316 Textiles and Textile Materials Trades 



shopkeepers and the immunity these itinerant traders enjoyed from 

 taxation, but also as a source of revenue, a Hcense system was used.' 

 Hawkers ha\dng certified to the Commissioners of Transportation 

 the manner of their trade and having paid £4 were Hcensed to hawk; 

 penalties were laid for hawking without a license. Exception was 

 made to makers of goods, who might sell their own products. This 

 act was renewed from time to time and became the standing policy. 



The act was soon evaded by the practice of "lending licenses;" 

 those not possessing licenses pretended to have left them at home or 

 elsewhere, and if the license was insisted upon, one was borrowed in 

 the community for the time being. To correct this abuse, in 1704 an 

 act made it a misdemeanor for a hawker to hawk not having the license 

 with him, and lending licenses was specifically penalized.- 



In 1704 travelling wholesalers of woolens and linens were exempted 

 from the requirements of having a license, and in 1717 a like exemp- 

 tion was tendered the wholesalers of bone lace, but it was not till 

 1785 that the exemption of wholesalers was made general for all 

 commodities.^ 



The effect of the license is so complicated with other economic 

 phenomena that it cannot be definitely disentangled. Defoe, writing 

 in 1745, said the number of petty chapmen was very great but that 

 it was the opinion of some that the number was not so great as it had 

 formerly been. By this time many of them had also become keepers 

 of "shops, or chambers, or warehouses, in the adjacent market- 

 towns, and sell their goods in the villages round. "^ The assumption 

 of this sedentary retailing may have been used as a way of evading 

 the license law, but no evidence has been found to support the sug- 

 gestion. It is, however, evidence that the country store was arising 

 into economic significance. 



Despite the revulsion and the opposition against the petty chapman, 

 he did the country populace a distinct benefit. The means of com- 

 munication in the rural recesses were meager, poor, and seasonal; the 



' 8 and 9 Wm. Ill, Cap. 25; 9 and 10, Cap. 27; 12 and 13, Cap. 11, Sec. 11; 3 

 and 4 Anne, Cap. 4; 5, Cap. 19; 6, Cap. 5; 7, Cap. 7. The license system was not 

 an entirelj'^ new invention: it had been used in the period of town economy for the 

 maintenance of local protection; cf. 5 and 6 Ed. VI, Cap. 21; I Jas. I, Cap. 25; 

 1 Phil. & Mary, Cap. 7. 



'^ 3 and 4 Anne, Cap. 4, Sec. 4. The lending of licenses is sketched in Dowell, 

 Hist, of Tax, III, 33-4. 



3 3 and 4 Anne, Cap. 4, Sec. 4; 4 Geo. I, Cap. 7; and 25 Geo. Ill, Cap. 78; S. 

 P. Treas., 1717, CCVIII, 47; V. C. H., Bucks, II, 107. 



■* Defoe, Com. Eng. Tr., Ill, 211. 



