The Company of Merchant Adventurers sounds like pirates. It was a cloth-exporting cartel with a monopoly and a very good lawyer.
Merchant House is a basement cocktail bar off Bow Lane with five hundred and thirty-nine reviews and a 4.6, and it is very good.
And the merchants of this city gave us one of the most misleading names in commercial history.
The Merchant Adventurers
The Company of Merchant Adventurers of London. It sounds like a licence to plunder.
It was a cloth-exporting monopoly.
The Adventurers exported undyed English broadcloth to the Low Countries – to Antwerp, and later to Hamburg – and they had a royal charter giving them the exclusive right to do it, and anybody else who tried was in breach of the law.
The adventure was the risk of the capital. To adventure, in the sixteenth century, meant to venture money – to put it at hazard in a trading voyage – and it had nothing whatsoever to do with swashbuckling.
They were not adventurers. They were a cartel with a lobbyist.
The cloth
Which was the entire English economy, and we wrote about it at the Golden Fleece.
England produced the finest wool in Europe. And for a long time we did exactly what a resource economy always does, which is to export the raw material and let somebody else make the money.
The Flemish wove it. The Italians finished it. The value was added abroad.
And the great national policy achievement of the later medieval period was to stop that – to build a domestic cloth industry, to export the woven cloth rather than the fleece, and to capture the profit here.
The Merchant Adventurers were the vehicle for it, and it worked, and English cloth became the dominant export of the country for centuries.
The Prat’s economic desk would simply note that this is industrial policy, executed by a monopoly, under royal protection, and that it is precisely the thing that this square mile now spends a great deal of time explaining is a bad idea.
The undyed part
Which is the detail that finishes it.
They exported the cloth undyed and unfinished – because the dyeing and the finishing were the skilled, high-value stages, and the Dutch had those skills and we did not.
There was an attempt, under James I, to force the export of finished cloth instead – the Cockayne Project – and it was a catastrophe. The Dutch simply refused to buy it, the English could not dye it well enough, the trade collapsed, and thousands of weavers were ruined.
An entire industry was wrecked by a policy designed to improve it, in about three years.
The bar
Genuinely excellent – small, dark, a serious list, and staff who know it.
Small room. Short list. Somebody who knows. Four hundred and seventy-five articles and it has never failed.
Verdict
Superb bar. Go, and enjoy a name that sounds like a pirate and means a cloth cartel.
The word adventure
It has drifted a long way and it went the opposite direction to forge.
An adventure was originally simply a thing that happens – a chance, an occurrence, from the Latin for that which is about to arrive. It carried no glamour at all.
Then it acquired the commercial sense: a venture, a risk, money put at hazard. Hence the Merchant Adventurers, and hence the venture capitalist, who is the same creature with a different suit.
And only much later did it become swashbuckling – and that shift is largely the work of nineteenth-century boys’ fiction, which took a word about financial risk and made it mean pirates.
A venture capitalist and a Merchant Adventurer are, etymologically, the same person. One of them has better branding.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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