German colonial age.
A corresponding development in Western Germany is the progress from a two-field
to a four-field system which is found in the valley of the Mosel. It was a distinct
technical advance for, whereas under the two-field system half the land lay
fallow yearly, of a four-field system it is written seminabunt agros illos tribus annis et quarto vacabunt. The same thing happened in some English
two-field villages; but the change is hard to date.
The pressure of population in
old-settled districts had furnished both colonists and some incentive to the
adoption of the less wasteful forms of agriculture. Towards the end of the
thirteenth century the business of village-making slackened throughout Germany,
and in the fourteenth century it ceased. Forests, which in the twelfth century
had been valueless or even a burden, began to be protected systematically,
first by the lords and subsequently by the customary law of village or mark.
Great numbers of villages were even deserted in various parts of Germany;
though how far this was due to war and pestilence, and how far—as has been
argued—to the actual inability of a now redundant population to maintain itself
on poor land, it is impossible to determine. Had the rural population, in any
part of Europe, grown during the two closing centuries of the Middle Ages,
fundamental adjustments in technique would have been inevitable. But
plague—especially the great visitation of 1349—warfare, and possibly the more
subtle social causes which tend to preserve the balance between population and
resources, rendered anything of the kind unnecessary. Indeed, what large-scale
adjustments took place were often in the opposite direction, as
a result of the temporary fall in population, due in England to the Black Death, or in France to the
Death and the Hundred Years' War.
Such progress in agriculture as had
occurred up to the fourteenth century was not absolutely confined to the mere
conquest of wood or waste, and the reproduction on land thus gained of slightly
improved forms of the old village life. The transforming power of nearness to
the young towns, or of facilities for the production of some luxury or necessity which could enter into commerce, can everywhere be
traced, most readily and most extensively in the agriculture of the
Mediterranean lands. Throughout Northern Europe special crops could not easily
be fitted
into the corn-producing routine of the
open arable fields; whereas in the South the climatic
facilities for the production of such crops—the grape, for instance, and the
olive—had maintained a varied and relatively elastic agriculture since ancient
times. The gradual extension of crops other than corn, in the Teutonic or
semi-Teutonic North, was facilitated by the fact that much land which was
cultivated directly by or for the greater “proprietors” either had always lain
outside the intermixed acres of the open fields, or was gradually consolidated—extracted from the fields as it were—at some time
before the fourteenth century. Whether such land was tilled by a more or less servile peasantry, under’ the
direction of the lord’s agents, or was in some fashion farmed, is from the
present point of view immaterial. The fact that an intermixture of property was
a technical disadvantage had been early recognised. Documentary evidence of
such recognition is naturally rare, but a few cases have come to light, such as
the exchange effected between two ecclesiastical landowners of South-West
Germany in 1158, on the ground that “ex tali perinixtione diversarum proprietatum saepe molestiae fiebant et querimoniae.” There is little reason to think that, in
Germany or any other country, this recognition, with the resulting re-arrangements,affected peasant
lands before the fourteenth century.
The peasantry, however, had always
controlled some scraps of land outside the fields, and the progressive
absorption of waste land had added to the supply. In the earlier centuries land
newly won must have often been assigned piecemeal to its first cultivators and
subjected to the ordinary arable routine; but when once that routine was set,
the new acquisitions—the essarts of English
agrarian history—often provided opportunities for a more individual agriculture
than was possible in the fields, whatever the system of tenure.
The closes of the lord’s demesne and
the essarts in peasant hands, to adopt the
English terminology, might be turned into specially well-cared-for meadows, into vineyards or orchards; they might be cropped with
flax or hemp, hops or woad; or they might be used as garden ground for pease, cabbages, and small sowings of the finer grain
crops. Wherever climate and circumstances favoured, there was a steady addition
to the land thus set aside for crops that required special attention. Here and
there, in the thirteenth century, whole districts were dominated by some
special crop, though this was, of course, exceedingly rare. The high valley of
Aquila, in the Abruzzi, grew saffron “for half Europe”;
and as its second staple industry was pasture, it drew its corn and oil from
other parts of the Regno, tn the near neighbourhood
of Bordeaux, winegrowing for distant markets controlled agricultural life.
South-western
France was a region in which the
closely-articulated and therefore relatively indestructible Teutonic type of
open-field husbandry had never existed; so it is not
surprising to find that the solvent influence of a commercial agriculture had
produced an entirely individualistic rural economy, in which
vines, olives, and wheat were grown by an almost free peasantry on “small,
exceedingly subdivided plots, without any communal connexion between them.” In
a more northerly wine-producing district, that of the Mosel, where vines were
grown on demesne land or on land newly won from the waste, the social effects
of a specialised agriculture are also to be seen, in the freer forms of
tenure, and consequently greater subdivision of property in the peasant
vineyards than in the manorially regulated Hufen (peasant holdings) of the common fields.
Thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Flanders furnishes the extreme instance north of
the Alps of the reaction of an industrial city-life on rural conditions, though
wherever towns grew strong some of the results which were general in Flanders
were likely to occur sporadically. The great Flemish estates of the
Cistercians, and many of those belonging to the nobility, produced for the
towns; towards the end of the thirteenth century such estates were let out to metayers or rent-paying farmers, since throughout
Flanders serfdom was decadent and agricultural capital was accumulating.
Polders were multiplying rapidly; some of them still bear names which are
probably those of the “undertakers” of the thirteenth century. Inland heaths
and marshes were also laid under contribution. Intensive agriculture was
already driving out the system of regular fallowing. The urban demand for meat,
milk, and cheese enabled the cultivator to keep much live-stock;
the climate was favourable to pasturefarming; and so
manure was abundant. Agriculture was becoming to some extent specialised
locally; there were cattle districts, corn districts, woad districts. Commons
had almost disappeared, except the scanty common of the highway side or the
dyke bank. There were fed the beasts of the agricultural labourers, the coppers, who, like the labourers of eighteenth-century England, had at most a scrap of
land attached to their cottages, and supplemented their earnings with those of
their wives and children, who span wool for the urban manufacturer.
Languedoc also was a land of towns,
and that much earlier than Flanders; but its town life was, for the most part,
less industrial. Nevertheless, rural conditions in Languedoc indicate an
urbanised rather than a feudal society. In the twelfth, and even in the
eleventh century, the Toulousan peasant was but
little burdened with services or servile dues. He had inherited a diversified
agriculture. He was, it would appear, some sort of metayer, paying to his lord usually a quarter of the produce of his plough-land and a
half of that of his vineyards, orchards, and nut-trees.
In Northern and above all in Central
Italy the mezzadria system had
become very common by the close of the
thirteenth century, as the result of the victory of a rich urban over a poor
feudal society. The businesslike landowners, while
able and ready to advance capital for the development of their estates, were
not prepared to part with their share in the increment, as did the feudal lord
when—in France for instance—he granted land to the peasantry in return for a
fixed cens. Therefore the Italian stipulated for his share of the produce. The typical townsman of
Italy despised and bullied the contadini,but it was to his interest to promote drainage, irrigation, the rational use of
the land, and that diversified agriculture which was necessary to meet the
luxury and the varied industrial demands of the cities. As communities also,
the cities of the thirteenth century are found applying business principles to
land. About Bergamo common pastures were rented out to cattle-owning
associations. Brescia let its pastures at auction to the highest bidder,
instead of regulating their use by tradition as a contemporary English town
might have done. Como sold much of its common land out and out. The constantly
recurring prohibition of such sales in urban legislation during the whole
century, and also the constant acquiescence in the
permanent though irregular occupation of common land by individual citizens, show
how strong the tendency to alienation was in an individualistic society. With
the fourteenth century, agriculture in Tuscany, Lombardy, and the other Italian
homes of active civic life had taken its place in definite economic
subordination to the capitalism of the towns.
