stock is likely to go from any other profession
to the improvement of land in the way of
farming. More does, perhaps, in Great Britain
than in any other country, though even
there the great stocks which are in some places
employed in farming, have generally been acquired
by farming, the trade, perhaps, in which,
of all others, stock is commonly acquired most
slowly. After small proprietors, however,
rich and great farmers are in every country
the principal improvers. There are more such,
perhaps, in England than in any other European
monarchy. In the republican governments
of Holland, and of Berne in Switzerland,
the farmers are said to be not inferior to those
of England.
The ancient policy of Europe was, over and
above all this, unfavourable to the improvement
and cultivation of land, whether carried
on by the proprietor or by the farmer; first,
by the general prohibition of the exportation
of corn, without a special licence, which seems
to have been a very universal regulation; and,
secondly, by the restraints which were laid upon
the inland commerce, not only of corn, but
of almost every other part of the produce of
the farm, by the absurd laws against engrossers,
regraters, and forestallers, and by the privileges
of fairs and markets. It has already
been observed in what manner the prohibition
of the exportation of corn, together with some
encouragement given to the importation of foreign
corn, obstructed the cultivation of ancient
Italy, naturally the most fertile country
in Europe, and at that time the seat of the
greatest empire in the world. To what degree
such restraints upon the inland commerce
of this commodity, joined to the general prohibition
of exportation, must have discouraged
the cultivation of countries less fertile, and
less favourably circumstanced, it is not, perhaps,
very easy to imagine.
CHAP. III.
OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF CITIES AND
TOWNS, AFTER THE FALL OF THE ROMAN
EMPIRE.
The inhabitants of cities and towns were, after
the fall of the Roman empire, not more
favoured than those of the country. They
consisted, indeed, of a very different order of
people from the first inhabitants of the ancient
republics of Greece and Italy. These
last were composed chiefly of the proprietors
of lands, among whom the public territory
was originally divided, and who found it convenient
to build their houses in the neighbourhood
of one another, and to surround
them with a wall, for the sake of common defence.
After the fall of the Roman empire,
on the contrary, the proprietors of land seem
generally to have lived in fortified castles on
their own estates, and in the midst of their
own tenants and dependents. The towns were
chiefly inhabited by tradesmen and mechanics,
who seem, in those days, to have been of servile,
or very nearly of servile condition. The
privileges which we find granted by ancient
charters to the inhabitants of some of the principal
towns in Europe, sufficiently show what
they were before those grants. The people
to whom it is granted as a privilege, that they
might give away their own daughters in marriage
without the consent of their lord, that
upon their death their own children, and not
their lord, should succeed to their goods, and
that they might dispose of their own effects by
will, must, before those grants, have been either
altogether, or very nearly, in the same
state of villanage with the occupiers of land
in the country.
They seem, indeed, to have been a very
poor, mean set of people, who seemed to travel
about with their goods from place to place
and from fair to fair, like the hawkers and
pedlars of the present times. In all the different
countries of Europe then, in the same
manner as in several of the Tartar governments
of Asia at present, taxes used to be levied
upon the persons and goods of travellers,
when they passed through certain manors,
when they went over certain bridges, when
they carried about their goods from place to
place in a fair, when they erected in it a booth
or stall to sell them in. These different taxes
were known in England by the names of passage,
pontage, lastage, and stallage. Sometimes
the king, sometimes a great lord, who
had, it seems, upon some occasions, authority
to do this, would grant to particular traders,
to such particularly as lived in their own demesnes,
a general exemption from such taxes.
Such traders, though in other respects of servile,
or very nearly of servile condition, were
upon this account called free traders. They,
in return, usually paid to their protector a
sort of annual poll-tax. In those days protection
was seldom granted without a valuable
consideration, and this tax might perhaps
be considered as compensation for what their
patrons might lose by their exemption from
other taxes. At first, both those poll-taxes
and those exemptions seem to have been altogether
personal, and to have affected only particular
individuals, during either their lives, or
the pleasure of their protectors. In the very
imperfect accounts which have been published
from Doomsday-book, of several of the towns
of England, mention is frequently made, sometimes
of the tax which particular burghers
paid, each of them, either to the king, or to
some other great lord, for this sort of protection,