Medieval England: Towns, Commerce and Crafts, 1086-1348 (Social and Economic History of England) by Miller Edward & Hatcher John

Author:Miller, Edward & Hatcher, John [Miller, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317872856
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

(e) ‘The community of merchants of England’, 1336–49

‘The community of merchants of England’, as it was called in 1343,135 had to play many parts and assume many obligations in the early years of the Hundred Years’ War, as a few details relating to one individual indicate. The York merchant, Henry Goldbeter, was well enough regarded locally to have served as the city’s bailiff in 1333, but in the war years he played a part on a somewhat larger stage. In 1343, Henry and four partners were still owed £1,400 for wool delivered to Dordrecht in 1338; he went on to be a member of syndicates which consisted mainly of York men, but also included Hugh Ulseby of London and Thomas Colle of Shrewsbury, and which undertook to buy up wool for the king in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Cumberland, Lincolnshire, Shropshire and Gloucestershire. If this commission had been fully carried out the cost would have been £32,500 for the wool, with a further £7,750 due for customs when it was exported. One syndicate to which Henry belonged also undertook in 1340 to pay £1,400 on the king’s behalf to the duke of Brabant; and in 1341, in association with Ulseby once more together with Walter Prest of Melton Mowbray, he was empowered to export 1,220 sacks of the king’s wool through Hull, Boston and London, for which customs charges alone would have been £3,050. The range of Henry’s operations, in other words, became national rather than regional, the scale of his business had become larger than that which took him to Dordrecht in 1338, and he was clearly equipped by experience to be a representative of the ‘community of merchants of England’ when it negotiated with the king in 1343.136

The ‘community of merchants’ in this context, of course, consisted principally of wool merchants, for the good reason that it was the wool trade which Edward III mainly exploited, with the result that wool merchants figure much more prominently in the public records than any other traders. In this respect the records present a picture of the merchant class in the mid-fourteenth century which is distorted and incomplete. While wool was by far England’s dominant export commodity, and while most merchants of any substance at least dabbled in the wool trade from time to time, few specialized in it to the exclusion of other exports; and many leading exporters were also engaged in the import trades and in the distribution to the home market of goods produced both in England and overseas. Nevertheless, as a guide to the personnel and the main bases of the English merchant class in the mid-century, there is much to be learned from the lists of merchants who received bonds for wool delivered at Dordrecht in 1338, of those who attended the merchant assemblies convoked by Edward III between 1336 and 1342, and of those who were members of the commercial and financial syndicates formed between 1336 and 1349.137

The first impression conveyed by this evidence is that

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