The roots of medieval Italian
capitalism are buried in and beneath the commercial revival of the eleventh
century. It has been argued that medieval trade—at any rate before the
thirteenth century—was such a peddling affair, so limited in scope and outlook,
that it could not of itself beget accumulated capital, whose immediate origin,
so the argument runs, must be sought in the surpluses—the true unearned
increments— accruing to the burgess owners of urban real property, during the
age of town growth from the tenth to the thirteenth century; and whose ultimate
sources were the surpluses which the governing classes in Church and State drew
from their control over the springs of rural wealth, and spent in the towns. No
doubt ground-rents were a true cause of accumulation; in some parts of Europe,
above all in the North, they may well have been a chief cause; but that they
were the sole or even a prominent cause in those places where accumulation was
earliest, most rapid, and most conspicuous, cannot be maintained. However much
the growth of the early medieval town, and so of its ground-rents, may have
been promoted bv the dispersal of agrarian surpluses
through the households of king and count, bishop and abbot, trading wealth and
the employment which it brings must be regarded as both cause and consequence
of town growth, not as consequence only.
In Italy, where urban history before
the thirteenth century is most significant and urban wealth greatest,
no such simple connexion between agrarian surpluses and commercial capital can
be accepted. The salt-trade, and the earnings of her traffic with Byzantium and
the East, laid the foundations of Venetian wealth at a time when her citizens
were not lords of the terra firma, and when
the rental of the Rialto can have been but small. No doubt, in many other
towns, accumulations of wealth are found at an early date in the hands of a
class which corresponds to the landowning patriciate of the towns of Northern
Europe. But care must be taken in drawing conclusions from this fact. It is on
record, for instance, that Genoese noblemen, owners of urban real property,
provided capital for the wars of St Louis; but there was no gulf between
nobleman and merchant at Genoa, and it is possible that the wealth invested in
land had been won by their predecessors in trade. As merchants, shippers,
bankers, the nobles of Genoa in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries took
a leading part in the commercial life of the town. They risked, and no doubt
also gained, wealth in trading partnerships en commandite. A will which has survived from the
year 1236 shews clearly the varied, if somewhat modest, investments of one such
Genoese trading gentleman. Perhaps his initial capital came from the land; it
certainly grew in trade.
There is, however, both in Southern
and Northern Europe, and throughout the whole medieval period, one certain
connexion between feudal land-ownership and
commerce—the lord might himself become a trader or an organiser of trade. The
trading lord was most often the head of an ecclesiastical corporation, but not
infrequently he was a king. A familiar instance of monastic commerce is the
wool trade of the English Cistercians. Monastic houses were the chief traders,
shipowners, and money-lenders of Scotland in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The early Benedictine houses of the continent
had regularly employed a negotiator eccletiae, who was charged with the sale of the surplus produce of their lands and of the
monastic artificers. In the ninth century the abbey of St Martin of Tours had
secured extensive trading privileges from Louis the Pious, and in the eleventh
those of St Wandrille, Jumibges,
and Fecamp could undersell the other wine-merchants owing to their exemption from tolls. In the twelfth
century the government of Richard I carried through some profitable deals in tin; in the thirteenth Henry III—or his agents—utilised the royal
prerogative to help the sale of wine from the royal vineyards in Gascony; in
the fourteenth the Black Prince made profit out of his tin “blowing houses” at Lostwithiel and shipped salt fish for sale to
Bordeaux.
But nowhere was royal trading so early
or so fully developed as in the kingdom of Sicily. The Norman administrative
genius, which had not hesitated to tabulate English swine and “otiose beasts”
in the Damesday
survey, and had made the Duchy before
the year 1200 “the most advanced and self-sufficient country in Europe,” found
an outlet in the kingdom of Sicily in the organisation of government monopoly
and trade. Perhaps the Normans were influenced by the example of Byzantium and
stimulated by the congenial Italian commercial atmosphere. In the twelfth
century the Crown monopolised the commerce in iron, steel, and pitch; it sold
the surplus corn and cattle of its vast domains to merchants from Venice and
the northern towns; it conducted an extensive grain trade with Africa. Under
Frederick II the agricultural resources of the kingdom were developed
systematically, numerous fairs were established, internal customs were
abolished, weights and measures were standardised. But royal trade proper attained
its greatest extension under the Angevin dynasty. To the corn and cattle trades
Angevin administrators added trade with the Venetians in cheese, butter, and
oil. Crown agents bought, warehoused, and resold silks, cottons, flax, and
spices. Retaining the old monopolies of iron, steel, and pitch, they
established a monopoly in salt. Royal ships were not allowed to rest unproductive, but were hired out when not wanted—often to
corsairs. This government business was not all sound: the Angevin fiscal greed
constantly threatened the prosperity of the kingdom, and the whole commercial
development depended too much on the enterprise, and latterly on the capital,
of traders from the commercial cities farther north, especially Florentines.
Yet government business continued under the Aragonese dynasty; it was imitated
by the barons, and it grew rank in the congenial atmosphere of the fifteenth
century. At the close of the Middle Ages, King Ferrante’s son was speculating
in the Genoese oil trade, and there were barons who forbade their people to buy
even food except from themselves.
It was by means of capital early
accumulated in trade that Italy, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century,
exerted her most direct economic influence on Northern and Western Europe. How
the Crusading age developed the Levant trade of the Italian cities and brought
the princes of the North into financial relations with the Lombards is well
known. The Italian trader, long a familiar figure over all the Mediterranean
littoral, is found constantly north of the Cevennes, though not often north of
the Alps, from the early years of the twelfth century. His chief places of
resort were the great fairs in Champagne—the two of Provins;
the two of Troyes; those of Lagny-sur-Marne and
Bar-sur-Aube. His trade was both in money and in merchandise; but it is only
towards the close of the century that his characteristic financial activities
can be traced with certainty. Somewhere about the period 1150-75 the Champagne
fairs had become such convenient meeting-places for Frenchmen and Germaiis, Spaniards, Provencals,
Catalans and Italians, Flemings, Englishmen and men of Brabant, that the
practice of making “international” debts payable among the booths of their money-changers was well established by the close of the
century. Each of the six great fairs ran
for six weeks and no two overlapped; so trade could be carried on almost all the year
round with that full liberty which was only possible during the Middle Ages at
the fair. Documents stipulating for the settlement of debts at one or other of
these fairs have survived from the late twelfth century; and from the beginning
of the thirteenth century Champagne becomes for a time the clearing-house of Europe. In 1202, for example, Baldwin of Flanders is undertaking to repay
certain noblemen of Venice— Venetians, by the way, were rarely seen in
Champagne—at the fair of Lagny. Or again, from 1213
onwards there are records of a whole series of borrowings by the archbishop and
the city of Cologne, the lenders being always Italians, the place of payment
always Champagne. The example of Cologne was followed by many other bishops of
Southern and Western Germany. As the loans to bishops across the mountains were
often made to facilitate payments due from them to the Holy See,
and were often arranged with a visiting bishop in Rome itself, the Curia
might be induced to use its influence in support of the creditors: “we must get
letters from Rome,” write the agents of Italian houses when they find their
debtors obstinate.
