IV.: English Boroughs and Merchant Strangers.

The quarrel between home and alien traders underwent many vicissitudes during succeeding centuries, the Crown taking now one side, and now the other, as its pecuniary interests happened to dictate for the moment. No glimmerings of the doctrine of free trade can be traced: the merchants of each town, banded in their guilds, directed their endeavours towards securing rights of exclusive trading for themselves. It is true that the men of London were scarcely more jealous of the citizens of Rouen or Paris than of those of York or Lincoln; their ambition was to inflict restrictions upon all rivals alike.

English traders were not yet merchant shippers and therefore did not prevent foreigners from undertaking the carrying trade between England and the Continent. Flanders bought English wool and sent back woven fabrics to rival which English looms could not aspire. Londoners, however, resold these goods at a profit and resented any attempt of aliens to encroach on their retail monopoly by coming into touch with English magnates or other consumers. Foreigners must be kept “at the wharf–head.”

The Liber Custumarum, a compilation of the early thirteenth century, lays down minute rules for the regulation of foreign traders in London. The merchant stranger had to take up his abode in the house of a citizen. He was prohibited from purchasing articles in process of manufacture. He could buy only from those who had the freedom of the city, and could not re–sell within the borough walls. He was allowed to sell only to burgesses of London, except on three specified days of the week. Such were a few of the rules which the Londoners enforced on all traders within their gates. The King, however, intermittently encouraged foreigners. Under the fostering protection of Henry III., Lombards and Provençals settled in considerable numbers in the capital; and, with connivance of the King, infringed these rules. When the Londoners complained, Henry refused relief. Their loyalty thus shaken, they sided with the King’s opponents in the Barons’ War, and when the royalist cause triumphed at Evesham, the Capital shared in the punishment meted out to the Crown’s opponents. Prince Edward in 1266 was nominated protector of foreign merchants. At the accession of that Prince, London bought itself back into favour, and an attempt was made to define what tolls might be taken by the Crown. In 1275, in Edward’s first parliament, a tariff was fixed by “the prelates, magnates, and communities at the request of the merchants” on most of what then formed the staple exports of England: half a mark on every sack of wool, half a mark on every three hundred wool–fells (that is untanned skins with the fleeces on), and one mark on every load of leather.

These were subsequently called magna et antiqua custuma. The settlement of 1275 was by no means final. New disputes arose; and in 1285 Edward I. confiscated the liberties of London, suppressed what he characterized as abuses, and favoured the aliens. In 1298 the franchises of the capital were restored, and very soon the abuses complained of began anew. Edward retorted in 1303 by a special ordinance known as the Carta Mercatoria in favour of their foreign rivals, by the terms of which the provisions of the present chapter of Magna Carta became at last a reality. This new charter, which was the result of a bargain struck between the Crown and the alien traders, conferred various privileges and exemptions in return for an increase of fifty per cent. of duty, known henceforth as parva et nova custuma. Edward I. made several attempts to exact the higher rates from denizens as well as strangers; but in this he failed. In 1309 a Petition of Parliament was presented against the exaction of the “new customs,” declaring them to be in contravention of Magna Carta.

In 1311 a temporary community of economic and political interests resulted in an alliance between the English merchants and the English baronage, whose combined efforts forced the “Ordinances” upon Edward II., compelling him for a time to reverse his father’s policy of favouring foreigners at the expense of native merchants. It is unnecessary to follow the checkered fortunes of these Ordinances, frequently enforced and as frequently abolished, according as the fortunes of the barons or of Edward II. were for the moment in the ascendant. During the reign of Edward III. the deep–rooted quarrel between home and alien merchants continued; and many changes of policy were adopted by the Crown. The statute of 1328, which abolished the “staples beyond the sea and on this side,” provided “that all merchant strangers and privy may go and come with their merchandises into England, after the tenor of the Great Charter.” Seven years later, this was confirmed by an act which placed strangers and denizens on an exact equality in all branches of trade, both wholesale and retail, under the express declaration that no privileged rights of chartered boroughs should be allowed to interfere with its enforcement. While this statute merely repeated and applied the general doctrine of the present chapter of Magna Carta, it directly infringed the provisions of chapter 13. Such sweeping regulations were in advance of their age and could not be carried out without revolutionizing the medieval scheme of trade and commerce, which depended on merchant guilds, town charters and local monopolies. The influence of the English boroughs and their political allies was strong enough to make the strict enforcement of such legislation impossible; and later statutes, bowing to the inevitable, restored the privileges of the boroughs, while continuing to enunciate an empty general doctrine of free trade to foreigners. The English boroughs, to which Parliament in the reign of Richard II. thus restored their franchises and monopolies, were able effectually to exclude foreign competition, in certain trades at least, from within their walls, for four centuries, until the Statute of 1835 ushered in the modern era of free trade.