The Mercery of London

Trade, Goods and People, 1130–1578

Anne F. Sutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351885706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Although mercers have long been recognised as one of the most influential trades in medieval London, this is the first book to offer a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the trade from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. The variety of mercery goods (linen, silk, worsted and small manufactured items including what is now called haberdashery) gave the mercers of London an edge over all competitors. The sources and production of all these commodities is traced throughout the period covered. It was as the major importers and distributors of linen in England that London mercers were able to take control of the Merchant Adventurers and the export of English cloth to the Low Countries. The development of the Adventurers' Company and its domination by London mercers is described from its first privileges of 1296 to after the fall of Antwerp. This book investigates the earliest itinerant mercers and the artisans who made and sold mercery goods (such as the silkwomen of London, so often mercers' wives), and their origins in counties like Norfolk, the source of linen and worsted. These diverse traders were united by the neighbourhood of the London Mercery on Cheapside and by their need for the privileges of the freedom of London. Extensive use of Netherlandish and French sources puts the London Mercery into the context of European Trade, and literary texts add a more personal image of the merchant and his preoccupation with his social status which rose from that of the despised pedlar to the advisor of princes. After a slow start, the Mercers' Company came to include some of the wealthiest and most powerful men of London and administer a wide range of charitable estates such as that of Richard Whittington. The story of how they survived the vicissitudes inflicted by the wars and religious changes of the sixteenth century concludes this fascinating and wide-ranging study.

CHAPTER 1

Definition and Location: The London Mercery, 1130s–1230s

London is a very noble city; there is none better in Christendom or any of higher worth, of greater renown or better furnished with well-to-do people. For they much love honour and munificence and bear themselves very gaily. London is the mainstay of England – there is no need to seek beyond it. At the foot of its wall there flows the Thames, by which merchandise comes from every land where Christian merchants go. Its men are very clever.

So wrote Thomas of Britain, a poet at the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, probably in the late 1150s.¹ London was part of the rich and courtly background of his poem about the love of Isolde, Queen of England, and Prince Tristan. By describing contemporary London he placed his story in the world of Henry and Eleanor and gave his courtly audience a sense of reality and familiarity. Among the luxuries which came to London from abroad, he mentioned silks of rare colours. Throughout the Middle Ages the greatest mercery was silk. Silk was the obvious choice for the goods of the Lord Caerdin when he disguised himself as a merchant in order to travel to London and fetch Isolde to his dying friend, Tristan: ‘He sails upriver with his merchandise and within the mouth, outside the entry to the port, has anchored his ship in a haven. Then, in his boat, he goes straight up to London beneath the bridge, and there displays his wares, unfolds and spreads his silks’.²

London was to be the major centre of the silk and mercery trade in England throughout the Middle Ages. When a merchant from overseas spread his silks on the quays of London, as Thomas described, he did it before the sheriff and the king’s chamberlain, so that the king could have first choice of this rare cloth, as he did with all other luxuries. The Angevin kings insisted on this privilege and so did Henry III.³

The courtly world of Thomas’s poem and Tristan’s silks is an excellent introduction to the most exotic aspect of the mercery trade.⁴ The court and those about the king always represented the upper end of the mercer’s market, and the mercers were sensitive to the court’s attitudes and its demands.⁵ The mercery trade was, however, in terms of the overall trade of England, always a small one, although trade and the commercialization of society grew apace between 1100 and 1300 and the mercery trade shared in that expansion.⁶ The word ‘mercery’ derives from the Latin merx, mercis, merchandise. In its widest sense, mercery included all merchandise except the heavy, bulk commodities, such as victuals, corn and wine, metals, wool and wood. Further classification narrowed the range as certain goods became the specialities of particular groups of traders.⁷ Such specialization was only possible in a large emporium: the size of London was thus all-important for the definition of this particular trade. In England, only London could develop a truly specific mercery trade in goods, which in general could be termed luxuries, but were often useful. Outside London mercery was to retain its catch-all meaning throughout the Middle Ages.

