A history of commerce

30. Political conditions affecting commerce; the modern system of government.—The reader who studies the history of commerce in the medieval period faces a system of government entirely different from that of modern times, which he must understand before he can appreciate the peculiar conditions of commerce then. We can illustrate the modern method of government by taking a country, say France, for an example. We wish to understand the relations of the capital, Paris, to other parts of the country, say the district around Bordeaux, in the southwest corner. An observer of this country will find that Paris and Bordeaux are united by different means of communication and transportation, telegraphs and posts, railroads, highways and canals, which are constantly employed in the service of government. On the path from the province to the capital go the reports of the officials who are in charge of the government of Bordeaux; and, if they fail in their duties, petitions and complaints from private citizens, asking relief, will take the same path. By this path, also, the taxes collected at Bordeaux will stream to the treasury at Paris, to be employed in maintaining the government. Part of these taxes will be expended at Paris, to support the officials who live in the capital, the central army, etc. Part, however, must be used to fulfil the local needs of Bordeaux; and on the road from the capital to the province we shall find money and wares, going as salaries to officials, appropriations for public works and the like. On this road, furthermore, we shall find a stream of messages, sent by the central government to its local subordinates, directing them in their work; these messages will answer the reports of officials and the petitions and complaints of subjects.

31. Impossibility of applying modern methods of government in the period after the fall of Rome.—The system of government, thus roughly outlined, was the system used in the period when Rome was still strong. But when the power of Rome declined it became constantly more difficult to maintain a system of the kind; every obstacle to the free passage of men and wares weakened the hold of the government on its provinces. The roads grew worse, and while they were still passable the danger of traversing them increased, so that the expense of maintaining this government became prohibitive. The reports from officials and the petitions from subjects were delayed or lost; only a small part of the local taxes reached the treasury at the center. The central government, on its side, found that it had no longer the means to pay the bills for salaries and public works in the provinces, and found that its commands were not received there, or were not obeyed, because the government could no longer send officials and troops to force obedience.

32. The feudal system; rise and character.—The time came, finally, when the government had to recognize publicly the change in conditions, and to adopt a system of quite a different kind, known as the feudal system. In substance it told the man who before had been a salaried official that it could no longer pay salaries, and that he must support himself henceforth from the revenues of land which would formerly have gone to it as taxes. It maintained still a nominal superiority, and exacted from the feudal lords who now assumed the responsibility of government certain payments for general public service, occasionally a sum of money and more frequently personal service of a military or judicial kind. Practically, however, the state had split into little pieces; the central government had lost the right even to nominate the successor of an official, and each was succeeded in the duties and profits of government by his son, as though he had been a petty king. It is impossible to state accurately the number of little governments of this kind that existed in the different countries of Europe; in France, in the tenth century, it is supposed to have exceeded 10,000. The character of government varied greatly, of course, according to local conditions, not only in different countries but in different parts of the same country, but it was everywhere extremely low when measured by modern standards. This will be apparent as we survey the conditions under which commerce was carried on in the period known as the Dark Ages.

33. Difficulties and dangers of transportation.—Attempt was made to maintain the roads, which of course are essential to trade by sea as well as by land, by making the proprietors through whose land they ran responsible for their repair. Many of the proprietors managed to escape contribution, and what work was done was largely wasted, through ignorance and lack of proper superintendence. We shall see that even in later periods the roads were bad; in this early time they were so bad that they seem to have been mere tracks, of service to passengers on foot or on horseback, but of little use for wagon traffic.

The merchant suffered even more, however, from bad men than from bad roads. Government was so weak that robbery was common; people were so ignorant of everything outside the narrow sphere of local interests that they suspected every stranger, and too often with reason. There is a whole series of English laws, beginning about 700 and continuing for centuries, of which this is an early example; “If a man come from afar, or a stranger, go out of the highway, and he then neither shout nor blow a horn; he is to be accounted a thief, either to be slain or to be redeemed.”

34. Restrictions imposed to insure security. The market.—The dangers of travel required a merchant to go in company with others, and the danger that a merchant would himself turn robber made it necessary for him to subject himself constantly to public supervision, and to get residents who would act as sureties for his good behavior. In England, even in the eleventh century, the central government thought it necessary to pass a law “that every man above twelve years of age make oath that he will neither be a thief nor cognizant of theft.” Such a general statute would surely be of little use.

