Middlemen in English Business 183 



Methuen treaty was heralded as a wonderful achievement and as 

 giving England the Portugese wine trade.^ 



The importing merchants appear to have sold their wines to the 

 tavern ers who retailed them. The distributing carriers were the 

 '"wine-drawers."- The enforced distinction between wine taverner 

 and ale-house-keeper no longer obtained after gild-control declined 

 in the city and travel increased; both kinds of beverages were sold by 

 each class. It was the custom for the wine-merchants to send coopers 

 over to Portugal as agent wine-buyers; they mixed the wine there in 

 rented cellars before they shipped it to England.^ A custom house 

 regulation prevented the merchant importers from doing a retail 

 business in connection; the duty on wines for retailers was 8 per cent 

 higher than on those for wholesalers and if a merchant sold any at all 

 by retail he was charged the higher rate on all.'' There appear to 

 have been many evasions of the regulation, however. The Vintners' 

 Company was essentially mercantile in its early days and the vintners 

 evaded the law Hmiting them to the wholesale trade by assigning their 

 ware to taverners for sale as agents.'' 



{b) Cider and Perry. 



The juice of the apple and pear provided a considerable industry 

 in several counties, chiefly Hereford and Hants. One John Beale, in 

 1656, entitled a publication of his, "Herefordshire Orchards a Pattern 

 for all England." In Hants during the same period one John Dela- 

 mere was the manufacturer of cider-mills on a considerable scale." 

 The organization of the Hereford cider industry in the last quarter 

 of the eighteenth century was described by a writer on agriculture. 

 Much of the cider was sent to external markets, the principal one 

 being London, whence it was exported, in part, to the West and East 

 Indies and other foreign markets in Ijottles. Bristol also exported. 

 The home consumption, however, was greater than the foreign; "not 

 only London and Bristol, but ' every town in this Island' as well as 

 Ireland were supplied by Herefordshire. The immediate purchasers, 

 termed 'cidermen,' for these markets were dealers who lived in the 



^ See discussion of the commercial aspect of drinking as given in Lecky, I, 517, 

 et seq. 



-Cf. Hazlitt, Liv. Cos. 1, 322. 



' Atlas Mar. et Com., 154. 



^ Case of Messieurs Brooke and Hellier, ca 1700. 



^Hazlitt, Liv. Cos., 317. 



■^ J. Worlidge, Vinetum Brittoricum, 1676 ed. 160; V. C. H., Hants, V, 475. 



