of those times. FAIRS. It was necessary to have a meeting-place where merchants might come together to buy and sell, and it was desirable that the time and place of meeting should be well known and fixed. Fairs at certain times and places were consequently instituted. The fairs were generally connected, or supposed to be connected, with some religious celebration-an immemorial usage which equally characterised the fairs of mediæval times, of classical times, and of a still remoter past. Thus there were the fairs of St. James at Munich, St. Denis at Paris, St. Bartholomew at London, and St. Giles at Winchester, commencing respectively on the feast days of those saints, and continuing for several days. after. Sometimes this connection with the Church was more than a nominal advantage, its protection being necessary to the safety of the gathering. It was indeed greatly on this pretence that the privilege of holding fairs was originally conferred upon religious corporations at all, who throve upon the tolls and dues that they exacted in connection with them. The privileges thus conferred were often very extensive, including, in one recorded case, that of the grant to the church of St. Moritz during the great Magdeburg Fair, even the right of coining money.1 The facilities offered to traders attending fairs were often also very great. Mr. Morley relates how, "in France before a way was opened for trade by the fair of St. Denis," certain feudal tolls and rights "absorbed one-half of a foreign merchant's goods upon their first arrival and debarcation." But to that fair "traders came, exempt not only from imperial taxation but from many of the ordinary risks of travel." It became therefore a great resort of very various traders: "an emporium for the iron and lead of the Saxons, for slaves, for the jewelry and perfumes of the Jews, for the 1 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair, by Henry Morley, p. 15 (Warne). 1 oil, wine, and fat of Provence and Spain, for the honey and madder of Neustria and Brittany, for merchandise from Egypt and the east." The right of granting a charter to hold a fair was inherent in the Crown, and a very important source of its revenues. Enlightened monarchs sometimes granted free fairs, for attracting commerce to their dominions. Charlemagne in particular bestirred himself in this direction, and with good results, and the establishment of fairs in Flanders had much to do with the early prosperity of the country. A "free fair" did not mean that goods were exempt from the ordinary dues at the place where the fair was held, but only that they were permitted free passage to and from it; in the absence of which it was in the power of every petty landowner through whose domain they were conveyed to levy what dues on them he thought fit. The extent of business done in these fairs, and their importance in the commercial life of the Middle Ages, can only be realised when we recall such obstacles to transport as these; which are only a few of those that could be mentioned; and the general dearth of shops, which now supply so immediately all our wants. For the more important class of home-made goods in those days the merchant was at once producer and wholesale and retail dealer; and for foreign goods, merchant and retailer in one. Customers did not attempt to supply their needs from day to day, but generally for months at a time. Consequently the fair was the great arena for mercantile activity, and the great local event of the season. Of the fair still held annually at Beaucaire, a little town on the Rhone, not far from Arles, we read: “This fair was once without an equal in Europe. Merchants from Marseilles and other ports of the Mediterranean came hither with rich stores of all the wealth brought from east, west, north, and south by the trading fleets of 1 See p. 231. Venice and her rivals. To meet them came traders from all the inland towns, silk mercers from Lyons, wine dealers from Macon and Dijon, and representatives of every mart and factory that had anything to buy or sell."1 As many 3 as 100,000 persons from a distance used to visit this fair as lately as the middle of the last century, and even at this day more than half that number are said to do so.2 Of Stourbridge Fair in England, Mr. Thorold Rogers gives an equally striking account. It was held in a field near Cambridge, and was at one time the greatest of all the English fairs, not even excepting St. Bartholomew's, or St. Giles'. Modern representatives of such gatherings continue to exist even at the present day. The annual fair of Nijni Novogorod is still the principal mart for the produce of central Russia; and the great fair at Leipsic remains an event of annual importance in Germany. In India there is a great annual festival, half-commercial, half-religious, as of old, at a place called Hurdwar, one hundred and twenty miles north-east of Delhi, which is attended by multitudes; and there are many others in other parts of Asia. It is only within living memory that Greenwich Fair near London, and Donnybrook Fair near Dublin, were abolished, and their praises are still celebrated in the local ballad literature of those parts. The great facilities of locomotion, and the more perfect organisation of industry have now, however, generally superseded the need of fairs in most civilised countries, and the nearest approach to them with us at the present day are the agricultural shows and exhibitions of various kinds which are held in increasing number. 1 Romance of Trade, p. 66. 2 Merchant Enterprise, by J. H. Fyfe, p. 275 (Nelson). CHAPTER VI. MEDIEVAL MANUFACTURES The Dark Ages-The Church-The Greek Empire-Silk-Wool-Flax— Cotton-Metal Manufacture-Smaller Industries-Locks and ClocksWire drawing-Dyeing-Felting-Paper -making-Pottery - Leather -Glass-Medieval System-Trade Societies. IF it be difficult to follow the movements of commerce in the early Middle Ages, it is still more difficult to trace the distribution and progress THE DARK AGES. of manufacture, and the reason assigned for this by Hallam is the all-sufficing one, that there was then no manufacture to trace. There is not a vestige perhaps to be discovered for several centuries," writes the historian of the Middle Ages, "of any considerable manufacture; I mean of working up articles of common utility to an extent beyond what the necessities of an adjacent district required." The definition of manufacture in this sentence, it may be noted, is the one that has been adopted throughout this work, and with so unexceptionable an authority to rely on, it might have been held excusable to have omitted a chapter on mediæval manufacture from it. Such an arrangement would, however, have scarcely accorded with the plan laid down at the commencement, of investigating the germs, namely, as well as the growth and progress of the modern manufacturing system. Instead then, it is proposed to here pass rapidly in review 1 View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, by Henry Hallam, LL.D., p. 612 (Ward and Lock). the main facts concerning manufacturing occupations at this epoch, collected from a few scattered sources, and fitted into something like the form of a connected narrative. We have already learned that such rude industry as there was, was principally local; which means that production had, in appearance at least, gone back to the prehistoric stage-to that system of uncombined individual effort which preceded both the patriarchal and communistic systems of development, and which has been sketched elsewhere.1 There was, in short, just then neither any real industrial nor social system in modern Europe at all, but only a condition of complete anarchy. Every one was for himself, either as an oppressor or as one oppressed, and all were unconsciously looking for a time when a new order should be evolved out of, and a new principle infused into, this chaos, that should unite society again. That new principle of cohesion and progress was presently to appear in the combined influences of the Church and feudal system, acting and reacting upon each other; and to be supplemented by the independent attitude which the industrious classes assumed later towards the excessive pretensions of both. But in the Middle Ages and in the west, up to at all events the reign of Charlemagne : and after the termination of that reign for some centuries more: there was little order of any kind, and industrial production for purposes of trade was in many places completely at a standstill. How indeed could any considerable trade be profitably conducted? It was not merely (as we are assured by Hallam) that, "in the domains of every lord, a toll was to be paid in passing his bridge, or along his highway, or at his market," for "it was only the mildest species of feudal lords who were content with the tribute of merchants. The more ravenous descended from their fortresses to pillage the wealthy traveller, or share in the spoil of 1 Chapter ii. |