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Plantagenets-all included, of course, within the city walls, and then with plenty of vacant space in it-was full of markets. There were the Chepe, or West Chepe, now Cheapside, where bread, cheese, poultry, fruit, hides, onions, garlic, and like articles were sold by dealers at little wooden stalls, not more than two and a half feet wide, arranged along the roadside; and the Corn Hill, where grains and all articles manufactured of wood and iron were harboured at similar stalls; while Soper's Lane, now Queen Street, Cheapside, was the chief resort of the pepperers or grocers; and the Poultry, on the other side, was assigned to poulterers, who were freemen of the city, Leaden Hall being the special market for dealers in fowls and game, who were not citizens. The Pavement at Grace Church and the Pavement before the Convent of the Minorite Friars at New Gate were for miscellaneous dealings, and thither merchants of all sorts were allowed to come and take up their temporary stations. The market of Saint Nicholas Flesh Shambles, the precursor of our modern Newgate and headquarters of the butchers, and the Stocksmarket on the site of the present Mansion House, both of them furnished with permanent stalls, were appropriated to butchers on flesh days and to fishmongers on fish days. Near to the Stocksmarket was the yet more important mart of Wool-Church-Haw, close to Saint Mary Woolchurch, the great meeting-place of wool and cloth merchants, while in any part of the city, with the exception of Corn Hill, carts might stand loaded with firewood, timber, and charcoal. Dealers of all sorts, of course, might halt or loiter as they chose in the uninhabited suburbs of the city, in Moor-Fields, or on the banks of the Old-Bourne, by Fleet-Ditch or round the HolyWell, midway in the dismal unfrequented Strand; and far away to the west, in the independent city of Westminster, was a nest of separate markets, the principal being at the gates of old WestminsterHall. As London grew and there was need of places for retail purchase nearer to the more out-of-the-way houses than were the central markets it became the fashion for tradesmen to throw open the lower front rooms of their dwelling-houses and stock them with articles for sale. In this way shops came into fashion. And in like manner, to make space for the storage of goods, many upper rooms came to be enlarged by pent-houses, or projections, reaching nearly into the middle of the streets, but with their floors nine feet above the ground, "so as to allow of people riding beneath." Much larger than these were the selds or shields, great sheds erected by the

more important dealers for their single use, or by several merchants in company, for the sake of separate commodities. One in Friday Street, for instance, was, in Edward the Third's reign, appropriated to traffic in hides, while another, known as the Winchester Seld, adjoining the Wool-Church-Haw market, seems to have been the chief place of resort for the merchants of Winchester, Andover, and other towns, and to have been used by them for the stowage and sale of all sorts of goods. Towards the end of the thirteenth century. its keeper was one William de Wool-Church-Haw. "This William," we are told, "although bound by oath to abstain from all malpractices, was in the habit, immediately upon the arrival of a newcomer with wares for sale, of shutting the doors of the seld, opening out the goods, and himself, or by his underlings, making his bargain with the vendor. The price duly arranged, the goods were exposed for sale to the public by the merchant-strangers as though their own and not already sold-of which the consequence was that the goods were sold at a higher price than they ought to be, the public having to pay two profits, one to the merchant-stranger, another to William de Wool-Church-Haw. It was an even greater crime, no doubt, in the eyes of the King's officers that, in defiance of the royal prerogative, this William had had the audacity to set up a tron of his own for the weighing of wool and had taken tronage, or toll, for the same."

As the numbers of markets, shops, and selds increased, the varieties of trades and callings, of course, became likewise more numerous. But the separation between wholesale and retail dealers, merchants, and tradesmen was much less clearly marked then than it now is; and those who bought goods in large quantities, either from foreign merchants for sale at home or from the English producers for exportation, for the most part dealt promiscuously in articles of all sorts. The divisions of commerce, however, were gradually becoming more distinct; and even now there was, at any rate, the one broad separation of trades in articles of food from trades in articles of clothing and the like.

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Mediaeval shops would appear to us rather primitive, but their evolution is very interesting and affords an index of the growth of trade. According to Mr. Addy, they were originally below the surface

'Taken by permission from A. Abram, English Life and Manners in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 92-93. (George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1913.)

of the street, like cellars. In London, Stow tells us, speaking of the fishmongers and the butchers, they had at first only movable boards or stalls which they set out on market days to show their goods, but they procured license to set up sheds which "grew to shops." A movable stall, "situate beneath the gate of Ludgate," was let on lease in 1375 for ten years at a rent of forty shillings a year, but rents were much higher in London than elsewhere. A lease of a plot of ground nine feet by five was granted to a butcher of Colchester to make a stall thereon, and he paid a rent of two shillings a year. When it became necessary to have permanent shops, stalls were often fixed onto the front of the lower part of the house and provided with hinges so that they could be let down when they were not in use. An ordinance of the City of London, in the reign of Edward II, decreed that they should not be more than two and a half feet wide. They must have been something like the adjustable flaps we have on gateleg tables. Sometimes a sloping wooden roof protected them, and sometimes the projecting upper stories of the house served the same purpose. As business increased the room to which the stall was attached was used as a shop, as well as the stall itself; and sometimes there was a cellar or a storeroom under the shop. The shops in Butchers' Row, Shrewsbury, which Mr. Parker says were built in the fifteenth century, consist of good-sized rooms, divided into three parts by stanchions; one opens into the street, and the upper portions of the other two form the shop window. Each shop had its sign hanging outside it to indicate the trade of its owner. A survival of the custom may be seen today in the pawnbroker's three balls. Men of the same trade congregated together in the same street, and some of the streets of London and other towns still owe their names to the occupations of their former inhabitants. The makers of the rosaries which were called Paternosters lived in Paternoster Row, and Lombard Street was the abode of the Lombard brokers.