Various types of Italian financiers are
to be found in the North. There are humble usurers who wander over France and
Germany, doing a little buying and selling, but occupied mainly, like some of
their Jewish predecessors and competitors, in lending to small folk who pawn
their household goods to get advances at the well-known usurer’s rate, 43 per
cent. The Germans called such people Kawerschen (Cahorsins), and some may have come from Cahors in
Languedoc; but most of those trading in Germany apparently came from Asti. The
men of Asti were among the first to migrate in considerable numbers beyond the
Alps, and with them migration seems to have become a habit. According to their
own chronicler it was “in the year of Our Lord 1226” that they “began to lend
and practise usury in France beyond the mountains.” Sometimes they handled the high as well as the low finance. In
the two Burgundies, where they were particularly numerous, they engaged in
every form of profitable and unpopular commerce—corn speculation, toll-farming,
farming the revenues of ducal domains, and ordinary village usury. They were
followed into the Burgundies, France, and Germany by traders and financiers
from most of the West Lombard and Tuscan towns, besides men of Genoa, Venice,
and Rome.
The financial supremacy of the
Florentines dates from about 1250 and endured for a century. They owed much, in
the long run, to the quality of Florentine gold money; but they had won their
position before the fiorino (Toro was first struck in 1252. England
admirably illustrates the progress of their influence. John, a stay-at-home
king, borrowed of an Italian house in the early years of his reign, but the
house was from Piacenza. About a quarter of a century later, Florentines
appear, together with Sienese, Lucchese, and l’istoians,
on the borrowing list of Henry III.
Henry’s son also made use of the
Genoese; but by his time the great Florentine firms, led by the Frescobaldi, a
house whose head became a member of Edward II’s council, were indisputably
supreme. So they were also at the court of Philip the
Fair, where “Mouche et Biche,”
that is to say Musciatto and Biccio Guidi of the company of the Frescobaldi and the Franzoni, gained wealth and unpopularity. Under Edward II
the Frescobaldi, who after alternations of good and bad fortune abandoned
English business in 1312, gave way to the Bardi and
Peruzzi. Italian financial operations were already declining in England and
would probably have dwindled away, in the course of the fourteenth century, owing to the growing wealth of native merchants and the
increasingly difficult economic situation in Florence itself, quite apart from
Edward Iii’s notorious act of bankruptcy.
These Italian firms were normally companies, with a family nucleus.
In the firm of Peruzzi, for example, about the year 1300 more than half the
capital belonged to members of the Peruzzi family, but some sixteen other
families were interested in it. There were five or six Directors (direttori); the house had regular representatives in
Naples, Avignon, Paris, Bruges, London, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Tunis, to name only
the more important centres; and there was an army of travelling agents,
identifiable by their teasera—the
family badge—scattered over the whole commercial field. The business of such
firms was varied. Custody of the deposits of private
individuals, gilds, churches, and other corporate bodies, formed a large
part. This was the home business. More familiar, but not more important, were
the loans to crowned heads and the business of remitting funds to Rome, who
undertook to pay over at Rome in Florentine money what he had gathered in a
great variety of currencies.
Such widespread and intricate
transactions required an elaborate business organisation, detailed accounts,
drawing of bills (lettere di pagamenti) by the scattered agents on the head office, and an infinite knowledge of
currencies and exchange. Even primitive forms of the bank-note and the cheque can certainly be traced in the fifteenth century; and the
former, if not the latter, appear to have existed much earlier.
The coining of the gold florin in 1252
marks the return into the currencies of Europe of an effective gold unit. Since
Charles the Great struck his new (silver) money there had been no regularly
renewed gold coinage west of the Adriatic. The golden bezant, continuously
struck and used in the Eastern Empire, was known throughout Christendom. In the West, golden coins had been struck from time to
time—with some regularity at Genoa from the middle of the twelfth century—but
they had not become current money with the merchant. Frederick II, that hardy
innovator, issued a golden augustale after his return from the East
in 1285; but his need became so
great that it could not be kept up: once he was reduced to the issue of leather
money. So the augustala has no history. Twenty-four years after it came the florin, which has a great
history. Before the close of the century it had been
widely imitated and, owing to its reputation, Florentines had been called in to
manage the mints, not only in other Italian towns, but at Hall in Swabia and
even in London; though they were not everywhere required to arrange for the
striking of gold. The credit of Florence rested on the excellence and abundance
of her gold; and her government of traders, who were very willing to strike
overrated silver for paying wages by the Arno, maintained the quality of the
florin with the honesty of self-interest.
Gold once known and struck with some
regularity throughout the West, the currency history of Europe entered its late
medieval phase. The gold was mainly a money of commerce, favoured by the great
lenders and borrowers, buyers and sellers, because of
its portability, its noble aspect and universal welcome. From the first, its
use was encouraged by the Papal Curia. But even in Florence silver was the
standard money for domestic trade. Now, owing to ignorance, abuse of the royal
prerogative, the diversity of moneys, and the defects of medieval minting, the
legal ratio of exchange between coins of the two metals was always fluctuating,
and only by the merest accident might two countries employ the same ratio at
the same time. So governments constantly discovered
that one or other metal was undervalued and tended to leak out abroad, in spite
of ferocious currency laws. To remedy this evil the legal ratio might be altered or coins made of the undervalued metal might at the
next issue be lightened. In the fourteenth century alone the official ratio of
the metals was altered a hundred and fifty times by the King of France, with or
without alterations in the metallic content of the coins. As, over and above
the lightenings thus undertaken to rectify the evils
of a crude bimetallism, new coinage was sometimes lightened in order that it
might not differ too much in weight from tokens of the same face value which
had borne the heavy burden of a medieval circulation, and sometimes because it
suited the convenience of kings to lighten it, the metallic content of the
European currencies fell steadily from 1300 to 1500, In these two centuries the
English silver penny fell from 22 to 12 grains, the gold equivalent of
6/8 from 128 to 80 grains; and this fall of something like forty per cent, is
representative.
Advantageously situated as were the
Italian towns for the development of the machinery of commerce, their political
independence and animosities accentuated among them, with unfortunate results,
that particularism which was characteristic of medieval urban life. Their
distinct currencies were only an outward sign of distinct and often conflicting
economic policies, policies which produced such trade-wars as that between
Venice and Ferrara, or industrial wars like that waged by Florence
with Volterra about an alum-mine, which was essential to
the Florentine wool industry. In countries which possessed a measure of
political unity, some of the economic drawbacks of the Italian urban
civilisation were mitigated. Flanders is a case in point. The Flemish towns, though
not technically independent, were almost autonomous from the twelfth century
onwards. But they were subjects of a single ruler, and not the least important
of the many causes of Flemish economic development was the care with which the
Counts of Flanders maintained the currency, which had a reputation for
excellence and uniformity as early as 1100. To uniformity of coinage was added,
as time went on, a uniformity of weights and measures exceedingly rare in the
Middle Ages. Diverse as were her measures,
England in Pegolotti’s day had at least a more
uniform, if a more old-fashioned, coinage than any considerable European
country. The excellence of her silver was well known in Italy in the thirteenth
century, though she had no gold money of international, or even of domestic,
significance until a much later date.