London was the largest and wealthiest city of the Norman and Angevin empires, frequently visited by the king, his court and barons, with the palace of Westminster increasingly the centre of royal government. Both secular and clerical magnates built town houses. Luxury goods were in demand: a London Mercery probably existed as an area before 1130. The city began to exercise a considerable ‘pull’ on the region around it. Its port was pre-eminent among English ports by this date, conveniently situated towards Europe, across from the Low Countries, and attractive to all manner of alien merchants. London had the largest population of any English city, with 110 parishes compared to the fifty of York, Lincoln or Norwich.⁸ Its wealth was self-evident, not only to a poet like Thomas: it undoubtedly contributed to the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’, and it paid by far the largest portion of Richard I’s enormous ransom. In 1194 when Richard returned to England, foreigners in his train were astonished at the wealth of London – and the cash-hungry Richard said he would be happy to sell it!⁹

The first definition of mercery was current before 1130 and specific: silk, linen and fustian. All of them implied overseas trade; only linen was also produced in England. Their places of origin and who brought them to London is therefore of interest. Although the English had enjoyed an active overseas trade in Anglo-Saxon times, they had suffered greatly from the Danish and Norman invasions, and everything suggests that at least in the first half of the twelfth century, most mercery textiles were brought to London by aliens, among whom the Flemings were the most frequent and numerous.¹⁰ Other potentially important importers of merceries were the Cologners, who had their own London guildhall by the mid-twelfth century, and freedom to buy and sell in London from 1194.¹¹ The balance of trade is likely to have been in England’s favour in this period: there was a stable English currency and English wool was always in demand.¹² Nor was London’s trade entirely passive.¹³ A colony of Londoners at Genoa (a centre of the silk trade) maintained close contacts with London and Arras at the end of the twelfth century and after,¹⁴ and it is not impossible that these emigrants, as well as visiting merchants from London participated in the overland trade with Genoa and the south of France, as well as the fairs of Champagne and the Low Countries by the end of the century. Londoners are known to have gone to Spain for silks and spices; and there are also signs that Londoners had developed habits of joint trade.¹⁵

i.	Mercery: The Earliest Definition

The first reference to mercery (mercerie) in England, so far discovered, occurs in two closely related trading regulations of London, usually dated to c. 1130 and c. 1150, but probably reflecting older circumstances. They concerned the ‘emperor’s men’, probably mainly from Tiel, Cologne and Bremen, and the merchants of Lorraine and the Meuse valley, also part of the Holy Roman Empire. These merchants had been coming to London since at least the days of Ethelred II at the end of the tenth century; they were well placed geographically to carry the luxuries of the East as well as their own manufactures to England.¹⁶ The regulations reveal a time when London’s trade was sufficiently extensive to allow certain goods to be particularly identified as mercery, within the catch-all term.¹⁷ In the first of these regulations, the merchants were described as singing Kyrie eleison up to London Bridge; once past the bridge they waited in the harbour, to show their wares, as did the hero Tristan, so that the king’s chamberlain might take whatever the king wanted at the valuation of merchants of London: wine, plate, jewels, silk cloth of Constantinople and Regensburg, and fine white and unbleached linens.¹⁸ They submitted to precise regulations over their sales of ‘mercery’: fustian might only be sold in dozens, and cloths of silk, wool and linen in the uncut piece. The regulations as a whole suggest that silk, linen and fustian were all defined as mercery in the twelfth century, exactly the same definition to be found in fifteenth-century London. Equally important was the rule that mercery should be weighed on a tron of twenty-two cloves, that is, on one with twenty-two swing points, a clear indication that another characteristic definition of later centuries used for those mercery goods which could be weighed, such as spices¹⁹ and raw silk, was already in use: they were weighed on a small beam.

