30 THE GREAT PLAGUE AND ITS RESULTS II 



and business capacity. In a word the merchant prince 

 was appearing, men like the later Jack of Newbury, and 

 William Canynges with his argosy of ships. 1 With the 

 growth of individual enterprise, money and capital in the 

 modern sense of the word became accumulated in private 

 hands, the more so because the expulsion of the Jews by 

 Edward I, and the failure of the Bardi and other Italian 

 bankers in the reign of Edward III, had opened the way 

 for Englishmen to engage in the profitable business of 

 money-lending. Under these circumstances money be- 

 came the chief nexus between man and man, and a system 

 of ( Geldwirthschaf t ', to use Hildebrand's and Schmoller's 

 phrase, took the place of the old economy, in which money 

 had little part, much earlier than elsewhere except in Italy 

 and in Flanders. 



It was this revolution which was the real solvent of the f 

 manorial system, and which prevented its reconstruction 

 after the shock of the Great Plague. More villeins, tempted 

 by the new opportunities and the rise of wages which the 

 development of trade especially of the cloth trade fur- 

 nished, ran away, sometimes with leave and paying a small 

 fine, sometimes without. 2 Those who stayed pressed for 

 further commutation of their labour services, and though the 

 manorial lords appear at first to have resisted these demands, 

 since the commutation they received was fixed by custom at a 

 much lower rate per day's work than hired labour cost at the 

 time, they were forced finally to comply, and soon began to see 



1 Cf. Pryce, The Canynges family ; Law, Nouveaux riches of the 

 fourteenth century, Transactions Royal Hist. Soc. ix. 49. 



2 Miss Davenport says : Judging from evidence of Forncett Manor, 

 Norfolk, it would seem that sufficient importance has not been given 

 to the voluntary withdrawal of villeins. Combating Cheyne's view 

 that it was only a few of the restless spirits who would do that. The 

 fugitives from Forncett Manor became weavers, tailors, shoemakers, 

 smiths, carpenters, hired labourers. 