In this matter of the gold
currency there can be no doubt that transalpine governments consciously
imitated those of Italy. And it is probable that in connexion with many private
commercial institutions there was more or less conscious imitation, though proof in such cases is not likely to be forthcoming. That
half-public and half-private institution, the gild, commercial or industrial,
in its innumerable forms, whatever its ultimate origin or origins, cannot be
included among the borrowed institutions; although, as has been already pointed
out, the earliest definitely economic gilds of the
Middle Ages are to be found south of the Alps. But the commercial company, as
employed for instance by the Florentine bankers, was certainly first perfected
in Italy, under the influence of Roman law, and made known by Italians in many
other parts of Europe. An institution which has its roots in the family, or the
simple association of those who eat the same bread, is not of
necessity sprung from any one law or from any one land; and company trading was
well developed among the Hanse merchants in the late thirteenth century, without
any demonstrable Italian influence. Yet, whereas the first traces of trading
companies in Germany go back only to the opening years of that century, in the
Italian towns such companies are found a hundred years earlier. They might be
extended family partnerships or wider organisations such as that of the
Peruzzi. The individual company was usually referred to in legal documents as
the Societas A. B. et sociorum.
These firms were essentially private
partnerships, not primitive joint- stock companies. Not until the middle of the
fourteenth century do the beginnings of joint-stock organisation appear at
Genoa. Such things remained exceptional, even in Italy, down to the close of
the Middle Ages; and they were nowhere imitated.
Older than the company are the
sleeping partnership (commenda) and the loan
to a merchant for a trading venture overseas, which have their roots in Roman
Law and Byzantine practice. At Genoa and Marseilles in the twelfth century many
varying methods of employing the commenda can be traced. The sleeping partner is not however, at
this time, a permanent associate of his active colleague. As a rule he hands over his capital only for some specific
enterprise; so that in practice such partnerships are not very different from
the loans for a venture beyond the sea. The latter, however, provided
opportunities for more speculative undertakings. In the form which they assumed
in Mediterranean commerce, commenda and
shipping loan spread northwards; though primitive
forms of such obviously natural institutions must have been known to Teutonic
traders in very early times. When Burning Flosi, in
the Saga of Burnt Njal, was fitting out a ship to
leave Iceland, it is said that “he was so beloved by his men that their wares
stood free to him to take either on loan or gift, just as he chose”; his men,
in short, were prepared to speculate in their chief’s half piratical venture.
Nor is it difficult to trace, in very
early Northern gild regulations, the beginnings of certain kinds of mutual
insurance. Every gild, social, religious, commercial, or industrial, insured
its members in some degree against accidents of life, death, or immortality.
The suggestive clause which declares that “at a house burning” brethren shall
contribute a penny occurs in. the rules of the Exeter gild of late Anglo-Saxon
times. In the twelfth, and possibly in the eleventh century, the Icelandic Repp, an association of neighbours for mutual protection,
and the somewhat similar Danish frith-gild, took special cognisance of losses
by fire. But systematic commercial insurance, based on the regular payment of
premiums, is first found in Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century.
There is no reason to suppose that it existed before that date; nor can the
splitting of risks connected with loans for trading ventures be properly
described as insurance. From documents which run back to 1318 it is evident
that the Bardi accepted insurance risks, on
consignments of cloth despatched overland, in return for definite premiums.
From about the middle of the fourteenth century the history of insurance at
Genoa is continuous; and before the century closes re-insurance and the subdivision
of insurance risks begin to appear. A Genoese trader was concerned in the
first demonstrable case of insurance at Bruges—the first in all Northern Europe—which happened in 1370; and, for many decades
after that date, insurance business with which Italians have no connexion is
rare even in the busiest commercial centres by the North Sea. Premiums
for the insurance of human life also
begin in Italy in the fourteenth century; but, even in Italy, life insurance
only occurs sporadically and in relation to specified risks—those of the sea, fpr example, or those of childbed.
There is reason to think that
commercial insurance was, in part at least, an ultimate product of the
condemnation by the Church—about 1230—of contracts for the payment of fixed
interest on loans for distant ventures. The growing difficulty which faced the
speculating merchant in finding lenders who would share his risks without any
certain returns made some means of reducing these risks desirable. Only an
isolated canonist here and there ever criticised insurance by way of premiums.
This episode in the history of the ecclesiastical campaign against usury in the
thirteenth century illustrates the fact that, by this date, the campaign was a
forlorn hope; because the payment of interest, certain guaranteed interest, was
no longer, as in primitive rural communities, merely the sin of detested
village usurers but was a part of everyday business-life in Italy and, to a
much less degree no doubt, throughout Europe. Innocent III was perhaps hardly
exaggerating when he wrote to the Bishop of Arras in 1208 that, if all
usurers were really to be shut out of the Church. That was at a time when the Italian money-lenders were extending their
operations swiftly and successfully beyond the mountains. Nor did they go to
lands where usury was unknown, although they did bring fresh supplies of
loanable capital and highly-trained commercial
intelligence. Quite apart from Jewish money-lending (which is dealt with
elsewhere) outside even of the Jews' range, the loan of money at interest had long been practised in societies
which are sometimes conceived of as living in ignorance of how money breeds. It
may be that the denunciations of usury by English and Carolingian Church
councils in the eighth and ninth centuries were to some extent imitative; but
it can hardly be doubted that they were aimed at a real, though perhaps
uncommon, evil. Throughout Europe, from very early times, rich monasteries and
individual churchmen had committed usury on a large scale. In the thirteenth
century the Templars and the Teutonic Knights carried on the old monastic tradition; though their contracts may not have been
technically usurious. Much of the lending by religious corporations, during and
after the Crusading Age, is connected with the
Mediterranean commercial developments of that era, a connexion which further
illustrates the size of the problem with which the stricter moralists of the
thirteenth-century Church tried to deal. The references to money out at
interesting Njal’s Saga may reflect the
environment of the thirteenth-century Icelandic scribe rather than that of his
tenth-century hero; but even so they are significant.
The methods of the ordinary Christian
usurer, who carried on what he knew to be a doubtful trade, were much the same
in all times and places.
His devices as described early in the
thirteenth century by Raymond of Penaforte, whose experience
was presumably gained in Catalonia, have their parallels in England and
Normandy, Italy and Germany. He buys standing crops at
impossible prices; he exacts ruinous compensation for delay in repayment,
having fixed the date of repayment so that delay is certain to occur; he takes
out his interest in the labour of his debtor or, imitating the Cahorsins, takes it frankly in money; he hides loan and interest behind a fictitious sale
and repurchase at an impossibly high price by the debtor—a device which still
troubled English legislators in early Tudor times. Whether the pilloried Cahorsin was an Italian or not, his frank acceptance of
interest in money reflects Italian practice and Italian law as they existed
before the middle of the fourteenth century when, under the influence of Baldus
and Bartolus, the prohibition of interest found its
way into secular legislation. Fifteen per cent, was a legal rate of interest at
Milan in 1197 and twelve per cent, in 1216. The right to a fixed return without
risk—the very essence of usury as conceived by the Christian casuist—was
publicly admitted in connexion with the debts of Italian city republics. Genoa
led both in the creation and in the consolidation of such debts; her
consolidated debt of 1274, which still, as has been said, lives on in the
national debt of unified Italy, was the first of its kind. Venice was also an
early borrower, and she was followed by Florence, Pisa, Bologna, Siena, Novara,
Vercelli, and Como. The clash of the doctrine of usury with the habits of a
commercial society is well seen in fourteenth-century Florence. In the course
of the century every Florentine gild forbade usury; yet all the time the gilds
themselves, like tire State, both gave and took interest, either frankly after
the manner of the Cahorsins, or under cover of one of the recognised subterfuges.
