24

FRENCH COMMERCE.

JACQUES CŒUR. [Book III.

Their devotions might have been dedicated to a less worthy object; yet it is certain that the method of curing herrings was known centuries before the time of Benkelens, though he may perhaps have introduced some improvements into the process.42

The assigning of the Azores by King Alphonso of Portugal to his aunt the Duchess of Burgundy as a dowry must have given an impulse to the navigation of the Low Countries 43; and the flag of Duke Philip might be seen in the Levant. But, though industrious and enterprising, the Flemings, as we have before had occasion to remark, were also sensual and luxurious. They delighted in banquets and festivals, and an extreme licentiousness prevailed in their warm baths, or bagnios, which were very numerous, and were converted into resorts of seduction and profligacy. All the arts of luxury had risen to a great pitch in Flanders; but at the same time the fine arts were not neglected, and music, architecture, and painting flourished. Thus Flemish life presented a strange contrast of magnificence and grossness, and may be not unaptly compared to the pictures of Rubens beside those of the Italian school, equal in vigour of drawing and colouring, but deficient in grace and form.

France could offer nothing to match the opulence and splendour of Flemish life. Machiavelli has observed the want of money in the former kingdom; and Louis XI., himself the plainest, not to say the shabbiest, of monarchs in his way of life, restrained by sumptuary laws the finery of his subjects. Yet in the first half of the fifteenth century, French commerce had received a wonderful impulse from the genius and energy of Jacques Cour. The son of a skinner at Bourges, who gave him but little education, Cœur became connected in 1427 with a mint in the south of France, the whole of whose conductors were convicted of issuing a depreciated coinage, but were dismissed on payment of a heavy fine. Cœur now directed his attention to foreign trade. He visited Italy, Greece, Syria, and Egypt, and determined to vie with the Italians in the commerce of the Levant. He established his operations at Montpellier, which city had received from Pope Urban V. permission to trade with the infidels, and whence there was a communication by canal to the port of Lattes.45 As Provence was not yet French, Cœur was obliged to revive the marine of Languedoc, but at the

42 In 1339 King Edward III. ordered five lasts of red herrings at Yarmouth, which had long been famous for them: Macpherson, vol. i. p. 525. See on this subject Petit, Chronique de Hollande, t. i. p. 184. There are accounts of the herring

fishery on the coast of Norway as early as 978: Macpherson, l. c.

43 Kervyn de Lettenhove, Hist. de Flandres, ap. Martin, t. vii. p. 17. 44 Ritratti di Francia.

45 Since superseded by Cette.

CHAP. I.] TRADE AND MANUFACTURES OF LYON.

25

same time he established a subsidiary house at Marseilles, when he obtained the rights of citizenship. His commerce embraced articles of all sorts, as stuffs, spices, metals, and also included banking operations, so that his house rivalled that of the Medici; his business was conducted by 300 factors, and his establishments were planted over the coasts of the Mediterranean, whose trade he disputed with the Venetians, the Genoese, the Florentines, and the Catalans. No commercial operations have been seen in France on such a scale before or since. But these great monopolies display the infancy of commerce, and in France as in Germany they were complained of by the smaller traders. Cœur was at last ruined by a court intrigue in 1456.

says

Louis XI. patronised the trading part of the community, and under the paternal government of Louis XII. France also made considerable progress: internal prosperity was accompanied with an increase of foreign commerce. A contemporary author that the French merchants then made less difficulty in going to Rome, Naples, or London than formerly to Lyon or Geneva. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Lyon was still the centre of traffic between Italy, France, England, Flanders, and Germany. It first began to be known as a manufacturing town in the fourteenth century, though it had long before been famed for its commerce and for its August fairs. At the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, the Florentines had a great share in the trade of Lyon; and even in 1548 it still numbered thirtyseven respectable Florentine houses. Charles V. in his war with Henry II. gave its prosperity a great blow by forbidding his subjects to visit its fair, and at the same time by opening the fair of Augsburg. The manufacture of silk was introduced at Lyon about 1521, workmen being brought from Milan for the purpose. 48 The English do not appear to have paid much attention to commerce till towards the close of the fifteenth century. All the great commercial operations seem in early times to have been carried on in that country by foreigners. Thus in 1329 the English customs were farmed by the Bardi of Florence for 201. a day; and London, with regard to foreign trade, was little more than a depôt of the Hansa, and had a Teutonic Guildhall. Even so late as 1518 we find a riot in London on the complaint that all the trade was monopolised by foreigners. Some progress had, however, begun to be made under Richard III., and out of