Silk had been made in China since 1500–1000 BC; from China the skill passed to Persia and Syria which lay across the silk road to the West. Crimson silks of China were mentioned by FitzStephen in his description of London written before 1183.²⁰ Byzantium or Constantinople was making silk by the fifth century AD, its industry developed under the strict control of the Imperial Palace. Venice, the main exporter of Byzantine silks to the West, began to weave silk itself in the twelfth century, and the skill spread to Islamic territories, such as Spain, after the conquest of Syria.²¹ There were, therefore, several sources of silk in the twelfth century, dramatically altered by the destruction of Constantinople and its silk industry in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade, and the flood of Chinese silks into western Europe in the thirteenth century when the Mongul invasion of China reopened the east–west routes. Silk was precious, portable and ideal for gifts to and from kings: the Byzantine Emperor sent a hundred pieces of silk to Henry II of Germany, and the emperors presented imperial silks to churches, as did the kings of England.²² The silks referred to in the London trade regulations were those of the Palace of Constantinople and those which went by the name of Regensburg (now Ratisbon). The great trading centre of Regensburg in fact never made silks; its name was merely attached to silk which passed through the city. The so-called Regensburg silks have been identified as the silks and half-silks (that is, linen/hemp and silk), made in Venice from at least the late twelfth century, and in great demand for church vestments.²³

Raw silk and silk thread also came to London for craftswomen to make into laces or braids and use for embroidery, all of which were mercery throughout the Middle Ages. Although it was Italy which increasingly dominated the silk trade of Europe, in the twelfth century at least it seems that silks were not yet brought to London by Italians, although it is possible that some Londoners had direct contact with Italian suppliers at the fairs of northern France. There are several signs that trade with Spain was good, and some was conducted by pepperers of London, in the twelfth century.²⁴ Henry II’s daughter married Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1169 and Spanish silks, famous for their small recurring patterns, were readily available: a cloth of samite, a patterned twill silk (probably from Spain), was bought by Henry II in 1176–77;²⁵ in 1210–11 sixty silk cloths from Spain and 120 purple cloths of laresta (a silk taking its name from its ‘fish-bone’, arista, weave and predominantly made in Spain at this date), were supplied to King John.²⁶

Fustian was an ancient cloth of the Middle East made from flax and cotton; it was soon imitated in Italy, where it became an increasingly important manufacture from the twelfth century. It reached London by the same routes as silk.²⁷ Flax cultivation was widespread in Europe and linen production had been revolutionized in the eleventh century by the treadle loom. With increased supplies, linen for clothing and the table was becoming a symbol of affluence. Important centres of the industry were northern France, Paris, Germany and n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Definition and Location: The London Mercery, 1130s–1230s
• Chapter 2: ‘The poor pedlar makes more noise crying his goods than does a rich mercer all his valuable wares’: The Mercery Trade in the Thirteenth Century
• Chapter 3: The Origins and Early Associations of London Mercers, 1270s–1340s
• Chapter 4: ‘Loving companions who are dwelling in the good city of London’: The Commonalty of the Mercery
• Chapter 5: The Company and the City 1348–94: From the Black Death to the First Charter
• Chapter 6: ‘Le compaignie del mercerie que dieux veul garder de male et de perile et tutditz convoier a bon aventure’: The Move into Mercantile Status, 1290s–1430
• Chapter 7: Success on All Sides: The Mercers in Fifteenth-Century London
• Chapter 8: The Mercery Trade in London: Prosperity and Conflict
• Chapter 9: ‘C’était une vie d’aventures semblable à celle des chevaliers’: The Mercers’ Ascendancy among the Adventurers in the Low Countries, 1430s–85
• Chapter 10: ‘All merchandise shall have its course and merchants to have their communication each with other’: Trade, 1430s–85
• Chapter 11: ‘Give to every man that which is his’: The Mercers and the Merchant Adventurers, 1485–1520s
• Chapter 12: New Responsibilities and Losses, 1490s–1550s
• Chapter 13: Religious Change, Wealth and Faith
• Chapter 14: ‘The present understanding of the feat of the merchant adventurer’: Overseas Trade, 1520s–80s
• Chapter 15: The Demise of the Medieval Mercery
• Chapter 16: ‘A sample and light’: Charity and Protestantism
• Chapter 17: A New Company?
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index