In societies less radically
commercialised than those of the Italian towns, certain types of contract for fixed gains survived the elaboration in the
thirteenth, and the legal adoption in the fourteenth century, of the completed
canonist doctrine of usury, just because they had so long been familiar. Of
these the sale and repurchase of lands and the purchase of rents are the most
important. A borrower could sell land cheap, leaving the fruits to the lender
as a handsome interest; and the repayment of the loan would appear as a
repurchase. Though the sale and resale of chattels came everywhere to be
treated as a usurious contract, the principle was never applied to real
property. As for the purchase and sale of groundrents—one
of the oldest types of investment—that was never seriously criticised. Rent
purchases were always a favourite monastic investment. The sale of urban
ground-rents might provide the trader with very necessary capital, or—though
less frequently—the rural landowner with funds for improvement and
colonisation. In thirteenth-century Germany such transactions were conducted on
an average basis of 10 per cent. Latterly they were often fictitious, that is
to say undertaken without reference to specified properties; and so they became indistinguishable
from ordinary usurious loans at fixed
interest. Taking all these various lines of investment into account, it may
well be doubted whether at any time in the Middle Ages capital, where it
existed, lacked remunerative employment, with risks which—medievally
judged—were not great.
Accumulation of capital, as has
already been pointed out, was always possible for the landowner, more
especially the corporate landowner, and for the successful trader. Whatever may
have been the case at an earlier date, by the year 1300 some merchants of
weight and wealth were to be found in all parts of Europe. They were of course
far more numerous and wealthy in Italy than, for
instance, in England; but even the English merchants of the thirteenth century
were not such men of straw as has sometimes been suggested. Light is thrown on
the comparative scale of Italian and English business operations, in one
important branch of commerce, by the records—imperfect but not so far as they
go untrustworthy —of the wool export from England in 1273. In that year various
persons connected with the house of Scotti in Piacenza shipped at least 2100
sacks of wool, and the Bardi at
.least 700. (For comparison it maybe borne in
mind that, sixty years later, 30,000 sacks was a
burdensome national grant to Edward III for his French wars). There were twenty
Englishmen each of whom exported more than a hundred sacks; of these the two
most important were together responsible for a larger export than the Bardi. They were William le Pcssuner and John Durant, both of Dunstable. The total amount exported by Englishmen
exceeded that exported by foreign merchants. In estimating a merchant’s
opportunities for profit and accumulation, the fact that he was not necessarily
confined to one line of business must not be overlooked. In thirteenth-century
London “most of the aidermen were wool-mongers,
vintners, skinners, and grocers by turns or all at once.” And the capital
gathered in trading could be increased from the rentals of urban property, or
by customs-farming and other profitable work for the Crown.
But when all has been said, the number
of those who, by any or all of these meanSj were on the road to wealth was singularly small in
the average North European town of the early fourteenth century—mainly because
of the smallness of the towns themselves. There were, by that time, several
Italian cities which approximated in size, and in the variety and splendour of
their economic life, to the Byzantium of the tenth century; and it has been
maintained that Paris had a population of 200,000, though some would reduce the
figure by at least one-third. A better founded estimate gives Bruges 50,000 in 1292. But London can hardly have risen above
20-25,000. Cologne, and rather later Lubeck, were perhaps in the same class as
London. Even towards the close of the fourteenth century, really
important towns, such as Frankfort, Nuremberg, or Hamburg, York,
Norwich, or Bristol, may be assigned from 6-12,000. Such towns were few. More
representative of fourteenth-century England
is a town like Liverpool, which in
1375 had about 1,000 inhabitants. In Germany it is
probable that, at the end of the medieval period, the very great majority of
the towns had less than 5,000 inhabitants. Two centuries earlier their position
would be still more modest. In such communities the commercial or industrial
roads to wealth were few and strait. The five fishmongers, the four drapers,
the four bootmakers, and the two tailors, who formed the trading population of
Liverpool at the date mentioned, had not the opportunities of a Loudon aiderman in the days of Edward II, or of Antonio
Frescobaldi who sat on Edward’s Council. It is not often possible to draw a
satisfactory line between commercial and industrial activities; the typical
medieval craftsman was also a shopkeeper, and in the larger towns his
interests and outlook were those of the dealer rather than those of the maker;
but it is certain that the more purely commercial pursuits gave far greater
opportunities for accumulation than those which were primarily industrial. If
anyone in fourteenthcentury Liverpool became rich it
would be the fishmonger rather than the bootmaker.
The difficulties of communication; the
dominance of handicraft in the strict sense of the term; the great extent to
which townsman and countryman alike provided for their domestic needs by the
labour of their own families; the simplicity of those needs and the scanty
population both in town and country—these and many like causes tended to keep
the scale of industry small, quite apart from the general absence of expensive
mechanical appliances, apart too from those definite attempts to prevent any
craftsman from rising above his fellows which are so commonly found in the gild
regulations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The ordinary picture of
medieval industrial life, drawn from industries working with primitive
appliances for a narrow market, is therefore broadly true—true of all the
industries in an average town; true of many industries
oven in the greatest towns of Italy or Flanders. Taking all trades together, it
has been argued that even in Paris, say in 1300, there were as many masters as men.
For the towns of Germany many scattered instances, from the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, shew that the majority of master
craftsmen employed at any rate three or four assistants—apprentices and
journeymen; but, when the minority is taken into account, this does not yield a
result which differs much more from the Parisian estimate than the later date
of many of the records would lead one to expect. Throughout Europe, in many
crafts, the master was very often only a jobbing workman called in to handle
materials supplied by his customers. In occupations such as carpentering, in
which the master sold not goods but services, he was paid only about 20 per
cent, more than his mate in fourteenth-century England, a difference which may
be taken as a rough measure of the distance between employer and employed over
a large part of the industrial field in Europe. It is not therefore surprising
to find that the Parisian Livre des metiers (1261-70) contemplates the
possibility of masters reverting to the status of journeymen, “through poverty
or because they choose to do so.” In the gilds of Prussia, at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, for every hundred employers there were barely fifty-six
employed; and although the petrifaction of the German gild system in early
modern times, and the multiplication of masters, who had secured their
position—in the English phrase—by patrimony, may in part account for these
figures, it can liardlv be supposed that the average
position in the Middle Ages was more favourable to the employing class, if such
a term be not an anachronism.
But an arithmetical statement of this
kind by no means exhausts the facts. In the few centres of active industrial
life we can discern—as industrial conditions come into the light of fourteenth-century
documents—certain significant tendencies: a tendency for the journeyman to become an outworker doing jobs for several
masters; a tendency for masters, in some minor industrial craft, to become
subordinated economically to the shopkeeper or merchant of an allied commercial
occupation; or a similar tendency to differentiation within a trade, the handworking master taking work from his more commercial
colleague. From Siena to York, gilds are found laying down the rule that the journeyman shall work for one master only, a rule whose
universality is only explicable on the assumption that there was a general
tendency in the opposite direction, atendency favourable to inequality among the masters; for the powerful employer would
control a disproportionate share of the trained labour in his town, if he were
permitted to secure even some part of the services of men employed primarily by
his weaker neighbours. In those towns or trades—and they were very many,
especially in Germany—where the industrial gild spirit, with its jealous desire
for equality of opportunity among masters, most completely prevailed, the
tendency towards inequality was counteracted during the fourteenth century. But
it survived and had freer scope elsewhere.
