1 8 History of Inland Transport 



the village mill might, like the salt, have to be brought in from 

 elsewhere ; but otherwise the villagers had small concern 

 with what went on in the great world. 



Such trading relations as the average village had with 

 English markets or with foreign traders were almost ex- 

 clusively in the hands of the lord of the manor, one of whose 

 rights and one not without significance, from our present 

 point of view it was to call upon those who held land under 

 him, whether as free men or as serfs, to do all his carting for 

 him. This was a condition on which both villeins and cottars 

 had their holdings ; and though, in course of time, the lord 

 of the manor might relieve his people of most of the obligations 

 devolving upon them, this particular responsibility still 

 generally remained. " Instances of the commutation of the 

 whole of the services," says W. J. Ashley, in the account of 

 the manorial system which he gives in his " Introduction to 

 English Economic History and Theory," " occur occasionally 

 as early as 1240 in manors where the demesne was wholly left 

 to tenants. The service with which the lord could least easily 

 dispense seems to have been that of carting ; and so in one 

 case we find the entry as to the villeins, ' Whether they pay 

 rent or no they shall cart.' " 



To the lord of the manor, at least, the difficulties of road 

 transport, whether in getting his surplus commodities to 

 market or otherwise, must have appeared much less serious 

 when he was thus able to call on his tenants to do his cartage. 



In the towns the isolation may not have been so great as in 

 the villages ; but the urban trading and industrial conditions 

 nevertheless assumed a character which could only have 

 been possible when, owing to defective communications, there 

 was comparatively little movement and competition in regard 

 either to manufactures (such as they were) or to workers. 



The period of internal peace and order which followed the 

 Norman Conquest led, as Ashley has shown, to the rise in 

 town after town of the merchant guild an institution the 

 purpose of which was to unite into a society all those who 

 carried on a certain trade, in order, not only to assure for them 

 the maintenance of their rights and privileges, but also to 

 obtain for them an actual monopoly of the particular business 

 in which they were interested. Such monopoly they claimed 

 against other traders in the same town who had not entered 



