Middlemen in English Business 347 



are kept for the sale of meat, bread and cattle."^ The concentration 

 of the population depended upon the di\'ision of labor, the di\asion of 

 labor upon the facilities of transportation. As will be shown else- 

 where, the carriage of goods, persons and information was much im- 

 proved during the century 1660' to 1760. The rise of permanent 

 shops was concomitant and causal to the relative decline of the public 

 market and the travelling merchant and chapmen. Middlemen 

 increased in number and became sedentary. 



Retailing and wholesahng were always under close municipal 

 supervision and regulation. Buying to sell again in the same town was 

 permitted to gildsmen alone. The purchase of raw materials, the 

 keeping of wine-taverns, the retailing of certain commodities as cloth, 

 corn, etc., were, likewise, competent only to gildsmen. The quahties 

 of the wares were prescribed and inspectors executed the regulations.- 

 Traders were constrained to contribute to the gild merchant if they 

 made it a business to buy and sell, or dealt, wholesale or retail, in any 

 thing they did not produce themselves. There was usually some sum of 

 money specified as the maximum amount above which a burgess dare 

 not trade \^^thout enroUing as a merchant.' All persons who bought at 

 markets and fairs to sell again retail or wholesale in towns were con- 

 strained to be merchant gildsmen.^ If the ware was manufactured or 

 converted into new form while in the hands of the middleman he was 

 not necessarily a merchant.^ Retailers of cloth paid license fees for 

 setting-up shop.'' A frequent regulation was to limit the number of 

 tradesmen per town or commodity. At Lyme Regis about 1600 the 

 purpose of the limitation of the number of tradesmen that had "liberty 

 to use their trade" seems to have been to prevent excessive competi- 

 tion from making too many of them chargeable to the town.' At 

 Woodstock the number of buyers any glover could engage was limited 

 to two, a larger number being dangerous to the competition deemed 

 best for the public market.^ All such medieval regulations were 

 gradually discarded and the business of the tradesmen became \-ery 

 free during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 



1 Pococke, II, 20. 



- In illustration see Dav'ies, Southampton, 139; V. C. H., Hants, ^^ 415. 

 ^ Instance Beverley in 1503 with 5m. as the limit and in 1582 £10: Selden. XIV. 

 81, 90. 



' Ibid., 75. 



■> Ibid., 93. 



" Ibid., 100. 



^ V. C. H., Dorset, II, 249. 



« y. C. H., Oxf., II, 257. 