48. PEDLARS, MERCHANTS, AND CHAPMEN1

Wayfarers there were in whom both characteristics were united, the slowness of pace of the merchant and the lightness of heart of the messenger. These were the pedlars, a very numerous race in the Middle Ages, one of the few sorts of wanderers that have not

Adapted by permission from J. J. Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, pp. 231-44. (T. Fisher Unwin, 1892. Author's copyright.)

yet disappeared. A jovial race they seem to have been; they are so now, most of them, for their way to success is through fair speech and enticing words, and how could they be enticing if they did not show good humour and entrain?

They swarmed along the roads in the Middle Ages. There were not then as now large shops in every village with all the necessaries of life ready provided for the inhabitants. The shop itself was itinerant, being nothing else than the pack of travelling chapmen. In the same way as the literature minstrels would propagate, as news, tales, letters, pardons from Rome, and many other things, so household wares were carried about the country by indefatigable wayfarers. A host of small useful things were concealed in their unfathomable boxes. The contents of them are pretty well shown by a series of illuminations in a fourteenth-century manuscript, where a pedlar is represented asleep at the foot of a tree, while monkeys have got hold of his box and help themselves to the contents. They find in it vests, caps, gloves, musical instruments, purses, girdles, hats, cutlasses, pewter pots, and a number of other articles. As to the means by which pedlars came by their goods, several were familiar to them, and purchase seems to have been only one among many.

The regular merchants whom Langland and Chaucer describe, with business enough to be in debt, adorned with Flaundrisch hats and forked beards, were a very different sort of people; but though no mere wanderers, they, too, were great wayfarers. Many of them had had to visit the Continent to find a market for their goods and for their purchases.

The importance of this intercourse with the continent, which fortunately the variations in the law of the land were unable to check, gave prominence to the English merchant in the community. He was already in the fourteenth century, and has been ever since, one of the main supports of the State. While the numerous applications of Edward III to Lombard bankers for ready money are well known, it is sometimes overlooked how often he had recourse to English merchants, who supplied him with that without which his archers' bows would have remained unstrung. The advice and good-will of the whole class of merchants could not be safely ignored, therefore their attendance was constantly requested at Westminster to discuss money and other State matters. Some families among them rose into eminence, such as the De la Poles of Hull, who became earls of Suffolk with descendants to be killed at Azincourt, to be checked

by Joan of Arc at Orleans, to be made dukes, and to be impeached for high treason. It was, too, the time of "thrice Lord Mayor of London" Dick, afterwards Sir Richard Whittington. Another man of the same sort a little later was the famous William Canynge, of Bristol, who made there a large fortune in trading with foreign countries. One of the boats of this Canynge was called the Mary Redcliffe, a name as well as his own since associated with the memory of the Bristol boy-poet, Thomas Chatterton.

Below men in such exalted situation the bulk of the merchant community throve as best they could. One of the necessities of their avocation was constant travelling. They were to be met about the roads almost as much as their poorer brothers, the pedlars. They also made great use of the watercourses and carried their goods by boat whenever there was any possibility. Hence the constant interference of the Commons with the erection of new mills, weirs, and other hindrances on rivers by lords of the adjoining lands. The reasons that merchants preferred such a conveyance were that the cost of carriage was less; except for the occasional meeting of unexpected locks and weirs, they were more certain than on ordinary roads to find before them a clear course; and they were better able to protect themselves against robbers. They could not, however, go everywhere by water and, willingly or not, they had to betake themselves to the roads and incur all the mischances that might turn up on the way or at the inn.

Between the "male" of these chapmen and the mere pack of the pedlar the difference is not very considerable; it is not very great either if compared to the "male" of the merchant we have met before, who travels slowly on account of it, and who is represented by the poet as the emblem of "men that ben ryche." So that these three links kept pretty close together the chain of the itinerant trading community. They all had to go about and to experience the gaieties or dangers of the road, the latter being of course better known to the richer sort than to the poor Bob Jakin of the day. The reasons for this constant travelling were numerous; the same remark applies to merchants of the fourteenth century as to almost all other classes; there was much less journeying than today for mere pleasure's sake, but very much more, comparatively, out of necessity. We cannot underrate the causes of personal journeys which the post and telegraph, with the money facilities they have introduced, have suppressed. But besides this considera

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