Company of Merchant Adventurers of London

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Arms of the Merchant Adventurers

The Company of Merchant Adventurers of London was a trading company founded in the City of London in the early 15th century. It brought together leading merchants in a regulated company in the nature of a guild. Its members' main business was exporting cloth, especially white (undyed) broadcloth, in exchange for a large range of foreign goods.[1][2] It traded in northern European ports, competing with the Hanseatic League. It came to focus on Hamburg.

Origin

The company received its royal charter from

St. Thomas of Canterbury. It claimed to have liberties existing as early as 1216. The Duke of Brabant granted privileges and in return promised no fees to trading merchants. The company was chiefly chartered to the English merchants at Antwerp in 1305. This body may have included the Staplers, who exported raw wool, as well as the Merchant Adventurers. Henry IV's charter was in favor of the English merchants dwelling in Holland, Zeeland, Brabant, and Flanders. Other groups of merchants traded to different parts of northern Europe, including merchants dwelling in Prussia, Scania, the Sound, and the Hanseatic League (whose election of a governor was approved by Richard II of England
in 1391), and the English Merchants in Norway, Sweden and Denmark (who received a charter in 1408).

Under the Tudors

Under

Edward VI
in 1552.

Under Henry VII, the merchants who were not of London complained about restraint of trade. They had once traded freely with Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, but the London company was imposing a fine of £20, which was driving them out of their markets. Henry VII required the fine to be reduced to 10 marks (£3, 6s and 8d).[5] Conflict arose with the Merchants of the Staple, who sought to diversify from exporting wool through Calais into exporting cloth to Flanders without having to become freemen of the Company of Merchant Adventurers. The Merchant Adventurers kept control of their trade and Flanders as their port. Foreign merchants of the Hanseatic League had considerable privileges in English trade and competed with the Merchant Adventurers, but these privileges were revoked by the English government in the mid-16th century.

The Merchant Adventurers decided to use other ports.

Duke of Alva, governor of the Netherlands. Although trade was resumed at Antwerp from 1573 to 1582, its declining fortunes ceased with the fall of the city and the subsequent development of the Amsterdam Entrepôt, and the Dutch Golden Age
.

Under the charter of 1564,

James I
in 1603, there were at least 200 members. They gradually increased the fees for admission.

Conflict

The conflict of the Merchant Adventurers with the

Senate of Hamburg
invited the Merchant Adventurers to return there, but negotiations over this broke down.

The merchants who had frequented

staple port was moved during the early 17th century from Middelburg to Delft in 1621, then to Rotterdam in 1635, then to Dordrecht
in 1655.

The years between 1615 and 1689 were marked by periods, starting with the ill-fated Cockayne Project (1614 - 1617),[7] when the company lost and then regained its monopolistic privileges. It moved its staple port from Delft to Rotterdam in 1635. The company suffered from trouble with interlopers, traders who were not 'free of the company' (i.e. members), but who nevertheless traded within its privileged area.

Hamburg Company

When the Company of London lost its exclusive privileges following the Glorious Revolution of 1689, the admission fees were reduced to £2. After Parliament threw the trade open, the company continued to exist as a fellowship of merchants trading to Hamburg. Because they drove a considerable trade there, members were sometimes called the Hamburg Company. The Merchant Adventurers of London still existed at the beginning of the 19th century.

Similar groups colonising North America

In the early seventeenth century, similar groups of investors, referred to as "adventurers", were formed to develop overseas trade and colonies in the New World: the

Thirty Years War that achieved the surrender of Quebec in 1629, and colonized the island of Newfoundland
.

Heraldry

The arms of the various companies were as follows:

References

  1. ^ Robert Brenner, Merchants and revolution: commercial change, political conflict, and London's overseas traders, 1550–1653 (Verso, 2003).
  2. ^ E. Lipson, The Economic History of England (1956), 2;196–269.
  3. ^ "Merchant Adventurers" in Encyclopædia Britannica, Online Library Edition, 2013. Retrieved 22 July 2013.
  4. ^ Many records of the Court Meetings of the Merchant Adventurers of London are printed in L. Lyell and F.D. Watney (eds), Acts of Court of the Mercers' Company 1453-1527 (Cambridge University Press, 1936).
  5. ^ £1 = 3 English marks; 1 mark = 6s 8d
  6. ^ Calendar of Patent Rolls, Elizabeth I, Vol. III: 1563-1566 (HMSO London 1960) pp. 178-80, item 922.
  7. ^ academic.oup.com https://academic.oup.com/ej/article-abstract/39/156/619/5283364?redirectedFrom=PDF. Retrieved 25 October 2022. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  8. ^ Joseph Edmondson (Mowbray Herald Extraordinary), Robert Glover, Sir Joseph Ayloffe, A Complete Body of Heraldry, Volume 1, The Arms of Societies and Bodies Corporate Established in London, London, 1780(no page numbers)[1]
  9. ^ Edmondson, Glover & Ayloffe
  10. ^ Edmondson, Glover & Ayloffe
  11. ^ 'Merchant Adventurers' Hall', in An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in City of York, Volume 5, Central (London, 1981), pp. 81-88. [2] See image File:Merchant Adventurers' Hall - geograph.org.uk - 1505920.jpg[3]

Further reading

  • Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003).
  • Lipson, E. The Economic History of England I (12th edition, 1959), 570-84; II (6th edition 1956), 196-269.