142 Corn and Corn Products Trades 



ingross and keep corn in his granary. Another exception was made 

 in favor of certain badgers and drovers who were to be licensed to 

 ingross and regrate but not to forestall. This license system was the 

 new feature of the law, and the origin of the huckster's license now so 

 common. 



These licenses^ were to be issued to badgers, laders, kidders, and 

 carriers of "Corn, Fish, Butter or Cheese." The issuance was com- 

 mitted into the hands of three Justices of the Peace of the county 

 wherein the candidate badger lived. They enabled the licensed to 

 buy and sell in open and regular market unrestrained by the laws 

 against regrating and ingrossing; to transport corn freely from one 

 port or place within the realm to another provided the grain be shipped 

 within sixty days after its purchase with reasonable expedition to the 

 place the cockets named as destination, and a certificate be gotten 

 at the unlading place from the Customer of the Port directed to the 

 Customer of the Port clearing the grain. 



It was made evident by these exceptions and the license system intro- 

 duced that it was not designed to stop the wheels of trade that had 

 been started, but rather to regulate it, and make the food supply more 

 constant and sure by removing and restraining certain practices which 

 seemed like harmful excrescences on the customary course of trade, 

 and by forcing the wares of trade to go through the open public market 

 and fair. That the system did not repress trade intolerably is evi- 

 dent.- Without doubt the law confining the sale of corn to market 

 towns worked serious injury to the small husbandman. In 1623 

 Nottinghamshire complained against this restriction. Many of the 

 small agriculturists did not have the horses wherewith to convey their 

 corn to these distant markets; the townsmen badgers were thus 

 given an advantage over the husbandmen, who preferred to market 

 nearer home.^ But it appears that the farmers added to their sales 

 at the weekly market by selling "at home to their neighbors the rest 

 of the weeke."* The Justices seem to have issued licences freely 

 in some parts and the clamors for local equality of treatment tended 

 to draw others to the same practice. Bishop Hooper in the year 

 the law went into effect said: 



1 5-6 Ed. VI, Cap. 14, Sees. 7, 12. 



2 Cf . opinions of Faber, 66, and Naude, 20. The restraint on the coastwise trade 

 in the fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was really only one of 

 supervision, to guard against shipping abroad under guise of coastwise trade. 



3 S. P. Dom. Jas. I, CXL, 10; V. C. H., Nott., II. 288. 

 ^ Carew, Carnwall, 54. 



