The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-12-09
MedlaevaI London.


 Not a few interesting things come out when we study the history of me- diaeval London. One of them Is the social status of the trader, The fash ICnaOIe contempt Tor ms business Is ot comparatIveIy recent growth, not much more than a century old. No pre- c:se date can be given, but in the ear
 Her part of the eighteenth century the feeling on tine mater was not what IL
 became in the nineteenth. For hundreds of years before then
 the connection between the country
 and the city, the country gentlsfolk and the city trader, had been most in-
 innate. No more striking evidence of
 this can be given than the analysis of the origin of the 20S Lord Mayors from Henry Fitz-Aylwin down to the year
 lCSS, a period of 210 years. or these
 lt6 were country born. When we con-
 slider what the mediaeval village was,
 how limited was the horizon of all but
 the lord ot the manor or knight here
 and there, it is not difficult to under stand why many lads of good birth sought the opportunities offered by ap- premiership in the city. Camden is quoted to show that the nobility thought with shame of the merchant $ career. He himself declared mercatura non derogat nObiitati. These same country lads supplied the city, as in- deed they do now, with the necessary
 fresh blood and energy.
 Another important point Is the fact 1 that London was always great as dis trubting, not as a manufacturing cen ter. And this fact no Legislation, no system of duties could alter. Fraterni- ties of foreign merchants established | themselves in. their fortified houses and kept their trade jealously to them selves The Crown, so iong as 1t got Its l tolls and duties, was content Now and then, indeed, It endeavored to restrict their increasing trade, but Its ordinan- ces were always evaded. For London wanted what they alone could supply. It could supply itself well enough with 1 Eccessaries as Sir Walter Besant says, but neither London nor England has ever been content with necessaries. The mediaeval city of 500 years ago was as full of IuXuries as Is the city of 1 today--the best shopping place in Northern Europe in the days of Edward III, as it is in the days of Edward VII. Entire fleets laden with nothing but wine came to London. Once or twice there were periods when a man could get dead drunk for two pence as the fascinating invitation of a later time put it; but the drink hud by that time been changed from wine to gin. Media Gtdt LOHuOH HduI llihCdN' NllV D'SL tt everything, paying for it all in wool .. So Capegrave has it: Our enemies laugh at us; they say: Take the ship of
 your gold noble and impress a sheep in-
 stead (This was the noble Edward ID Napolean repeated the taunt, but
 the laugh was not in the end with the
 foreigner. And how, it may be asked
 die these good things so backward and forward? Not always securely. We
 could not always command the channel
 though we still clai the sovereignty oi
 the seas. In this respect things reach
 ed their worst. we are told. in the four
 tcenth century. Foreign merchants
 settled in London and traded. They
 came from Venice. London, Genoa. Flor
 erce, Lombardy Antwerp and Dant- zig. And so the period was a halcyOn time for pirates. for lords of manors
 vho had foreshores. for fishermen and
 for wreckers.