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Volume 2 | Issue 5 - Money
Article by James Mawdesley. Edited by Sam Wakeford. Additional Research by Jon Park.
When we go shopping, who do we trade with? Do we go shopping in stores with recognisable names, or do we browse and if we see an item in a shop window where we like the item and the price, do we buy it regardless of which shop it is in? Or, are some of us influenced by other concerns such as whether the company has a good ethical record?
Some of the above scenarios would have been familiar to the early modern shopper, though others may have seemed very alien. This was because ready cash was often in short supply, with it being estimated, for example, that in the 1660s between one-quarter and one-third of England’s cash was in the hands of eight thousand London merchants. This created cash shortages elsewhere, particularly in provincial areas distant from London. Walking into a shop and paying for the purchased goods with ready cash was a relatively infrequent occurrence in provincial England. This meant that items would often be purchased ‘in kind’ with goods exchanged for those of equal value desired by the other party in the transaction, or alternatively, they would be purchased on the proviso that they would be paid for at a later date when ready cash became available to the purchaser.
However, such a situation raised issues about the reliability of the trader. After all, you would not want to sell goods and then not receive payment for them later. In many ways, if a modern analogy is to be used, early modern trading could be perceived as the equivalent of internet shopping. When we make purchases on a website such as Amazon, how many of us look elsewhere for the goods that we want when we encounter a low seller’s rating? On a website such as Amazon, we pay up-front in the expectation that we will soon receive the goods which we have ordered. We trust in the good reputation of the purchaser. In a sense, this is the same set of values that governed early modern trade, though often in reverse: if a purchaser asked for credit, then a trader had to trust in the good reputation of the purchaser, in order to be sure that they would soon receive the money which they were owed.
This created a series of dilemmas for the trader in early modern England as to who it was safe to trade with. One remarkable source that gives us some idea of trading protocol in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century is the autobiography of William Stout (1665-1752), written sometime after 1743. Stout was a Quaker ironmonger and grocer in Lancaster, and his autobiography containing many fascinating descriptions of his neighbours, people that he traded with and, perhaps most revealingly, the credit in which they were held. Stout had himself learned some harsh lessons in trade. After establishing his business in 1687, he wrote two years later that ‘I had been too forward in trusting and too backward in calling, as is too frequent with young tradesmen’. Therefore, it was imperative that the people that he gave credit to were reliable and would settle their debts to him. However, even after this early warning, it would seem that Stout’s judgement was not always accurate, as was demonstrated in 1697 when Stout calculated that ‘in nine years of trading’, he was owed money by 248 ‘insolvent debtors’, to the sum of £220.
For William Stout, credit also worked the other way, as he, like most tradesmen, had to cultivate his own reputation for probity so that he could purchase goods on credit. In 1690, Stout attended the Quaker Yearly Meeting in London and immediately after the meeting, ‘ I had time to settle my accounts with all I dealt with, and bought and ordered what goods I had occasion for’. The historians Keith Wrightson and Craig Muldrew have both highlighted the value of leading an orderly household and being respected by one’s neighbours as good means of constructing one’s credit, particularly as many traders (unlike Stout who travelled widely throughout England on business) would have run businesses whose foci were essentially local.
Craig Muldrew has also argued that Stout’s devout Quaker faith helped to construct his credibility as a trader, with those of that religious affiliation often renowned for their honesty. One of Stout’s most interesting arguments was that he would always set an honest price for the goods which he was selling, for if he set a higher price for an item in the hope of making a substantial profit, then the buyer would negotiate a lower price for the purchase, meaning that he had effectively lied to the purchaser about the value of the goods in setting the initial, higher price. Aside from Stout’s own attitudes, the Quaker movement also formally promoted responsible trading practices. In 1688, advice was issued to meetings throughout England that Quakers should not ‘launch into trading and worldly business beyond what they can manage honourably and with reputation; so that they may keep their words with all men’.
By promoting such values, Quakerism provided a useful network of trading contacts that one could assume heeded to certain values. Although Stout could personally judge his fellow Lancastrians, he could not necessarily judge people who he traded with in other places in England. Stout made several visits to Sheffield to buy metal, and whilst he names few of the people that he traded with there, he does mention a Quaker by the name of Obadiah Barlow, whom in 1692 he settled his accounts with, and employed him ‘to buy goods for me in my absence’. This required a certain amount of trust on both parts; that Stout would settle his debts, and that Barlow would secure the goods that Stout wanted. In the absence of frequent contact between the pair due to their geographical distance, Quakerism provided a mutual set of values and beliefs by which they could ascertain their trust in each other. Though a small religious group, concerns about credit and trust faced by the Quakers must similarly have been felt by many other people engaged in trade in seventeenth century England.
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