The Overseas Trade of Boston in the Reign of Richard II

Abstract

Fourteenth-century Boston was not only the outport for the major city of Lincoln but also a significant port in its own right, with a fair of international importance. Boston ranked as the fifth richest town in the country in the tax valuation of 1334 and the tenth most populous urban centre in the Poll Tax returns of 1377. It had, however, no powers of self-government until it was incorporated in 1545 and, consequently, lacks a medieval borough archive. This makes the particular and enrolled customs accounts one of the main sources for the history of medieval Boston. Professor Rigby provides us in this volume with a calendar of all twenty-nine documents in the class of PRO/Exchequer Customs Accounts (E.122) which survive for Boston in the reign of Richard II. These include nine Particular Accounts for wool custom, petty custom and tunnage and poundage and four Controller's Rolls for these customs, in some cases covering the same years as the Particulars. There are also commissions appointing customs collectors, receipts and acquittances for payments made by the collectors from the customs dues, accounts of goods seized, a cocket for the payment of export dues and, even, two leather pouches which contained customs accounts. This is almost certainly the most complete publication of E.122 documents for any port during a given period. In his introduction, the editor provides a detailed examination of the customs administration of Boston in this period, together with appendices listing the collectors and controllers and biographies of the fourteen men who served as customs collectors between 1377 and 1399. Until 1390, Boston's collectors were Lincolnshire merchants either from Boston itself or its hinterland, often recording trade in which they were themselves involved. From 1390, partly in response to parliamentary complaints about corruption and partly (the editor thinks) to enforce its bullion policy, the Crown appointed a royal clerk as one of the two customs collectors in Boston, as it did in other ports. Boston collectors ceased to appear as merchants in their own accounts, although, as the editor points out, this restriction could easily be circumvented by the collector using another merchant to export or import his goods. Rigby is highly sceptical about the reliability of the Boston accounts. That the controller acted as an independent check on the collectors he considers doubtful, since, where the accounts of both collectors and controllers survive for the same period, the order and content of the entries in both are far too similar for them to have been separately compiled. The searchers should also, in theory, have provided a check on the collectors and on merchants but, suspiciously, year after year they reported few or no arrests of smuggled goods. The editor concludes that ‘the final test of the reliability of the returns may … lie in the consistency of the commercial trends which they reveal rather than in the abstract study of the customs system’. Unfortunately, in spite of his unrivalled knowledge of medieval Boston and its trade, Rigby does not provide the reader with a summary of these trends against which to set the detailed accounts. Nevertheless, the accounts provide a wealth of information on Boston's trade and evidence on such questions as the extent to which growing cloth exports compensated for the drastic decline of Boston's wool exports from their peak in the previous century, when they rivalled London's. Although wool exports continued to be of importance, the cloth trade features prominently in the accounts and, in particular, the large volumes of cloth exported by Hanseatic merchants. Imports include quantities of dyestuffs, oil and alum for the cloth industry, fish from Scandinavia, furs, timber, iron and steel from the Baltic and a variety of manufactured goods such as linen, copper pots and pans, kettles and lanterns, much of it probably from the Low Countries. Unfortunately the accounts do not usually specify the name of each ship and its homeport, but only the master or owner's name. The volume, which is meticulously edited, includes a valuable glossary and index of imports and exports.