. Social England; a record of the progress of the people in religion, laws, learning, arts, industry, commerce, science, literature and manners, from the earliest times to the present day . havebeen weU informed, and gives many interesting particulars of thecommerce of the period^ Throughout the jioem we ai-e remindedof the arguments which had so nmch weight with the writersof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author com-plains that merchants exported their commodities inforeign bottoms, to the discouragement of native shipping,and that foreign merchants had more privileges
. Social England; a record of the progress of the people in religion, laws, learning, arts, industry, commerce, science, literature and manners, from the earliest times to the present day . havebeen weU informed, and gives many interesting particulars of thecommerce of the period^ Throughout the jioem we ai-e remindedof the arguments which had so nmch weight with the writersof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author com-plains that merchants exported their commodities inforeign bottoms, to the discouragement of native shipping,and that foreign merchants had more privileges in England 560 THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. C. E. Life. 11399 than English nierr-hanrs in foreign parts. Ho condemns theniiportation ot hixuries in tei-nis whieh would have pleased a writer of tlie mercantilistschool. His arginiientsrelative to Ireland andWales remind ns of tinlanguage of the age whichsaw the deliberate suh-ordination of the interestsof colonies and depend-encies to those of themother countiv. Ihe•sentiments, and in partthe language, of theauthor of the liibellc are reproduced in a poeniof a .somewhat later dateon the commercial policyof Tini (it UjDiiall, miuukh. If Ave are to take a lastglimpse at the life of towns before the Middle Ages close, we sliall find littlereal difference between the fourteenth and fifteenth disintegrating tendencies, which broke up their interna]economy into a lot of separate trades and crafts, were still atwork, and had resulted in the almost complete trium])h of thecraft guilds. The new charters of incorporation. which beganto be given to the towns from the reigii of Henry \ I., confinedtlie franchise, both parliamentary and nnmicipal, almost whollylo the freemen of the guilds, and the guilds were cvci-y (laarrowing Instead of being societies for the main-tenance of small capital and lalioiu in tlie same hands, andfor securing an eipial remuneration to all lab
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