of ecclesiastical power was in operation against these quasi monastic establishments. So long as man saw in the mishaps of this world the hand of a wrathful God, the church, the visible means of averting catastrophe, was powerful; but the spirit of the renaissance was beginning to leaven the mass. The lesson of ultimate retribution for crime committed brought home by the mistery play, by the decoration of the churches, by the sermons of the clergy with their reiterated cry of terrible physical torture for the sinner, were beginning to lose their effect. The renaissance with its thinly veiled doctrine of

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As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,

They kill us for their sport,"

was undermining the position of the church.

But the mercantile side of the organisation shows none of the fluctuations which distinguish the social and religious side; steady progress was the keynote, especially in the overseas trade.

The incontrovertible proof of the prosperity of York in the fifteenth century remains in the numerous buildings still standing, which owe their existence or their extension to the architectural activity of that period. The salient feature of the previous century is the decay of country districts owing to the lack of labour consequent upon the Black Death; but wool could be produced with less labour than corn or cattle; cornfields fell out of cultivation; herds of cattle vanished; flocks of sheep appeared everywhere. By the opening of the fifteenth century wool was plentiful, towns connected with the woollen industry progressed, those unconnected with it retrogressed. Happily, York was inside the area of prosperity. Haukinus and William of Brabant, who settled in York by royal authorisation in 1336,2 were followed by many others.

1 A. L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle Ages, p. 225.

2 Mr. Johnson, in The Company of the Drapers of London, p. 68, writes: 'It is no doubt a mistake to attribute this policy of Edward solely to a farseeing desire to promote the cloth industry in England, and thus to make her a manufacturing country." It is difficult at any time to find the clue to any particular policy, it is seldom that there is one sole motive. But after a very careful investigation of the conditions of the woollen industry in Yorkshire in the first half of the fourteenth century, it is impossible to avoid coming to the conclusion that a considerable immigration of textile workers from

ALIENS IN YORK AND YORKSHIRE

xxix

They came by ones and twos, and invaded not only the textile but the metal-working industries. In the thirty years between 1336 and 1366, thirty foreigners settled in York alone1; Henry Market and Peter van Uppestall obtained wealth and rose to civic importance.2

In the same way, the poll tax returns of Richard II show the peaceful penetration of Yorkshire, especially the West Riding, by foreigners with their wives, children, and servants, who settled down in the small villages and helped to bring about the industrial revolution, which changed England from a wool producing into a cloth making community. England now became the rival of Flanders, whose teeming population had for more than a century lived and thriven by weaving the wool spun for their use in countless English cottages.

But the English merchant had a second obstacle to overcome, before England reaped the harvest of her industry; native weavers could produce a saleable cloth, but the carrying of this cloth to continental markets was still largely done in foreign vessels by foreign merchants. In the fourteenth cen- • tury all York shipments passed through Hull. The German • or Hanse merchants, between the years 1362 and 1369, exported on an average half the cloth made in Yorkshire. It was clear that an entire reversal of the preferential treatment of the alien, wise as it was under Edward III, must be undertaken

3

Zealand and Brabant took place. That Edward and his councillors would have encouraged their coming, if diplomatic complications would have ensued, is improbable; that the policy of encouragement to aliens fluctuated with changes in foreign relations is undeniable; but that Edward did not realise the economic results of his policy is to attribute to him a stupidity, possible in his dotage, impossible in his prime. The whole question seems to me to be obscured by the lack of realisation that the idea of nationality was still in its infancy; the alien was hated as a money-maker not as a foreigner; the intruders from the neighbouring towns and districts were equally hated. The part, too, that the rich merchant played as an active agent in foreign as well as home policy before the age of ambassadors, has not yet been adequately investigated. cf. W. Cunningham, Alien Immigration, p. 107, op. cit., pp. 209, 292, 300, 636–649. M. Sellers, article on Social and Economic History in Victoria History of Yorkshire. Rymer, Foedera, vol. ii, pt. ii, p. 954, 10 Ed. III [1336].

1 York Freemen, op. cit., pp. 30-65.

2 York Memorandum Book, vol. ii, pp. 50, 185, 186, xxvii.

3 D. Schäfer, Die Hanse, passim. D. E. Daenell, Die Blütezeit der Deutschen Hanse, i, 60, 61. K. Engel, Die Organisation der deutsch-hansischen Kaufleute in England, p. 453. E. Lipson, Economic History, pp. 452, 453.

by his successors. To keep English trade in English hands was the problem that faced the politician of the fifteenth century. Banking had already passed from the Jews and Lombards to the wealthy English burghers, and foreign trade began to pass from the German merchant to the English merchant adventurer. Financial nervousness, dynastic struggles, political expediency, delayed the complete transference until the reign of Elizabeth, but from the fifteenth century this ⚫ transference was, unless mercantile enterprise and vigour decayed, a foregone conclusion. A fifteenth century poet, moaning over England's decadence, quotes the taunt of her enemies, who bid her exchange the ship, proudly placed by Edward III on his new coin, for a sheep-but would the substitution of a sheep have been an act of degradation, as terrible as it appeared to his imagination? We forget as we watch Crecy and Agincourt through the mirage, which historians throw over them, that it was fear that the market of Flanders would be closed to our wool that caused the hundred years' war. The clash of arms drowns the whirl of the loom, but it is to keep the loom going, the furnace blazing, the shipyard noisy, that battles are lost and won.

