Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300-1525

The officers of medieval Colchester were obliged to control trade to a variety of different ends. One set of rules, some of them established by statute law, was designed to protect urban consumers from monopolistic practices and to ensure that victuallers earned only conventional rates of profit. But the attitude of the authorities to middlemen and processors of food and drink could not be antagonistic. These groups made up a large sector of urban society, and their reasonable interests had to be safeguarded; brewing alone involved perhaps one sixth of all borough households, including some of the most influential. Rules to limit the profits of middlemen did not derive from hostility to hucksters as such. Other regulations, in fact, were intended to give privileges to burgesses as traders and to protect their livelihood against competition from non-burgesses. In this context the borough community acted like a gild to look after the interests of its members. Only burgesses could set up as craftsmen in the borough, for example, so that their employment was to some extent protected against external competition. The burgesses' jealousy was directed chiefly against outsiders, whose interests were systematically disregarded by urban regulations, sometimes with the connivance of statute law.