Middlemen in English Business 305 



buyers of cloth at Leeds, viz., travelling merchants, buyers to send to 

 London, and buyers to send abroad. The first of these three will be 

 discussed under another head.^ 



Those of the second class either bought on commission for London 

 drapers or merchants as principals, or acted themselves as principals, 

 and authorized factors or warehousekeepers in London to do their 

 selling on commission. These London agents suppUed London re- 

 tailers and drapers for the City's use, and also supplied merchants 

 who exported these cheaper northern goods to the Plantations and 

 to Russia and the Baltic. The factors of the London drapers and 

 cloth merchants were active buyers in the east and west districts, also, 

 in the days before the Blackwell Hall factors acquired their monopoly. 

 The London merchants in the days of Winchcombe came in person 

 or agent to Newberry to bargain for cloth. Deloney mentions "a 

 young, wealthie Italian merchant, comming oft from London thither to 

 bargaine for cloth (for at that time clothiers most commonly had their 

 cloth bespoken, and halfe paid for aforehand.)"- In 1605 out-of-town 

 factors bought and sold contrary to law at Colchester; complaint was 

 laid that ''divers Factors Strangers" sojourning in Colchester were 

 buying and selling to the great "wronge and hinderances" of the 

 burgesses.^ The Shropshire dealers complained against the factors 

 of the London merchants, 1621, for buying and engrossing Welsh 

 cloths and friezes and dispatching them, before they came to their 

 proper market at Oswestry, to the drapers of Whitechurch, Chester, 

 and Coventry. One William Thomas, a local clothworker, was buy- 

 ing as factor for John Byard of London and exporting these cloths to 

 Rochelle, Bordeaux and St. Malo.'* 



The buyers for exportation abroad were resident commission factors 

 employed by merchant principals who lived in Hamburg and in Hol- 

 land, and, farther, in the German and Austrian cities Nuremberg, 

 Frankfort, Leipsig, Augsburg and Vienna. It was said by the author 

 of an atlas in 1728 that he could of his own knowledge give the names 

 of particular merchants in Holland, who had sent commissions to 

 Leeds for these goods for above £100,000 value in a year, and that 

 for man\' successive years."" And in the 1760's £20,000 worth of 



^ See "'Traveling ^lerchant.'" 

 - Deloney, Jno. Winch., 86; this was about 1500. 



' Cal. S. P. Dom., Jas. I, 1605, 229; S. P. Dom., Jas. I, XV, 17; V. C. H., Essex, 

 II, 392. 



^Shrops. Arch. Soc. Trans., Ill, 134; V. C. H., Shrops, I, 430. 

 5 Atlas Mar et. Com., 109. 



