First appearing on a seal in 1425, their heraldic emblem is the Mercer’s Maiden, and to this day London buildings owned by the Mercers’ Company sport her sign, although some maidens are newly installed. A map of their whereabouts can be found on www.mercers.co.uk/mercers-maiden-london.
Over the years, the term mercer came to mean anyone who imported or traded in goods made of material, as well as material itself, so a merchant could be either a wholesaler selling to smaller shops or a mere shopkeeper (see Chapter 5).
Of course, London was not the only mercantile port. Bristol, Liverpool and Southampton were other major centres; Bristol and Liverpool were associated with the less appealing aspect of the merchant trade – slavery. The slave triangle saw goods such as guns and brandy taken to Africa and exchanged for slaves sold for rum and sugar in the West Indies and North America and brought back to England.
An interesting if eccentric website by Dan Byrnes in Australia and Ken Cozens in London can be found at www.merchantnetworks.com.au. The website includes, among other miscellanea: timelines, names of seventeenth century merchants, a convict contractor list to Australia and an extensive bibliography.
Bristol was important from the sixteenth century with its Society of Merchant Venturers established in 1552, whose members were mostly also members of Bristol Corporation. For background information, see www.portcities.org.uk, also covering Hartlepool, Southampton, Bristol, Liverpool and London. For ancestors trading from such seaports, you must search record offices and biographical records are sparse.
Merchants buy and sell. Because so much merchandise originated from abroad, tea, coffee, tobacco and snuff for instance, merchants needed access to a ship and many of them, certainly before 1818 (Book of Trades), owned their own. A man’s fortune was lost and won through the vagaries of the ocean; a ship lost at sea heralded ruin, a ship arriving in harbour untold wealth. In 1500, London was not among the ten largest cities in the world (Oxford Encyclopaedia of Economic History, ed. Joel Mokyr), but by 1814 it was the world’s largest port and the gateway to Britain’s developing empire, with huge numbers relying on it for their livelihood.
By 1833, the transatlantic crossing generally took twenty-two days. Five years later, steamship The Great Western sailed from Bristol to New York taking just fourteen days and twelve hours to complete the passage. In 1840, The Britannia crossed the Atlantic in eleven days and four hours. Ships sailing to Australia routinely took seventeen weeks to get there; a seven-month round trip. Compare this to the early navigators who spent months, if not years, at sea. The current transatlantic record is three days, ten hours and forty minutes (1952) by American ocean liner United States. Sailing east, before the Suez Canal opened in 1869, ships navigated the notorious Cape of Good Hope at the tip of South Africa. The Panama Canal opened in 1914.
The LMA has plenty of information about shipping, tonnage and taxes financed by London docks. For background information on shipping lines around the world, largely from the nineteenth century but including a few earlier companies including merchants, the World Ship Society at http://worldshipsociety.org has books on, for example, the St George Steam Packet Line 1821–43 and East India Company ships (CD only), among others. Based in Chatham, their archives are not open to the public; they have minimal information on individual voyages and nothing on ship personnel.
The East India Company became one of the most powerful companies in the world, even operating its own army. Set up in 1600 by a small group of London merchants, its Royal Charter was bestowed by Queen Elizabeth I. Ships acquired exotic fabrics from abroad and either brought them back to England or took them further east, trading with spices to import into Britain with the fabrics. Dissolved in 1858, its records are held at the British Library in the India Office archives. The index to the records can be searched online via the British Library website at www.bl.uk. The pages specific to the East India Office and family history are found on www.bl.uk/catalogues/iofhs.shtml.
FindMyPast has baptisms, marriages, burials, wills, pensions, military and civil career information and the India Office Family History Search has biographical information about the British and Europeans in India between 1600 and 1947. Remember, most were not involved specifically in trade and craft, although there is some information about the merchants. For merchants living prior to census records, the first stop is the record office. Another line of enquiry is trade directories, such as Pigot’s, the Post Office and Kelly’s.
For anyone with an ancestor who was a citizen and mercer in the City of London, www.londonroll.org is a searchable database with information about apprentices for 1339–1900. Names, dates and master’s name are given.
A practical but now outdated pavement feature in Georgian and Victorian towns and cities such as Bristol, Brighton, Dublin and London (especially Bloomsbury) is the presence of circular metal plates accessing the cellar. These ensured coal was poured directly into the basement rather than disturbing the residents – in this case, the servants. Unfortunately, coal-holes are rapidly disappearing as pavements are replaced and the function is becoming obsolete. Amongst the most prolific coal-hole cover manufacturers were Hayward Brothers, whose covers occur across cities, especially Bristol and London. Originally glaziers and glass cutters, they bought the business of ironmonger and coal-hole manufacturer Robert Henley in 1848, eventually building their own foundry. An innovative feature of their coal-hole was glass panels inserted into the cover to make the cellar slightly less gloomy. Their history 1783–1953 can be found in Years of Reflection on http://glassian.org/Prism/Hayward/YOR/dj.html. This chronicle includes their coat of arms and family tree, together with a fascinating history of how events such as the Boer War affected their business.