47

*Seyssel, ap. Martin, t. vii. p. 379. "Reumont, in Raumer's Taschenbuch, 1841, S. 482.

49 Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, vol. ii. p. 59.

26

ENGLISH COMMERCE. PIRACY.

[BOOK III. fifteen acts passed by the only parliament of that reign (1484) no fewer than seven relate to commerce. In 1485 we find an English consul appointed at Pisa, a fact which betokens some Mediterranean trade. There appears to have been some commerce between England and the Levant as early as 1511, and in 1513 Henry VIII. appointed a consul at Scio.49 But, on the whole, England, at the period which we are contemplating, though destined ultimately so far to outstrip the other European nations in a commercial career, seems to have been far behind most of them.

In those early ages, maritime commerce was much infested by pirates; nor was piracy exercised by professional robbers alone. The temptation of opportunity, and the facility of escape in the then comparative solitude of the seas, were inducements to which even the regular trader frequently yielded when he found himself the stronger. The records that can be collected respecting maritime commerce in the middle ages display a succession of piracies and murders committed by the sailors of almost every country. The seamen of different ports often made war upon one another, although the states to which they respectively belonged were at profound peace. In 1309, two judges were appointed to assess the damages committed on one another at sea by the citizens of Bayonne, the subjects of King Edward II., and the Castilians, and to punish the offenders. In 1315, we find the people of Calais committing piracy near Margate. It must be confessed that England, in modern times so distinguished for maintaining the police of the seas, was formerly not among the least offenders in this way. In 1311, the piracies and murders committed by the sailors of Lynn on the coast of Norway provoked retaliations on the part of King Hacon. The Cinque Ports seem to have acted together as an independent maritime confederacy, and were often at war with the Flemings, when England and the Netherlands were at peace. In 1470, some Spanish merchants complained to King Edward IV. of piracies committed by the men of Sandwich, Dartmouth, Southampton, and Fowey. The extent of these disorders is manifest from the frequency of the treaties respecting them. Thus, for instance, we find in 1498 a treaty between Louis XII. and Henry VII., the ratification of a previous one, by which shipowners were to give security in double the value of their ships and cargo that they would not commit piracy; also a stipulation of the same kind in the treaty with Ferdinand the Catholic, in 1500, for the marriage of Prince Arthur and the infanta Catherine; another

49 Macpherson, vol. i. pp. 508, 705; vol. ii. pp. 40, 46, 52.

CHAP. I.]

CODES OF MARITIME LAW.

27

agreement to the like effect between Henry VIII. and Francis I., in 1518 50; &c. &c.

Barcelona has the credit of having promulgated the first generally received code for the regulation of the seas, the Consolato del Mare, supposed to have been published in the latter part of the fourteenth century.51 According to M. Pardessus, it is not, however, an authoritative code so much as a collection or record declaring the customs of the maritime nations which surrounded the Mediterranean, in the same way as the Jugemens or Rôles d'Oléron became the rule for the nations situated on the Atlantic. The Mediterranean provinces of France and Spain appear to have possessed codes of maritime jurisprudence before the Consolato was published; but being written in Latin, they were for the most part a dead letter to those seafaring and commercial classes for which they were intended. The authors of the Consolato were deeply versed in Roman law as well as in the principles of modern jurisprudence, and these being expressed in the Consolato in a familiar and practical manner, and in a dialect universally understood in those parts, it soon acquired general adoption. It was long thought to be of Italian origin, but M. Pardessus has shown that it originated in Catalonia, the earliest manuscripts and even editions of it being in the Romance language, spoken in that province in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and which still prevails there. Embracing not only the elements of civil contracts relating to trade and navigation, but also the leading principles of belligerent and neutral rights in time of war, it has formed the basis of French maritime jurisprudence in modern times, and especially of the marine ordinance of Louis XIV. in 1681.

