Evan T Jones

Illicit business: accounting for smuggling in mid‐sixteenth‐century Bristol

S muggling has long been recognized as ‘one of the most serious, and certainly most baffling problems’ to confront the student of Britain’s pre-nineteenth-century commercial history. The problem arises because, while the size, nature, and direction of the nation’s legitimate trade can be determined through official commercial records, it is not clear to what extent the statistics derived from these sources represent a reliable indicator of the nation’s overall trade. The difficulty is that during the centuries between the first imposition of wool duties in 1275 and the liberalization of trade in the mid-nineteenth century, high tariffs and prohibitions created many incentives for merchants to avoid the legitimate avenues of commerce. The result, as contemporaries recognized, was that smuggling could, at least in some commodities, account for the bulk of total trade. While most studies of the subject have concentrated on the eighteenth century, large-scale smuggling was not a new development in that period. Indeed, on the basis of official expressions of concern in the activity, it would appear that a substantial illicit trade had been in existence since at least the mid-sixteenth century, when the Crown began to impose greater restrictions and higher duties on external trade. Thereafter the illicit trade flourished on the back of trading prohibitions, quasi-legal royal impositions, and rising taxes on both internal and external trade. In the end, despite the development of the revenue service into the largest and most powerful arm of the civil state, all attempts to crush the illicit trade failed and its decline from the 1840s had more to do with the passage of free trade legislation than the actions of the revenue men. For those interested in Britain’s economic development in the period

William Weston: early voyager to the New World: William Weston: early voyager to the New World

The Bristol merchant William Weston was the first known Englishman to lead an expedition to North America. Analysis of two important document finds suggests that Weston was an early supporter of the Venetian explorer John Cabot. A monetary reward demonstrates Henry VII’s satisfaction with the outcome of Weston’s voyage of c.1499 and the king’s continuing commitment to transatlantic discovery after Cabot’s presumed disappearance. Weston’s career is examined in detail to throw light on the nature and motivation of England’s earliest Atlantic explorers. Before 2008 William Weston, merchant of Bristol, was no more than a footnote to Bristol’s overseas trade. He emerged from obscurity as a result of an article in this journal on the unpublished research claims of Dr. Alwyn Ruddock (d. 2005), a former Reader at Birkbeck College and the leading authority on the voyages of discovery launched from Bristol to North America from c.1470–1508.1 Two things made the article unusual and went on to capture the public’s imagination. First, Ruddock’s assertions were astounding. She claimed to have found evidence that Bristol men had reached North America prior to John Cabot’s famous 1497 expedition, which initiated Europe’s exploration and settlement of the northern continent. Ruddock also argued for a previously unknown religious colony allegedly established in Newfoundland in 1498; and she offered reasons to believe that the Bristol explorers had charted much of the eastern seaboard of North America by 1500, long before those coasts were investigated by Juan Ponce de Leon (1513–21) and Giovanni da Verrazzano (1524). Second, the strangeness of Ruddock’s actions was enthralling. She failed to publish finds made over a forty-year period and then ordered the destruction of those discoveries in her will. It seemed incredible that an academic could unearth such amazing things and then seek to keep them secret. In combination, these two factors ensured that both the initial article and the follow-up research published in Historical Research received international press coverage.2 It also led to an unusually large 1 E. T. Jones, ‘Alwyn Ruddock: “John Cabot and the discovery of America”’, Hist. Research, lxxxi (2008), 224–54. Ruddock’s ideas had survived as a book synopsis in the archives of Exeter University Press. 2 Examples of the press coverage cited: [Accessed 7 Feb. 2017]. * Research for this article was undertaken as part of The Cabot Project, 2009–. From 2009–16 the project was funded by the University of Bristol, through the Arts Faculty Research Director’s Fund (2009–10), the British Academy, SG100194 (2010–11), and Gretchen Bauta, a private Canadian benefactor (2011–16), who also provided the cost of making this article freely available to the public. We would like to thank Francesco Guidi Bruscoli (University of Florence), Stuart Jenks (University of Erlangen), Dr. Jeff Reed and the late Peter Pope (Memorial University of Newfoundland), for reading and commenting on drafts of this article. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. William Weston: early voyager to the New World 629 Historical Research, vol. 91, no. 254 (November 2018)