Many other statutes of a more specific nature were passed, which may have helped to repress robbery, but which must have hampered trade at the same time. The idea in general was to force a man to make his purchases in public, so that if he appeared at home with new wares he could get witnesses to prove that he came honestly by them. Cattle formed a large part of the personal property in early times, and as these could readily be stolen, many laws were passed restricting the trade in cattle. Other things were included in the restriction, however, as the need of protecting commerce became more apparent. In England, in the tenth century, a man was not allowed to buy or sell any goods above the value of twenty pence, unless he did it within a town where a public official and witnesses could legitimate the bargain. In this practice is found the origin of the market, a medieval institution of which more will be said later. A market was a place appointed by the government, where bargains could properly be made; and only small exchanges of household produce could be made outside it, in the open country. Beginning in the need that was felt to prevent thieving it developed as a public institution, which the people found it profitable to extend as a means of collecting tolls and of regulating internal trade.

35. Society organized to exist with the minimum of commerce; the medieval village.—The striking and important feature in the life of European peoples at this period was not the large amount of commerce carried on, but the small amount. The people were organized on a system which enabled them to support life with the least commerce possible. Instead of being concentrated in towns, they were isolated in little groups, often called manors, one of which would be composed often of less than 100 people, who got their living from the square mile or so of land surrounding them. It is not necessary here to discuss the social and political life of these little groups, though it is proper to remark that often some of the inhabitants were slaves, and many more were only half-free, like the Russian serfs of the nineteenth century.

36. Self-sufficiency of the villages; low stage of the arts of production.—The economic life of these village groups is the side in which we are interested, and the chief point in that was the self-sufficiency of each group. A village tried to produce everything that it wanted, to be free from the uncertainty and expense of trade. We find, then, that almost all the people in a village were agriculturists, and these raised the necessary food supply by methods which were always crude, and were often very cumbersome and wasteful. The stock was of such a poor breed that a grown ox seems to have been little larger than a calf of the present day, and the fleece of a sheep weighed often less than two ounces. Many of the stock had to be killed before winter, as there was no proper fodder to keep them, and those that survived were often so weak in the spring that they had to be dragged to pasture on a sledge. Insufficient stock meant insufficient manure, and though the fields were allowed to lie fallow every third year they were exhausted by constant crops of cereals, and gave a yield of only about six bushels of wheat an acre, of which two had to be retained for seed.

Not only the food but nearly everything else had to be raised where it was to be consumed. Houses were constructed of materials from the forest, clothes were made out of flax and wool from the village fields, furniture and implements were made at home. Nearly every village had a mill, usually run by water, to grind its meal or flour; some villages had a smith or carpenter; few special artisans beside those suggested were to be found in the ordinary manor.

37. Evils resulting from the lack of commerce.—Before we proceed to describe the growth of European commerce from such origins it will be well to stop and consider the results of a system which was based on the lack of commerce. With regard to the main product, food staples, the result was an alternation of waste and want. A good year brought a surplus for which there was no market outside the village, and which could not be worked up inside for lack of manufacturing skill and implements. A bad harvest, on the other hand, meant serious suffering, because there was no opportunity to buy food supplies outside the manor and bring them to it. Nearly every year was marked by a famine in one part or another of a country, and famine was often followed by pestilence. Diseases now almost unknown in the civilized world, like leprosy and ergotism or St. Anthony’s fire, were not infrequent. The food at best was coarse and monotonous; the houses were mere hovels of boughs and mud; the clothes were a few garments of rude stuff. Nothing better could be procured so long as everything had to be produced on the spot and made ready for use by the people themselves. Finally, these people were coarse and ignorant, with little regard for personal cleanliness or for moral laws, and with practically no interests outside the narrow bounds of the little village in which they lived.

38. Exceptional instances of higher organization of industry.—These conditions existed all over western Europe, and may be taken as typical of the period about the year 1000. Though they determined the commerce, or better the lack of commerce, at this time, they were not absolutely universal. Great feudal princes and great monasteries owned each a considerable number of villages or manors, and tried to introduce a more advanced economic system among them. A great lord would have his shoemaker and tailor, his saddler, swordsmith, etc.; and would have a considerable number of women gathered in a sort of factory making clothes. It is noteworthy, however, that the difficulties of transportation were so great that for a long time to come it was not practicable to concentrate the food supplies of a large group of manors in one place, and the owner would have to go to the food instead of having it brought to him. So we read of the kings and princes being always on the road, traveling with court and retinue from one manor to another, eating up the surplus that had accumulated and then moving on.