The York men played their part in this great national effort, the women, too, for Mariona Kent was a member of the committee that settled the question as to whether merchants should be allowed to send their cloth in vessels belonging to owners not free of the company; at the end of the 'fourteenth century ninety-four women were paying taxes as weavers in York alone; in Wakefield in Emma Earle's weaving . sheds one-fourth of the entire output of the town was made. Chaucer could have found many prototypes for "his wif of Bathe," who made a fortune in cloth, in that city.

From calculations based on gild membership, it seems that about one-fifteenth of the population were engaged in the woollen industry. The ulnagers' accounts1 for the end of the fourteenth century show that York was still the centre of the ..weaving industry, for there were 800 weavers in the city who 'paid the tax, only 375 in the rest of the county. That exodus

1 Exch. K. R. Accounts, Bdle. 345, Nos. 16, 18, 19, mm. 1-19 (1394-1396).

THE SHIPPING TRADE (1457)

xxxi

from York into the country districts, which by 14631 had already begun among the subsidiary branches of the trade, had not seriously affected the weaving industry; it was not until a century later that the city became the depot, where the cloth collected in the rest of the county was bought and sold, while it ceased to make any appreciable amount of the material itself.

Unfortunately, the rolls tell little of the ships employed in the cloth trade beyond their names: the Laurance, the Hylde, the litell Joorge of Hull, the Anna, the Juliana Pilkington, the Petrus, the Maria Stables, the Grace de Dieu, all belong to the early days of foreign commerce.2 But the crew, the tonnage, the many particulars that would help us to visualise the vessels, which carried these pioneers of British industry across to Zealand, or through the Sound to Emden and Danzig, or even further still to Riga and Narva, are absent. Fortunately, the Cely papers give some scanty facts. The Margaret Cely, employed in the same trade at the same period, but sailing from the south-east coast, cost, exclusive of rigging and all fittings, twenty-eight pounds. The crew consisted of a master, boatswain, cook, and sixteen able-bodied seamen; her victuals were composed of salt beef and fish, bread, and beer. It has been conjectured that her tonnage was about 200 tons, but other vessels employed were not above a seventh of her size.3 The north-east coast boats were even smaller. ' The account book of the Katherine of Hull, for the year 1457, yields some illuminating details. Evidently the ship had met bad weather, and had had to sacrifice much of her cargo. Cloth white and "meld," lead, yarn, harness, calfskins, and dyvars parsells," contents not given, were thrown overboard, and the owners had to be indemnified. The purser of the vessel had been dishonest, for an item appears, "Payd for costes made for sewyng of the pursowr, and for j man of lawe, xijs. xd." A pilot, too, must have been taken on board, "payd

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1 York Memorandum Book, op. cit., p. 175.

2 Text, pp. 64, 68, 72.

3 Cely Papers, op. cit., pp. xxxvii, xxxviii.

Text, pp. 59-63.

for bryngyng of the schipe fro the barre Huke to Camfer, xs." Sailors are proverbially superstitious, the owners certainly paid large sums to gain heaven's protection for their ship and crew. Item, payd Gyllys Hakson for pylgramage to the holly blude,1 xxxijs. Item, payd to Thomas Robynson for pylgramage to owr lady of Walsyngham, xijs. Item, for pylgramage to our lady of Donkasstyr, xijs." John Inse and Thomas Skawsby, two prominent York merchants, superintended the freighting of the vessel. The former did a large foreign trade, and was part owner of the Valentine of Newcastle, which, with its cargo, was valued at the enormous sum of £5,000. The unfortunate vessel had been attacked by 400 armed men from Danzig, Lübec, Rostock, Wismar and Stralsund, and much interesting information concerning the dangers of medieval sailors' lives can be gained from the sworn evidence given in 1468, when the claim for damages was brought against the .Hanse merchants for this apparently unprovoked attack. But the Valentine must have been a ship of unusual size; probably the average vessels were nearer akin to a Danzig ship, onefourth of which was sold to John Denom of York and John Sexton of Beverley, in 1439, for twenty-six pounds, thirteen shillings, and fourpence. A detailed study of the water bailiffs' accounts in Hull, similar accounts in Middelburg, and the toll books of Copenhagen,1 would yield more precise information of the size of seagoing vessels of earlier times; all that can be said is that the impression left by a cursory survey, vague as it may be, increases our admiration for the courageous crews that ventured in tiny vessels into seas full of unknown perils. Laws of the sea certainly existed before international

1 From the context it seems probable that this pilgrimage was to Bruges, where several generations of York merchants had resided, but the relic at Hayles Abbey in Gloucestershire, was perhaps the best known place of pilgrimage. There was also a phial of the Holy Blood at Ashridge, in Bucks. Mr. Hamilton Thompson tells me that pilgrims went from Bourne in Lincolnshire to Hayles about 1440.

2 Hansisches Urkundenbuch (W. Stein), vol. ix, pp. 368–370.

3 York Municipal Records, &, fo. 84.

I had hoped to complete my investigations at Middelburg, Copenhagen, Danzig, and Riga before I edited these papers, but the war prevented the completion of my task.