The equally widespread group of rules,
limiting the numbers whom any single master might employ, is a further
indication of the state of things against which the systematised gild life of
the fourteenth century was a reaction or a safeguard.
The growing economic subordination of
craft to craft, or of the handworking to the trading
element within a single craft organisation, is conspicuous in fifteenth-century
London. A marked decline in the number of distinct craft organisations during
the century is one evidence of the former process: glovers, pursers, pouchmakers are absorbed constitutionally into the Company
of Leathersellers, the master-glover becoming, if not
exactly a wage-earner, at least to some extent dependent on the trader through
whom alone his wares can reach the consuming public. In the Goldsmiths' Company the process of differentiation between
working and trading masters is very well marked. These instances are taken from
the eve of modern times, but they illustrate tendencies which, even in England,
can be traced back to the thirteenth century and may well have existed in the
twelfth. In Bristol, for example, there can be seen in the fourteenth century
two distinct species of tailor, the “merchant tailor” and the small master
working on commission for him. In London, the thirteenth century reveals a
still more modern phenomenon, not the dependent small master but the “server,”
who could never aspire to the mastery. The ordinances of the Cordwainers of
the year 1271, one of the earliest trade-codes extant in any country, shew that
the cordwainer’s prentice was expected to pay a premium far beyond the means of
an ordinary worker in that or airy other trade. That there were opulent
tradesmen—goldsmiths, weavers, bakers, clothworkers, pep- perers—in
twelfth-century England the heavy payments made by their associations for
privileges from the Crown, and recorded in the early Pipe Rolls, are sufficient
testimony. The business organisation which yielded this wealth escapes us; but
it can hardly have been that of humble masters barely distinguishable from
those who served them.
On the Continent, as in England, only the documents of the later thirteenth and
early fourteenth centuries justify any confident account of industrial
organisation; but, in certain great towns and in a few trades which produced articles de luxe for export, that organisation is so complex,
so capitalistic, that its growth must have been a matter of generations,
possibly of centuries. It is closely allied, in its most important homes, Italy
and Flanders, with the contemporary organisation of commerce, of which it is
to a great degree a product. Its directors are men of commercial antecedents
and commercial instincts, whose thoughts and whose wares are far away in
foreign parts.
At Florence there are early
twelfth-century records of the import of fine cloth from Byzantium and of rough
unfinished cloth, Frisian and so forth, by way of the fairs of Champagne. In
the thirteenth century these “ultramontane” fabrics
were dyed and finished for export in clothworking shops by the Arno, belonging to, or working for, the merchants of the Arte di Calimala. Probably the
cloth was exported mainly to the Levant, though early in the fourteenth century
it is certain that consignments went back over the Alps or by sea to
Marseilles, to supply the Northern markets. Very little was consumed in
Florence, so that this industry, relying on imports for its material and on
export for its success, was liable to seasons of bad trade, with all their
familiar modem accompaniments in the world of labour.
More interesting than the Arte di Calimala is its
successful rival the Arte della Lana, which, when it comes into the full light of the documents (1293-1301),
is already the organ of a group of manufacturers who like the merchants of the Calimala use foreign raw material—at this date wool from
England—and produce mainly for export. A humbler “art” had to do with the
making of rough cloth for home use. The English wool, which for the most part
came via the Garonne and Aigues-Mortes,
was cleansed and prepared for spinning in the warehouse of the Lanaiuolo. The spinning was done on
commission for the Lanaiuolo by a distinct group of
tradesmen, the Stamanioli who employed
village spinners, mere country folk kept in order by their priests, who had
instructions from the city government to preach regularly against yarn
stealing and bad workmanship, and to excommunicate in case of need. Sometimes
the Stamaniolo himself supplied the yarn, but as the
fourteenth century went on, the Stamanioli became
simply paid agents of the Lanaiuoli. Weavers, working
by the piece for the Lanaiuolo, made the cloth on
looms which were usually rented from their employer. The master dyers, who in
the twelfth century had an “art” or gild of their own, were in a more
independent position; they owned their vats and appliances and sometimes
employed ten or more hands; but they too worked on commission for the Lanaiuoli. Fulling was mostly done in rural mills; the
various finishing processes—teazing, shearing,
pressing, and the like— in little urban workshops. Throughout the long series
of operations, the Lanaiuolo retained full ownership
of the growing cloth, and his gild controlled all the groups of commission
workers. The gild was wealthy and enterprising; it imported scarce raw
materials; as a partner en commandite it subsidised technical experiments; it
managed alummines and a woad warehouse; it owned ships, a court of justice,
and a jail. In all its decisions, the interests of the Lanaiuoli were paramount. The Lanaiuolo was of the same class,
often of the same family, as the great financiers; and the State, controlled by
these “capitalists,” absolutely forbade combinations among the workpeople.
To find in Florence industries in
which there was a fair chance that the average prentice would rise to become a really independent working master, one must descend to the
lesser arts, butchers, saddlers, bakers. Here the limitation of the numbers
that a master might employ, and the other familiar regulations for safeguarding
equality of opportunity, suggest the outlook of the typical North European
burgess, rather than that capitalistic outlook which the Lanaiuoli shared with the members of the commercial “arts.” The art of silk alone, among
the manufacturing arts proper, developed an organisation similar
to that of the export cloth industry; but it did so only gradually in
the course of the fourteenth century.
Approximations to the position of the
Florentine Lanaiuoli are to be found in the textile
industries of several Italian towns during that century. Occasionally records
from the early part of the century suggest that such an organisation was of old
standing. This is the case with the Lucchese silk industry, as reflected in the
regulations of 1308, an industry which sent its goods to the Champagne fairs
and even to London. The business undertaker was a merchant, who bought silk
and had it put through the various processes for him by groups of dependent
domestic workers.
In thirteenth-century Venice, the
actual manufacture of silk was in the hands of small master weavers, who bought
the raw material from importing merchants and sold silks to dealers and
exporters. As a result, it is conjectured, of a migration of manufacturers from
Lucca, the Lucchese type of organisation finally prevailed, in
spite of the struggles of the weavers, who however succeeded in
retaining more independence than the wool-weavers of Florence. The wool
industries in Venice and Pisa, as also the “Art of foreign wool” at Bologna,
also supply evidence—though in no case so striking and complete as that
furnished by the Florentine Arte della Lana—of a group of manufacturers economically and socially dominant over their
workpeople.
