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with the practice; to be able-bodied and helpless became CHAP XII a sufficient crime to justify deportation; the Portuguese stations became institutions for an organized kidnapping; and when the English vessels appeared they were welcomed by the smaller negro tribes as more harmless specimens of the dangerous white race. But the theft of the five men made them fear that the new comers were no better than the rest; the alarm was spread all along the coast, and Towrson, a London merchant, found his voyage the next year made unprofitable through their unwillingness to trade. The injury was so considerable, and the value of the slaves in England so trifling that they were sent back; and the captain who took them home was touched at the passionate joy with which the poor creatures were welcomed.

Thus it was that the accession of Elizabeth found trade leaving its old channels and stretching in a thousand new directions. While the fishing trade was ruined by the change of creed, a taste came in for luxuries undreamt of in the simpler days which were passing away. Statesmen accustomed to rule the habits of private life with sumptuary laws, and to measure the imports of the realm by their own conceptions of the necessities of the people, took alarm at the inroads upon established ways and usages, and could see only a most lamentable spoil to the realm, in the over quantity of unnecessary wares brought into the port of London."

trade of

From India came perfumes, spices, rice, cotton, indigo, The foreign and precious stones; from Persia and Turkey carpets, England at velvets, satins, damasks, cloth of gold, and silk robes the acces

List of articles entered from abroad in the Port of London in the second year of Queen Elizabeth.-Domestic MSS. Rolls House. Note of commodities brought into the realm in the year 1564.--MS. Ibid.

sion of Elizabeth.

CHAP XII wrought in divers colours."

1559

Russia gave its ermines and sables, its wolf and bear skins, its tallow, flax, and hemp, its steel and iron, its ropes, cables, pitch, tar, masts for ships, and even deal boards. The New World sent over sugar, rare woods, gold, silver, and pearls; and these, with the pomegranates, lemons, and oranges, the silks and satins, the scented soaps and oils, and the fanciful variety of ornaments which was imported from the south of Europe, shocked the austere sense of the race of Englishmen who had been bred up in an age when heaven was of more importance than earthly pleasure. Fathers were filled with panic for the morals of their children, and statesmen trembled before the imminent ruin of the realm.2

To pay for these new introductions England had little to spare except its wool, its woollen cloths, and fustians. It was true that the demand which was opened out abroad for these things quickened production at home, and the English woollen manufactures grew with the foreign trade; but Cecil found no comfort in a partial prosperity which withdrew labour from agriculture, and tended to bring back or to support the great grazing farms, which it was a passion with English statesmen to limit or break up: he was disturbed to observe that

1 The Eastern trade was carried on either through Russia and Poland or else through Turkey and the Levant.

2 It appears from the customs entries that the heaviest foreign trade was in canvas, linen, cloth, wood, oil, and wines. The total value of the wine entered at the Port of London alone, in the year 1559, was 64,000l.; the retail selling price being then on an average sevenpence a gallon. The iron trade with Sweden, Russia, and

Spain, was considerable; and strange to say, the English then depended on foreign manufacturers for their knives, their nails, their buttons, and even their pins and needles. Hops stand at a large figure, and so does sugar. Among miscellaneous articles are found dolls, tennis-balls, cabbages, turnips, tape and thread, glasses, hats, laces, marmalade, baskets, and rods for baskets. - Domestic MSS. Rolls House.

comments

London was importing corn; and in a paper of notes on CHAP XII the phenomena which he saw around him, he added as a 1559 fact to be remarked and remembered, that those who de- Alarms and pend upon the making of cloths are of worse condition to of Cecil. be quietly governed than the husbandmen." He dreaded, further, the supposed fatal effect of an export of gold, as the necessary consequence of an over-rapid growth of commerce; and he could see no remedy save to abridge' by Act of Parliament 'the use of such foreign commodities as were not necessary,' 'whereof the excess of silks was one,' ́excess of wine and spices another.' The great consumption of wine especially enriched France, whose power England ought not to increase;' 'the multiplying of taverns was an evident cause of disorder amongst the vulgar, who wasted there the fruits of their daily labour, and committed all evils which accompany drunkenness.' Anticipating the language of the modern Protectionist, Cecil thought it was an ill policy to encourage manufactures at the expense of tillage, when war might at any time throw the country back upon its own resources.