The general code of the usages, or customary laws of Barcelona (el Codigo de los usages Barceloneses), published in the reign of Raymundo Berenguer I., Count of Barcelona, in 1068, and therefore three centuries before the probable date of the Consolato, contained, however, some ordinances relating to navigation, and particularly law no. lviii., which assured all vessels arriving on the coast of Catalonia of friendly treatment, and the protection of the prince so long as they remained there. This law was several times confirmed by the kings of Aragon, after the union of Catalonia with that country.52

The maritime laws of Oléron, just alluded to, consist of forty

50 For instances see Rymer, t. iii. pp. 112, 122, 131, &c.; t. xi. p. 671 sq.; t. xii. pp. 690, 741, &c.; t. xiii. p. 649.

31 Pardessus, Coll. des Lois maritimes

antérieures au xviii Siècle, ap. Wheaton, Hist. of the Law of Nations, Introd. p. 61. 52 Capmany, Memorias Historicas de Barcelona, ap. Macpherson, vol. i. p. 300.

28

ENGLISH AND FRENCH NAVIES.

[BOOK III. seven short regulations respecting average, salvage, wreck, &c. By some they have been ascribed to King Richard I. (1197), but there is no authority for this assertion, and they were probably taken from the laws of Barcelona. Cleirac, an advocate of Bordeaux, in his Us et Coutumes de la Mer, published in 1621, ascribes them to the year 1266; and to Eleanor, Duchess of Guienne and Queen of England, by whom, however, he must have meant Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I.53

Thus it appears that codes of maritime law intended for general observance were, from the necessity of the case, promulgated centuries before any system of international law to be observed on land had been framed. The need of the latter was not much felt till the modern European system had made considerable progress; and it appears to have had its origin among the Spanish casuists, whose minds were led to inquire into the principles of natural equity by questions arising from the relations of the Spaniards to the conquered natives of the New World.54 No tolerably consistent system on this subject was, however, promulgated till the latter half of the sixteenth century, and we shall therefore postpone our consideration of it to a future chapter.

With regard to piracy, codes of law might have been promulgated in vain, in the absence of power to enforce them, and this was derived only from the establishment of regular national navies. Those worthy to be called such were of late growth, except in the Mediterranean. In England, King John appears to have possessed a few galleys, in 1213 55; and some are again mentioned in the reign of Henry III.56 (1242). The first navigation act (5 Richard II. c. 3.) was framed with the view of augmenting the royal navy (1381), and provided that no goods should be shipped outwards or homewards by any subjects of the King, except in English-owned vessels. Six King's ships are mentioned in the war with Scotland, in 1481.57 A royal navy, however, can hardly be said to have existed in England before the reign of Henry VIII. In fact, till the use of guns was introduced into naval warfare, there was little difference between a ship of war and a merchantman, except in the Mediterranean, where galleys were employed; and hence, in time of war, it was usual to press merchant vessels into the King's service. On ordinary occasions, the Cinque Ports supplied ships; on extraordinary ones, the maritime towns through

53 The laws of Oléron have been published in English by Godolphin in the Appendix to his View of the Admiral Jurisdiction.

54 Wheaton, Hist. of Law of Nations,

p. 35.

55 Matthew Paris, p. 233 sq.

56 Rymer, t. i. p. 406.

57 Macpherson, vol. i. p. 698.