How the contest between free trade and protectionism sparked fervor and unrest in medieval England
"It happened,” in the laconic words of the coroner’s inquest, “that a certain Giano Imperiale of Genoa lay slain.” The year of his visit to London was 1379, and he had been involved in a street scuffle on St. Nicholas Acton Lane. One summer evening, while Giano was sitting outside his dwelling, a passerby had trod “unwittingly” on his feet, leading to an argument, drawn swords, and Giano’s death. The killer and a confederate were indicted for the crime, but an all-Londoner jury ruled it an accidental homicide.
The matter was not, however, so easily swept under the rug. Giano, it developed, was no casual visitor. He had been admitted to England under letters of safe conduct issued by the king, who was seeking an innovative trading relationship with the Genoese. Giano and representatives of the king had already drafted an agreement allowing Genoese ships to skip the crowded Port of London, discharging and receiving cargo at the deepwater Port of Southampton instead. The product in question was English wool, a commodity so important that, at that historical moment, it accounted for a full third of the total revenue of the land. London merchants and traders had been thriving on duties and profits reaped from their absolute control of the wool trade, and the new arrangement sought by Giano would have blown their monopoly sky-high.
Needless to say, the wool men and their allies who had engineered the murder were intent on hushing it up, and two different London-based juries persisted in declaring the murderers innocent of all charges. The crown eventually moved the trial to Northampton in its quest for a conviction, and new facts were brought to light. It emerged that the scuffle was no accident, but that the murderer “went past Giano Imperiale’s feet and came back three times, on each occasion stumbling over his feet, for the sake of picking a quarrel between them.” Confronted with this and other elements of new testimony, the murderers revealed their true motive, explaining that they were acting on the belief of their masters—members of the London mayoral and trading elite—that “in the event that he could bring his plans to conclusion, Giano Imperiale would destroy and ruin all the wool merchants in London.”
Despite this technical triumph for the crown and its success in obtaining a conviction, the wool merchants prevailed in the end. One of the small-fry murderers was eventually put to death and one was released, but the crime’s architects suffered no penalties or even inconveniences. The wool men had gotten away with murder in defense of their prerogative.
Giano’s killing was one episode in the larger story of international trade and its accompanying rivalries in the later European Middle Ages. The so-called Dark Ages were never as dark as their name would imply; hucksters, peddlers, chapmen, and other minor players had always plied Europe’s roads and dealt their goods. But it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that high-volume international trading seriously resumed, with trade in wool one of its major drivers. In those centuries, the Port of London alone handled almost a thousand arriving and departing trading vessels a year, and numerous other English ports (including the newly active ports of Dover and Southampton) were claiming a role. Half this activity was devoted to wool, and it generated immense wealth for the realm, conferring fortunes on a small and monopolistic group of men. These successful profiteers were not the sheepherders and shearers of the provinces, nor the merchant sailors who braved the seas, but the entrepreneurial middlemen who collected revenues on exported wool. A close-knit group of at most several hundred men, they formed allegiances and confederations throughout the mercantile establishment that dominated the leading guilds and ran the city of London.
© Bibliothèque Nationale de France / HIP / Art Resource, NY.
Knowing a good thing when they saw it, these wool merchants secured their privileges by means of favorable arrangements with select European markets, cities with which they concluded binding and mutually profitable arrangements to defend their trading rights. They came to be known as the Staplers, as a consequence of their conservative and self-interested policies. “Staple,” based on estaple—the Old French word for a marketplace or an emporium—epitomized their principal stratagem of forming treaty-based relations with a European trading center and insisting on exclusive dealings.....MUCH MORE
Of course, the tumultuous and rapidly evolving economic scene of the later Middle Ages opened the door to more than one philosophy of trade. While the conservative wool men abided by the Staple, another and more activist cohort of traders, dealing in cloth and finished wool, was also operating out of London and a hodgepodge of smaller English ports. By the fifteenth century, these merchants had organized and given themselves a name: the Company of Merchant Adventurers. Their chosen name said a great deal about them. The early Merchant Adventurers spurned settled arrangements in favor of new horizons. Unlike their Stapler peers, they preferred far-flung destinations, flexible arrangements, and speculative deals. Their ranks were open to a wide range of aspiring traders and manufacturers with eyes on international markets and products to sell, including mercers (vendors of finished cloth), drapers, haberdashers, and skinners or furriers. Their “adventure” was not so much derring-do or thrill seeking for its own sake but (in the sense of the phrase venture capitalist as we use it today) a readiness to confront economic risk, a preparedness to stake their own capital in the pursuit of profit. Economic historian E.M. Carus-Wilson captured the difference between the two groups when she wrote, “The Adventurer, unlike the Stapler, who went regularly to and fro between England and the English port of Calais, voyaged far afield, east, west, north, or south, wherever he could find an opening.”
The dour Staplers and the more rakish Adventurers and everybody in between were swept into discussions of the risks and rewards of international trade. Their concerns were advanced by English authors and poets who talked and wrote avidly about their scorn for international rivals; their approval of sporadic acts of mayhem directed against foreign competitors; their disapproval of sharp practice; the excitement and even romantic allure of their goods; the convergence of their own interests with those of their emerging nation-state. Participants in the discussion included Geoffrey Chaucer (who spent fourteen years as controller of the wool custom in the Port of London and whose father was a successful international wine trader) and the gentleman lawyer John Gower, his friend and poetic rival.....
