Merchants and Trade

This study is not only concerned with the impersonal economic trends of the later Middle Ages. It also seeks to look at the personal experiences of the businesspeople who attempted to make a living in a period of commercial challenges. Inconvenient though it is for historians eager to model the vagaries of the later medieval economy, we need to always be mindful that it was the business decisions of individuals that shaped the aggregate trend lines used in this and other works. Grouping these people together as ‘merchants’, seeing them as ‘rational’ economic agents or as some breed of medieval automaton whose actions mirror those of their neighbours falls well short of reality and strips them of their own distinctive and particular motives and experiences. In this chapter some attempt will be made to put a personal face to inanimate statistics. Of those whose occupation is given in the Staple debt certificates, the largest group are merchants (37.4 per cent). The title ‘merchant’ in this case refers to traders and middlemen who dealt, generally wholesale, in a variety of merchandise. Unfortunately, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English merchants tended not to leave detailed records of their businesses—with the notable exception of individuals like the later fourteenth-century London ironmonger Gilbert Magfeld; the later fifteenth-century wool merchants, the Cely family and the early sixteenth-century Gloucestershire wool merchant John Heritage. Historians have undertaken important prosopographical studies of individual later medieval merchants where no detailed business documentation exists. Evidence for the lives and livelihoods of these merchants has been carefully reconstructed from a wide range of documentary sources. Examples include Adam Fraunceys (or Francis) and John Pyle (both users and mayors of the Westminster Staple in the 1370s); Richard Whittington (user of the Westminster Staple between the 1381 and 1404 and, subsequently, mayor of that court); and the Tate family, who operated their family mercery business between Coventry, London and Calais in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (users of the Westminster court between the mid-1460s and 1504). These individuals left a significant trail for historians because they were international import–export merchants of considerable note with wide-ranging business networks and contacts; they were spectacularly wealthy—Richard Whittington gave very generously to various London-based charitable works in his will; all were eminent landholders—John Pyle held manors in Northamptonshire, Middlesex and Essex and all held administrative or governmental positions—Adam Fraunceys was a crown troubleshooter sent in to deal with administrative failure and corruption and anti-government grievances, and was MP six times. All of this has, unsurprisingly, left considerable prosopographical evidence. Furthermore, all these men were Londoners or had business connections in London, which, as will be argued in Chap. 5 , made them even more visible. However, the invigorating and risky trading adventures undertaken by merchants of the first rank should not side-track historians. In fact, it was the everyday, rather dull, domestic trade which captivated the attention of most of the individuals who used the Staple.