If a dealer proposed to make his fortune in malt he opened proceedings with the strictest economies. A penny or a half-penny served as earnest money to the peasants from whom he bought his corn, and who were told to come to the house for payment. “And when they come there and think to have their payment directly, the buyer says that his wife at his house has gone out, and has taken the key of the room, so that he cannot get at his money; but that the other must go away and come again soon and receive his pay. And when he comes back a second time, then the buyer is not to be found; or else, if he is found, he feigns something else, by reason whereof the poor men cannot have their pay. And sometimes while the poor men are waiting for their pay the buyer causes the corn to be wetted,” and then tells the peasant he may take it away with him if he does not like the price offered.[138] In the same way the cloth contractor started with a modest business that needed no outlay of money, taking the raw material which his customers brought to him and handing it over to weavers, who on their side provided their own tools and did the work in their own homes. As he prospered in the world he may have become the owner of a few looms which he let out to the weavers he employed; or he perhaps added to his trade the keeping of a little shop or some small pedlar’s business for the sake of such petty gains as the law, looking in those days with scant favour on dealers, might allow. Often hard set to carry on his business, he sought to help out his poverty by cunning, and the expedients to which he was driven – the giving out of bad material or short weight to his workmen, the devices to save a few pence here and there by deducting it on one pretext or another from payments due, the giving wages in victuals or needles or mercery or the waste trifles of his little shop – must often indicate the distracting pressure of immediate need under which he anticipated the devices of the small working employer of to-day.[139]
But from the earliest times it is evident that there were many of the more successful traders who rose to a position which, in a humbler degree, closely resembles that of our modern capitalists and employers, and that this class constantly tended to increase in wealth and in numbers. They evidently rivalled in astuteness their brethren of lowlier fortunes.
“Ne had the grace of guile gone among my ware
It had been unsold this seven year, so me God help,”[140]
the merchant in Piers Ploughman admits frankly. His wife who made the cloth for sale was diligent in her sphere of economies, ordering her spinning women to spin the yarn out to great length, and paying for it by a pound measure that weighed a quarter more than her husband’s weighing machine – when he weighed true. At the draper’s he was taught how to stretch out the list of the cloth, or to fasten rich pieces together with a pack needle, and lengthen them out with pressers till ten or twelve yards reached to thirteen; and to get rid of his goods at Winchester and Wayhill fairs he carefully learned to lie and use false weights. To add to these resources he would go to the Lombards for lessons in clipping coin and in lending money out at usury.[141] Weaknesses of remorse troubled him little.
“‘Repentedst thou never?’ quoth Repentance, ‘nor restitution madest?’
‘Yea, once,’ quoth he, ‘I was y harboured with a heap of chapmen,
I arose and rifled their mails when they a’rest were.’
‘That was a rueful restitution,’ quoth Repentance, ‘forsooth!’”
No age, indeed, has a monopoly of clever dealers, and every artifice practised in earlier days was familiar to the fifteenth century, and so loudly resented by the consumers, that many people, mistaking the signs of a public zeal to check abuses for the evidences of a growing audacity in evil, have discovered in the later middle ages an accumulating mass of corruption which gradually covered with its blackness the felicity of a purer age.[142] But whether from “the grace of guile,” or from sheer ability, the traders prospered on every side. Langland looking out over all classes of men sees how with them above all lay the secret of fatness and good cheer:
“And some chose chaffer, they cheved [prospered] the better,
As it seemeth to our sight that such man thriveth.”[143]
The large sums that passed from hand to hand – the imposing debts registered in the town accounts – the complaints of a master being in arrears to his apprentice for a sum of £100, or an apprentice to his master for £138 – the leasing out of the customs of a great port like Southampton to a single merchant – all these things indicate the new plutocracy that was beginning to appear.[144] Drapers and clothiers were admitted into the select circles of privilege; in the towns the rank of “gentleman” became the appropriate reward of a successful cloth merchant,[145] and even in the county society the clothier was beginning to oust the old proprietors. The Tames of Gloucestershire were ordinary dealers who made cloth and traded at Cirencester till about 1480 when John Tame rented great tracts of land at Fairford for his flocks of sheep, and in the new industrial centre which he developed there, wool was collected to feed the Cirencester manufactory. All over the country he bought at a cheap rate lands which the ruined nobles could no longer hold; and his enormous wealth increased yet further under his son Edmund, who took his place among the “gentry” by becoming High Sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1505, receiving the reward of knighthood in 1516, and entertaining Henry the Eighth at his house at Fairford in 1520.[146]
The most wealthy folk in the towns, however, were probably the class that had grown up with the developement of foreign commerce and the export trade[147]– the merchants who forsook handicrafts and lived wholly by “grete aventour.”[148] Their lot was not altogether an easy one in a society perplexed by the mighty rush of the new commerce, where men trained in an earlier system looked with a mixture of fear and dislike on the intrusion of a dubious profession not vouched for by familiar custom – “covetous people who seek their own advantage,” and who not only lay under suspicion as men who refused to work, but were reproached with the destruction of trade by underselling the goods of English artizans with cheaper foreign wares. The government was concerned lest by their dealings the merchants should diminish the stock of gold to be kept in the country;[149] while, on the other hand, Church and people unanimously saw in bargains with bills and pledges and sums bearing interest, which were then known as “dry exchange,” something not to be distinguished from the sin of usury, and called on the government to declare void all such “damnable bargains grounded in usury, coloured by the name of new chevesaunce contrary to the law of natural justice” – “corrupt bargains which be most usually had within cities and boroughs.”[150] To the delicate conscience of theologian or social preacher trade could only be defended on the ground that honestly conducted it made no profit.[151] As for the “poor commons,” they held that while a man might live by trading, and perhaps make a modest competence, he had no right to grow rich;[152] his gains represented to the people the wages of iniquity, and the hungry toiler sitting over his mess of beans and bacon-rind comforted himself as best he could with thoughts of the weary ages merchants must at last count in purgatory, watching kings and knights and bishops pass out of its gates, while they themselves still lingered to pay the penalty of great oaths and innumerable taken
“Against clean conscience, for covetyse of winning.”[153]
Meanwhile their way was made difficult on earth, and along the road to fair or market the wandering merchant or chapman was held to ransom by the rustics, while the harmless messenger who travelled by his side was sent merrily on his road.