An Open Port: The Berwick Export Trade, 1311–1373

Abstract

As events have moved towards the creation of a subordinate parliamentary assembly in Edinburgh, contributors to the Scottish Historical Review have been understandably preoccupied with political history, to the virtual exclusion of economic history. Things were different when the journal first appeared in 1903. With the Unionist tide at its flood, a secure political climate was reflected in an altogether more balanced coverage of history and, indeed, literature. One contributor ventured to draw Chamberlain, Balfour and Rosebery (names more or less forgotten now, but figures in the politics of the day) into his discussion of trade.1 There were also pieces on towns and industry, alongside political perennials; there was even an illustration showing shipping from Leith in 1550.2 But shipping wool and leather from Scottish and English ports to the European mainland had been the basis of an important export trade in primary products long before then. Demand came from secondary sectors in the Low Countries and Italy. The tertiary element was a merchant class, at first alien but later native, which developed techniques of merchant banking and became involved in aspects of public finance. All of this is well known to students of the medieval economy, but worth mentioning, if only to remind specialists in later periods to take a backwards glance before accepting the Edin burgh-centric view that 'it is probable that at no point prior to 1600 had such a small group of merchants controlled and dominated the economic future of Scotland's most important trading centre'.3 There were merchants before 1600 and ports beyond Forth. Long-lost as a part of the kingdom and now unimaginable as a commercial capital, Berwick-upon-Tweed had once been Scotland's most important trading centre. With no competitors between Newcastle and Edinburgh, but accessible to the largest ships of the day, the 'Alexandria of the North' gathered the production of flocks and herds from a wide hinterland on both sides of the Tweed valley.4 Alexander Ill's Alexandria