39. Common wares of commerce in the period of the manor.—Absolute self-sufficiency was impossible; it was the ideal at which the managers of the manor aimed, but there were few manors which could supply all the necessaries of life. The list, however, of articles which had to be procured by commerce with the outside world was small. Salt was one item, of special importance as it was so difficult to keep live stock through the winter, and the animals had to be killed and salted down. Iron was necessary for various implements, though it was so expensive that it was spared in every possible way. Other articles had to be bought as occasion arose, stones for the mill or tar to keep the murrain from sheep. These wares were essential to existence; by channels so obscure that they cannot now be traced they reached the places where they were wanted, and were purchased with part of the manor’s scanty surplus. Cattle and horses formed also, as is natural, common objects of exchange.

40. The slave trade in Europe.—One ware which had long been an object of commerce was of especial importance in the period just after the fall of Rome, and, indeed, for some time later; this was slaves. The slave trade extended over all Europe, and had great markets on the Mediterranean, the North, and the Baltic seas. Merchants drove troops of slaves in chains from one country to another, or exported them in lots of 100 or more. In the slave markets of the Baltic as many as 700 are said to have been put up for sale at once. A number of English laws regulated the slave trade of the time. It seems to have been largely confined to convicts, but a law of Alfred provided that a father should not sell his daughter to servitude among strange people. Later the English laws forbade the trade entirely, but we read of Bristol merchants in the eleventh century who not only bought slaves all over England for export to Ireland, but bred them as well; and the trade persisted in various sections even later.

41. Distant commerce confined to rare luxuries.—Under conditions such as these the term “foreign commerce” in its modern sense is meaningless. The areas which now form the countries of Europe did not specialize in the production of different wares, so that we can trace a regular exchange of products between them. Most of the common wares of commerce circulated inside a restricted area. Only the rich could afford to pay for the transportation of wares over any distance, and they would spend their money only for valuable luxuries. The dignitaries of the church, by reason of their higher culture and connection with a universal organization, created a demand for a few foreign wares, and the governing classes wanted some things which could not be produced at home. Wines and spices were brought up from southern Europe, along the river routes and over the passes of the Alps, and furs were brought down from the North.

Distant sea voyages were still uncommon. An English law of about 900 provided that “if a merchant thrived so that he fared thrice over the wide sea by his own vessel” he might be promoted to a higher social class; and later laws refer to merchant ships again. The Scandinavians have left records of adventurous voyages to the North and West, and a vast number of silver coins found in Russia and the Baltic countries shows that a land trade with southwestern Asia persisted in the period of which we treat. It is only toward the close of this period, however, that we begin to get details about distant commerce, and can see that it is firmly established. The Institutes of London, issued in the eleventh century, and regulating the commerce of the town, mention ships coming from Flanders, from Rouen and other places in France, and from Germany. Foreign merchants bought wool and pigs, and sold wine, furs, spices, gloves, and fish.

42. Character of the merchant in the early Middle Ages.—We know even less of the person of the merchant, in this period (about 1000 A.D.), than of the wares that he carried. It is certain, at any rate, that the merchant was not the specialist that he afterwards became, but was a jack-of-all-trades. He might be wholesaler and retailer, transporter and pedler, and often an artisan too. Nothing like the country store of the present day existed, and trade outside the few centers where markets had been established was carried on by pedlers, who carried their wares on the back or on a pack animal. Every merchant was sure to be something of a soldier, as he was thrown largely on his own resources for self-defence; and he often assumed the garb of a missionary or pilgrim to get the help of the church in carrying on his trade. The pilgrim was exempt from many burdens laid on the ordinary traveler or merchant, and though this exemption had later to be abolished, because it was so frequently abused, it seems to have been of great use in helping commerce through its early stages.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

References on the rise and character of feudalism may be found in many manuals of European history; among others Emerton, Introduction, 236; Mediæval Europe, 477; Robinson, Middle Ages, 119. Brief accounts, mainly for the student of political history, may be found in the above, in Adams, European Hist., 185-191; and in the same author’s *Civilization, chap. 9. The best account of the feudal system in English is Seignobos, **Feudal regime, N. Y., Holt, 1903.

Most of the books describing conditions in this period treat them either from the political or the agrarian standpoint; the writer knows nothing, suitable for student’s reading, discussing the origins of commerce at this time. See, therefore, Cunningham, Growth, vol. 1, book 1, or the smaller manuals on English economic history.