Middlemen in English Business 191. 



beinf^ driven to market. They bought from the graziers, drovers, 

 and farmers and from one another. They sold at Smithlield and 

 occasionally at country markets. The buyers were the carcass and 

 cutting butchers, the graziers who bought lean cattle, and other 

 jobbers. 



Before 1750 the jobbers had gained a monopoly of the live-stock 

 market. Their practice of buying in the country stock which was 

 coming to market was a most glaring violation of the laws against 

 "forestaUing;"' it is likely that this course of business was delayed in 

 its emergence by this opposing legislation, and the free and extensive 

 practice of forestalhng the Smithfield Market is the most salient evi- 

 dence of the degree to which trade had freed itself from governmental 

 restraint and interference. 



As buyers from the farmers and graziers, the jobbers made their 

 purchases at the several farms by personal canvass. They higgled 

 over the price to be paid; the prevailing market price was not then so 

 well known as now, for the metropolitan newspapers scarcely reached 

 the rural parts with their statements of the market's course. This 

 circumstance favored the jobber who was more in touch with the 

 conditions at Smithfield. If any grazier was persistently disinclined 

 to sell to the jobber, the latter sometimes endeavored to tempt the 

 grazier by offering a price higher than he intended to give or than 

 prevailed at Smithfield. If afterwards the grazier tried to market 

 the animals he would fail to realize the price offered by the jobber. 

 As a consequence the next drove the grazier had to sell he was in- 

 clined to sell to the jobber lest he lose as he did before.- By divers 

 devices merely suggested by this one, the graziers and farmers were 

 brought into more or less dependence upon the jobber. 



But the greater part of the purchases were made en route to London. 



' The practice had gotten well in operation by 1718. "Bargains of this sort are 

 frequently struck by the Jobbers and Forestallers at the To\vn's-end, or perhaps 

 within a Stone's cast of the Market; and the\' have their Inns and Yards, which 

 are a kind of Half-waj' Houses for this puri^ose, where they meet and cabal and 

 there openly carry on the Forestalling Trade, as if some Fair or Market were 

 actually settled in those places by Patent or Prescription." "Essay against Fore- 

 stallers," 14. 



- J. H. C, 51 : 637. According to the testimony of one Adams, who had been a 

 salesman in Smithfield for fifty years, the practices of jobbing had been common at 

 that market ever since he could remember; he noticed nothing new in the practice 

 at the time he gave the testimony (17%). Ft may be assumed that the data fur- 

 nished by the hearings in 17')6 need be discounted in value but little for the period 

 before 1760. 