A similar, though not identical, class
can be discerned in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries among the
cloth-working towns of Flanders and the adjacent districts. Frisian cloth, as
has already been noticed, was the first manufactured product of a Northern land
which became a staple article of European trade. Already in the eleventh
century, Flanders was importing wool for the use of an industry that had
outgrown its old homes, the peasant’s hut and the manorial or monastic
workroom, and was maintaining a class of specialised craftsmen. By 1200 the industry
was complex and its products of an almost infinite variety. During the
following century, in such towns as Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges, operations were
directed by the drapyer (the clothier) who,
like the Lanaiuolo of Florence, himself bought the
wool and gave it out to the master weaver, dyer, fuller, and the rest, beneath
whom again was the true proletariat of “cnapen,” the
“blue-nails,” living in suburbs of wretched huts, often paid in truck, hired by
the week, and liable to dismissal during those times of slack trade which the
constant wars and the resulting difficulties of communication produced with
distressing frequency. The drapyer was as a rule a
member of the old urban aristocracy, a poorer, who owned urban property and was in a position to accumulate rents. Apparently he had no direct connexion with the manufacturing processes; so far as is
known he did not own looms, like the Florentine Lanaiuolo;
nor did his gild, in this case the Gild, the Merchants’ Gild, take any
but a regulative part in the business of manufacture. The craftsmen who
worked for him never admitted his supremacy, though forced to accept it; and
the economic hatreds which the system produced were among the causes of the
social upheavals of the fourteenth century.
Analogous to the position of the
Flemish merchant drapyer, was that of the Parisian
silk mercer, who bought the raw material and had it spun by wage-earning, but in this case the weaver was
an independent craftsman, to whom the mercer sold yarn. More strictlv analogous is the English “clothier that doth put
cloth to making and sale,” as an Elizabethan statute describes him, a type
which rose to great prominence with the rapid growth of the English export
trade in cloth towards the close of the Middle Ages, but first comes clearly
into the light in the fourteenth century. How
closely the emergence of this type of entrepreneur was associated with
production for a wide market is shewn by the history of the dreipiers at Brussels. The class came into being in the thirteenth century,
and was at the height of its power in the fourteenth. Side by side with
it there always existed a class of independent master weavers, who sold their
own fabrics instead of working for the drapier like their weaker
fellows. In the fifteenth century when, owing to commercial and political
changes, the cloth export from Brabant declined, these small mastersincreased in numbers while the merchant drapiers dwindled. Meanwhile the development of the
linen trade was calling into existence a class of linen manufacturers who, like
the drapiers, supplied material to
weavers, themselves superintending only the mercantile side of the business.
By that time this type of organisation was widespread in the textile industries
of Europe, perhaps the most notable instance, besides those already referred
to, being the fustian industry of South Germany, in which the Fuggers of Augsburg made their earliest fortune.
The clothier type has not exactly the same history in any two regions. The relations
of the clothiers to gild organisations are particularly varied. The early
Flemish drapyer belonged to an urban
aristocracy and an old established Merchants’ Gild, a gild which would not
admit those who worked for him; the Florentine Lanaiuolo,
also connected with a socially dominant class, had his dependent workers
regimented in the lower grades of his own “art”; the English clothier, and
others of the same type elsewhere in the fifteenth century, often employed
rural weavers and tended to operate outside or across the boundaries of gild
regulation. But, with certain minor qualifications, all represent the same
grade of economic organisation and the dominance of the commercial over the
industrial factor. This dominance is not confined to the textile industry; it
is noticeable, though not at so early a date, in mining and metallurgy. In the
English lead and tin mining of the fourteenth century, for example, the getting
of the ore was in the hands of small men; but these small men were often
dependent on advances from the merchants; and the merchants came into direct
contact with the actual work of production by their control of the business of
smelting. In the great mining industries of the German lands the situation is
complicated by the special and changing relations between the various governing
powers and mining enterprise, especially in the silver mines of Styria and the
Harz. During the earlier centuries, in many cases, work had been carried on
under the direct superintendence of a lord’s agents, by more
or less servile labour. From the twelfth century onwards these servile labourers are succeeded—though no one generalisation will cover
all the facts— bv groups of free working miners. But
differentiation sets in among members of the groups almost from the start: the more
successful copartners employ day-labourers; their
claims can be worked in their absence; where heavy expenditure on the workings becomes necessary only they, or
if they fail, the lord of the mine, can make the necessary advances. As time
goes on many of these richer shareholders are otherwise occupied: they direct
smelting operations, are minters, moneychangers, merchants. Yet they control
the mines, though working miners may still share with them; for in hardly any
case was a complete separation between “capital” and “labour” brought about.
The nearest approach to it occurred where the lord of the mine, by making the
necessary advances himself, had exchanged his primitive political and
proprietary control of the miners for a control that was more purely economic.
Like the Duke of Cornwall at Lostwithiel, he became a
kind of industrial capitalist.
The business undertaker in the various
industries which have been discussed—and in the discussion attention has been concentrated
on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—may fairly be described as a
capitalist. But if, in modern terminology, his circulating capital was
relatively large, the fixed capital of the industry—tools, appliances,
buildings—belonged for the most part, at any rate in the textile industries,
to those who took work from him; and they had no greater supply of these things
than had the ordinary self-dependent craftsman. Once more the nearest approach
to modern conditions is to be found in Italy. The Florentine Lanaiuolo had a large warehouse with a staff of bookkeepers and clerks, and
accommodation for workpeople who washed, sorted, and prepared the wool for the
spinners, or inspected the yarn and cloth as they were brought in at the various
stages of the manufacture. He had much capital “fixed” in the looms which his
weavers hired from him. The clothiers of Northern Europe must also have had
warehouse accommodation. There are records or suggestions that some of them
owned looms, dyehouses, or finishing shops. But, on the whole,
their fixed capital would seem to have been less; nor were they united into
corporations with capitalistic activities like the Arte della Lana.
Generally speaking,
there was little in the plant or machinery requisite for
medieval industry to encourage large scale operations of the familiar modern
type. There was abundant use of “power,” but rarely on a large scale. The water-mill for grinding corn, which spread over Europe—how,
no one knows—between the fourth century and the consolidation of the new
peoples, was a decisive innovation. Medieval society in the West would be
hardly recognisable to the modern student without the mill and the miller. Water-power was subsequently adopted for other industries;
but its technique hardly varied. From the twelfth century comes evidence of
its use in Italy for fulling, at a time when the fuller of Northern Europe was
still a “walker,” who stamped the cloth till it
thickened and felted. Later the
fulling mill spread into the north, being manorialised like the corn mill. Water-power was used during the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in metallurgy, for driving furnacebellows, tilt-hammers, and even wire-mills;
for grinding operations other than corn-milling; and for sawing. But, until the
fifteenth century, iron and steel were produced by very primitive methods and
in very small establishments. The high blast-furnace and cast iron were
unknown. The smelting forge (Anglicc, bloomery) in which the roughly prepared ore was worked into “blooms'’
of metal, and the smithy which turned out rods or shoes, were both so small as
to be easily moveable—the fabrica errantes of the Forest of Dean in the thirteenth
century. Steel was made in tiny quantities, and in few places, in equally small
Catalan forges. The nearest medieval approach to a modern
power-equipped factory is a water-mill for silk-throwing, said to have been
erected at Bologna in 1391, whose machines could do the work of four thousand
spinners. Others of the same type were subsequently erected by
the commune and rented out to manufacturers. As the reputed designer of this
medieval factory was a man from Lucca, it is possible that the capitalistic
silk industry of that town was familiar with such labour-saving devices at an
earlier date. The wind-mill spread slowly from about
the time (1190), when, at Bury St Edmunds, Herbertus decanus levavit molendinum ad ventum super Hauberdu, but it remained very rough and
imperfect.
