Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [262]
The conference was scheduled for noon. Doyle’s dark eyes surveyed the quay with satisfaction. So far, things were working out very well.
If Ireland had suffered during the last century, you would not have known it from looking at Dublin quay. For a start, since the days of Strongbow, a steady process of land reclamation on both banks had altered the shape of the River Liffey so that, beside the town, it was only half its former width. A new stone wall now ran all the way along the waterfront from Wood Quay to the bridge, a hundred and fifty yards in front of the old rampart. Outside the city’s wall, straggling suburbs had grown up, especially along the road to the south so that, if you included Oxmantown across the river, there were nearly three people living in the suburbs for every one inside the walls. Parish churches as well as monastic buildings graced the suburbs. And to ensure an adequate water supply, one of the southern rivers had been diverted to flow through channels and aqueducts into the growing city in a fresh and constant stream.
And few men in the new Dublin had done better than Doyle. Even the Black Death had worked to his advantage: for though the trade of the city had been hit, two of his business rivals had died, and he had been able to take over their trade as well as buy up all their property at very reasonable prices. Twenty years after the terrible plague, much of Dublin’s trade had recovered. Wars no longer provided shiploads of captives and coastal raids were a thing of the past, so Dublin’s old slave market had ceased to function. But Ireland had plenty of goods to export to Britain, France, and Spain.
The greatest export from the English realms, for many generations, had been wool. The trade was regulated through a limited number of ports, known as the Staple Ports, where customs duties were levied. Dublin was one of them. “We have never bred sheep with the finest fleeces, like the best of the English flocks,” Doyle would readily admit. “But there’s a market for coarse wool, too.” Huge quantities of hides from the island’s great cattle herds and furs from her forest animals went out from the Dublin quays. The fishing catch from the Irish Sea was enormous. Fish, fresh or salted, were constantly being carried across the seas. Timber also from Ireland’s endless forest tracts was supplied to England. The roof timbers of some of England’s greatest cathedrals, such as Salisbury, came from Irish oaks.
Doyle had a hand in all these shipments. But he found himself more interested in the import trade. The stout cogs with their single masts and deep bellies brought in all kinds of goods: iron from Spain, salt from France, pottery from Bristol, fine textiles from Flanders. Italian merchants would arrive with loads of oriental spices for the great summer fairs outside the western gate. But the trade that he liked the best was the shipping of wine from southwest France. Hogsheads of ruby red wine from Bordeaux: he loved the look, the texture, the scent of the great sixty-three gallon barrels as they were lowered off the ships; though the shipments were so huge that they were usually reckoned by the tun—two hundred and fifty-two gallons each. It was the wine trade that had made Doyle, with all his ships, such a rich man.
The Justiciar had summoned Doyle to the castle the day before, soon after Harold had been there. Indeed, the king’s representative had called for the merchant even before he had informed the city’s mayor. Like most of the larger cities in England, Dublin had a council of forty-eight who governed its roughly seven thousand inhabitants. The inner council, from which the mayor was chosen each year, consisted of only twenty-four of the city’s most powerful