The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance [9]
Jews, and that it does not keep the nobles out of trade. When matters like these were being all the time dealt with in the legislative assemblies in long-winded memorials and counter-memorials, it was natural that the municipal prohibitions of export or import, and the prohibitory regulations of the town should play an important part in the discussions. It was not a matter of indifference to the rural districts in Pomerania and Magdeburg if one fine day the council of Stettin prohibited the export of corn, and it was of the greatest moment to the townsmen whether the nobility could claim exemption. from such a prohibition. It was of importance for the whole country that, in East Prussia, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, each country-town could impose a prohibition of export on the neighbouring country-town without waiting for the sanction of the High Master (Hochmeister). From all this confusion arising from local economic policy there was only one way out: the transference of authority in the most important of these matters from the towns to the territorial government, and the creation of a system of compromise which should pay regard to the opposed interests, bring about an adjustment on the basis of existing conditions, and yet, while necessarily and naturally striving after a certain self-sufficiency of the land in relation to the outside world, should also strive after a greater freedom of economic movement within it. In the Prussian lands of the Teutonic Order it was recognised as a fundamental principle as early as 1433-34, that in future no Prussian town should obstruct another in the export of corn.(13*) In Brandenburg, likewise, the squirearchy (Ritterschaft) obtained for themselves the right of freely exporting their produce from the country as a general thing, and for the peasants, at least, a freedom of choice as to which town in the electorate, near or far, they should take their produce to.(14*) The much-disputed question whether foreign dealers should be permitted to go about buying and selling was differently settled from time to time in different assemblies - according as the towns or the squires happened to be the stronger; but at any rate they came to resolutions which, whether they threw open the country or closed it, bound the whole of it equally.(15*) The keen opposition of the agrarian interests to the old town policy, the advocacy by the agrarian party of free peddling, of a reform of "guest-right" (Gastrecht) and of the law as to markets and forestalling, led in Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Prussia, - partly in consequence of the strength of the squirearchy, partly in consequence of the increase of traffic and of general prosperity, - to a more considerable limitation of town privileges before the Thirty Years' War than was the case for some time after it: for the frightful economic retrogression which the war caused, seemed to call for the systematic employment of every possible means for encouraging the industrial life of the towns. But every success of the squirearchy in securing parliamentary resolutions or governmental ordinances meant a freer traffic in the country and greater liberality towards strangers. The fundamental principles which had governed legal relations between town and country remained, indeed, unchanged. Thus the belief in the hurtfulness of forestalling, - which did nothing, it was thought, but send up prices, - passed over almost intact from the town statutes into the law of the land. Nevertheless, it was an essential change that a regulation that in 1400 rested on a confused congeries of local regulations, customs, privileges, and alliances, became, about 1600, a law of the land (Landrecht) which encompassed, with tolerable uniformity, the whole territory. Associated with the transformation described above was the loss of their staple privileges by all the small towns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They had employed them against competing towns in their neighbourhood regardless of the fact that they belonged to the same territory. As early