There can be little doubt that the
nearest approach to modern conditions was to be found, neither in the textile
industries, nor in mining, nor in metallurgy; but in the shipyards of the
seafaring nations, especially those of Byzantium, Genoa, and Venice. In the
ninth century large ships began to be built at Venice on Byzantine models. By
the close of the eleventh century Byzantium was outstripped; and early in the
twelfth, Ordelafo Falier being Doge, the national shipyard was organised. The scale of operations and
the rapidity of work at Venice are suggested by the contract made by the
republic with the Emperor Isaac Angelus in 1188, to prepare a fleet of from 40
to 100 galleys within six months; but this is doubtful evidence and does not
necessarily apply to the government yard alone. From the time when Dante
compared the pitch of Malebolge with that which
boiled all winter in the Arsenal, information becomes more specific. A
detailed account of the operations in the fourteenth century shews that, apart
from repairs, 40 galleys could be built in the year, and that the whole body of
workpeople connected with the Arsenal may have been numbered in thousands.
Even in the middle of the twelfth
century Genoa was able to send out a fleet of 63 galleys and 163 other ships
against the Moors of Spain. Duringjher great days in
the thirteenth century the orders of the government for galleys suggest a very
highly organised ship-building industry,
probably superior to that of
contemporary Venice. In 1207 the government orders 20 galleys to be built at
home and 2 abroad; in 1242 the order is for 40, and in 1282 for no less than 50
galleys. From the scanty records of navies elsewhere, as for instance in
England or in Naples, it may be concluded that government ship-building in the
thirteenth or fourteenth century, backed as it was by the whole financial power
of the State, involved everywhere a great outlay of capital and a considerable
organisation of labour, though only the sustained and well-considered naval
policy of Venice could produce a continuous government industry at all comparable
with the ship-building industries of the modern world.
Like the building of ships, the
building of castles, palaces, churches, and monasteries was largely dependent
on the resources of the State, or on those of corporations no less durable and
not always less wealthy. The scale of building operations in the Middle Ages
was certainly not small. Unfortunately the
organisation of medieval building is one of the most obscure sections of
economic history. For the centuries from which no documentary evidence survives
we are occasionally told, and can generally assume, that there was some amount
of compulsory service in all the rougher work connected with building. The
carrying dues, which peasants so generally owed, were available for this purpose;
and for castle-building in conquered districts the subject population might be
drawn upon. Voluntary and unpaid labour on the fabric of churches and
monasteries is also not infrequently recorded. The slowness of the operations,
in almost all religious and in most civil buildings, put the industry as a whole into a class distinct from that of the building
of ships of war and of fortifications, in which time might be an object. In
cathedral and other records, from the thirteenth century onwards, the deliberate
accumulation of materials and the leisurely process of construction can
sometimes be traced. There can be no doubt that these instances are typical.
Every large foundation had its permanent staff of repairing masons and other
craftsmen, who served as a nucleus round which migratory workers might be
grouped when some great piece of building was undertaken. Owing to the slowness
of the work, it would not as a rule be necessary to call in outsiders in very
large numbers at any one time. Besides the ordinary working mason or carpenter,
experts were often summoned from great distances. Such a man was Estienne de Bonnueil, mason, who went from Paris to Upsala in 1287; or
William of Hurle, master carpenter, who worked for
Edward III at Westminster, Windsor, and the Tower, and whose consulting fee put
a strain on the resources of Ely; or the German masters, to secure whose advice
Gian Galeazzo Visconti sent letters and even embassies over the Alps, to such famous architectural centres as Strasbourg,
Cologne, and Prague. Sometimes these experts brought trained subordinates.
Estienne de Bonnueil had a band of “compagnons” and “bacheliers.”
John of Gloucester and at least six “of his men” came to cast the bells of Ely
in 1341-2; Johann Nexemsperger of Graz brought
a staff of thirteen to help him in a
series of difficult problems at Milan. For a much earlier period, the
affiliation of architectural styles throughout Europe proves, or suggests, the
influence of such experts: we know how even in the seventh century Benedict Biscop brought foreign masons to Jarrow.
Whether attention is fixed on the
expert and his subordinates or on the humbler migratory artisan, the medieval
building industry in its prime furnishes an important instance of true mobility
of labour. In combating the undue stress sometimes laid upon the stagnant
character of medieval life, care must be taken not to exaggerate the mobility
which undoubtedly existed. Yet even when Crusade and pilgrimage, the wandering scholar and the international Churchman, are put on one side
together with all permanent migrations, a great amount of economic movement of
the modern kind can everywhere be discerned. The larger towns, created by this
movement, continued to be fed from the country or from other towns. Bucher has shown how the majority of the
people admitted as burghers at Frankfort and Cologne, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had been born elsewhere; many came from the near
neighbourhood, but many from distant towns and villages. Less exact English
evidence points in the same direction. In a list of 59 master cordwainers, and
in another of 128 tailors, of York, from the latter part of the fourteenth
century, the great majority are named after Yorkshire towns and villages, from
Bridlington to Skipton. The lists include also a
number of place-surnames from other counties, of which the most remote is that
of Robert de Bristowe. That movement between town and
town was common in England is further shewn by the widespread type of gild
regulation providing for the admission of competent strangers.
England never developed that
systematised migration of journeymen which produced the “tour de
France'" of the French compagnon and
the compulsory Wanderjahre of the German Geselle. This is a late medieval development
in both countries, and cannot be traced with any
certainty before the latter part of the fourteenth century. It is connected
with the growing exclusiveness of the gilds, which called into existence
journeymen’s associations to resist the tyranny of the masters in possession, and is contemporary with considerable migrations
of German and Flemish labour into Italy and England. But, whatever special causes may have come into operation during this later period,
with which the present chapter is not directly concerned, it is certain that
compulsory wandering could hardly have developed had not the industrial, life
of an earlier age been tolerably familiar with voluntary wandering.
That the commercial classes were
mobile needs no proof, and has been illustrated
extensively in the foregoing pages. The records of every fair in Europe provide
additional evidence. Nor need such evidence be taken
from the great central fairs, from Troyes or Paris or Frankfort. Between
1270 and 1329 the visitors to the English fair of St Ives (Huntingdon) include
traders from Ghent, Bruges, Douai, Ypres, and Lille; from St Omer, Caen, and
Dinant; they include also Florentines, Scotsmen,
Germans, and Spaniards.
A few scraps of evidence, from different
parts of Europe, suggest that in the fourteenth century and perhaps earlier,
even the peasant was not everywhere so completely immobilised as the conditions
of medieval agriculture are often held to imply. The reference is not to
movements from the country to the town, which were very common, nor to
movements of half-nomadic herdsmen, such as those who accompanied the wandering
flocks of Spain or the flocks which moved year by year from the Abruzzi into
Apulia, but to recurring migrations of agricultural labourers. Wends travelled
regularly from Lusatia and elsewhere to help in the woad-harvests of Thuringia
in the fourteenth century; and in the fifteenth Polish harvesters helped to get
in the crops about Breslau. The descent of labourers from the Alps and the
Apennines, to earn a living in the plains, was probably no new thing when it
comes to light at the beginning of modern times. This probability is increased
by the evidence of a clause in Edward III’s Statute of Labourers, which
provides for the continued movement of harvesters from the hill districts of
England—Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Craven, and the Welsh and
Scottish Marches—into the richer agricultural counties. For how long these
movements had existed is not known; but a habit so well established as to
secure preferential treatment from legislators whose object was to check what
they regarded as improper migrations can hardly have been of recent growth.
CHAPTER XV
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