Mediaeval Socialism | Page 9

in the towns to what it was in the country districts.
The quickening influence of trade was making itself felt everywhere. In 1331 the cloth trade was introduced at Bristol, and settled down then definitely in the west of England. In the north we notice the beginnings of the coal trade. Licence was given to the burgesses of Newcastle to dig for coal in 1351; and in 1368 two merchants of the same city had applied for and obtained royal permission to send that precious commodity "to any part of the kingdom, either by land or water." Even vast speculations were opening up for English commercial enterprise, when, by cornering the wool and bribing the King, a ring of merchants were able to break the Italian banking houses, and disorganise the European money market, for on the Continent all this energy in trade was already old. The house of Anjou, for example, had made the kingdom of Naples a great trading centre. Its corn and cattle were famous the world over. But in Naples it was the sovereigns (like Edward III and Edward IV in England) who patronised the commercial instincts of their people. By the indefatigable genius of the royal house, industry was stimulated, and private enterprise encouraged. By wise legislation the interests of the merchants were safeguarded; and by the personal supervision of Government, fiscal duties were moderated, the currency kept pure and stable, weights and measures reduced to uniformity, the ease and security of communications secured.
No doubt trade not seldom, even in that age, led to much evil. Parliament in England raised its voice against the trickery and deceit practised by the greater merchants towards the small shopkeepers, and complained bitterly of the growing custom of the King to farm out to the wealthier among them the subsidies and port-duties of the kingdom. For the whole force of the break-up of feudal conditions was to turn the direction of power into the hands of a small, but moneyed class. Under Edward III there is a distinct appearance of a set of nouveaux riches, who rise to great prominence and take their places beside the old landed nobility. De la Pole, the man who did most to establish the prosperity of Hull, is an excellent example of what is often thought to be a decidedly modern type. He introduced bricks from the Low Countries, and apparently by this means and some curious banking speculations of very doubtful honesty achieved a great fortune. The King paid a visit to his country house, and made him Chief Baron of the Exchequer, in which office he was strongly suspected of not always passing to the right quarter some of the royal moneys. His son became Earl of Suffolk and Lord Chancellor; and a marriage with royalty made descendants of the family on more than one occasion heirs-at-law of the Crown.
Even the peasant was beginning to feel the amelioration of his lot, found life easy, and work something to be shirked. In his food, he was starting to be delicate. Says Langland in his "Vision of Piers Plowman":
"Then labourers landless that lived by their hands, Would deign not to dine upon worts a day old. No penny-ale pleased them, no piece of good bacon, Only fresh flesh or fish, well-fried or well-baked, Ever hot and still hotter to heat well their maw."
And he speaks elsewhere of their laziness:
"Bewailing his lot as a workman to live, He grumbles against God and grieves without reason, And curses the king and his council after Who licence the laws that the labourers grieve."
That the poor could thus become fastidious was a good sign of the rising standard of comfort.
But for all that life was hard, and much at the mercy of the weather, and of the assaults of man's own fellows. The houses of the better folk were of brick and stone, and glass windows were just becoming known, whereas the substitute of oiled paper had been neither cheerful nor of very much protection. But the huts of the poor were of plastered mud; and even the walls of a quite respectable man's abode, we know from one court summons to have been pierced by arrows shot at him by a pugnacious neighbour. The plaintiff offered to take judge and jury then and there and show them these "horrid weapons" still sticking to the exterior. In the larger houses the hall had branched off, by the fourteenth century, into withdrawing-rooms, and parlours, and bedrooms, such as the Paston Letters describe with much curious wealth of detail. Lady Milicent Falstolf, we are told, was the only one in her father's household who had a ewer and washing-basin.
Yet with all the lack of the modern necessities of life, human nature was still much the same. The antagonism between rich