Another strange fact, at first sight utterly inexplicable, perplexed Elizabeth's ministers. Along with the increase of the foreign trade the 'port towns of the realm had been steadily decaying;' harbours, which at the beginning of the century had been well furnished with ships and mariners,' were left with but a few boats and barges. It needeth no proof,' wrote Cecil, in 1566,2 that more wine is drunk now than in former times; let men that keep households remember whether commonly they spend not more wines than their grandfathers, yea, percase, than themselves within twelve

Notes on the state of trade, October, 1564. In Cecil's hand.-Domestic MSS. Rolls House.

2 Trade notes.-Domestic MSS. ELIZ. vol. xli. Rolls House.

1559

CHAP XII years; let all noblemen compare their household books with their ancestors', and it will be as manifest as can be that England spendeth more wines in one year than it did in antient times in four years.'

Decay of the fisheries.

Other imports from foreign countries had increased almost in the same proportion; and yet the ports were sinking and the navy dwindling away.

Much of the common

There were several causes. carrying trade was done by the French and Flemings; English enterprise was engaged in expeditions of a different kind, to which I shall presently refer. Another immediate and most important occasion was the cessation of the demand for fish.

'In old time,' (I again quote from Sir William Cecil),' 'no flesh at all was eaten on fish days; even the King could not have license; which was occasion of eating so much fish as now is eaten in flesh upon fish days.' In the recoil from the involuntary asceticism, beef and mutton reigned exclusively on all tables; and 'to detest fish' in all shapes and forms had become a 'note' of Protestantism. The Act of Edward, prescribing 'due and godly abstinence as a means to virtue to subdue men's bodies to their soul and spirit,' had been laughed at and trampled on; and thus it was that the men who used to live by the trade and mystery of fishing' had to seek some other calling. Instead of the Iceland fleet of Englishmen which used to supply Normandy and Brittany as well as England, 'five hundred French vessels,3 with from thirty to forty men in each of them,' went annually to Newfoundland; and even the home

1 Notes upon an Act for the increase of the navy, 1563.-Domestic MSS. Rolls House. 3 Sic.

2

2 & 3 Edward VI. cap. 19.

fish the

fisheries fell equally into the hands of strangers. The CHAP XII Yarmouth waters were occupied by Flemings and 1563 Frenchmen,' 'the narrow seas by the French,' 'the western fishing for hake and pilchard by a great navy of French within kenning of the English shores.' The north parts of Ireland, and specially the Bann, within Foreigners ten years, was in farm of the merchants of Chester; and English now both the herring and salmon fishing was in the waters. hands of the Scots; the south part of Ireland was yearly fished by the Spaniards; so that England was besieged round about with foreigners, and deprived of the substance of the sea fishing, being as it appeared by God's ordinance peculiarly given to the same; and more regard had how to entice merchants and mariners to a further trade, to employ themselves to carry treasure into France, and from that to overburden the realm with wines, rather than to recover their antient natural possession of their own seas and at their own doors, in which kind of trade men were made meeter to abide storms and become common mariners than by sailing of ships to Rouen or Bourdeaulx."

So wrote the most farsighted of English statesmen ; and knowing that the safety of England depended upon its fleet, and that 'to build ships without men to man. them was to set armour upon stakes on the sea shore," of means to encourage mariners' he could see but three.

First, Merchandize ;'

Second, Fishing;'

2

And thirdly, The exercise of piracy, which was detestable and could not last."3

1 Trade notes.-Domestic MSS. ELIZ. vol. xli. Rolls House.

2 Ibid.

ELIZ. II.

3 Ibid.

F F