ABSTRACT
Alexandra Johnston has sketched one scenario in her paper on 'Traders and Playmakers' in the proceedings of the 1991 London conference on 'England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages'. She stresses the number of New York mercers who were actively engaged in trade or correspondence overseas, and outlines the contemporary dramatic and processional activity in New York and the Low Countries. Economically, as is well known, patterns of trade shifted dramatically in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the main commodity was raw wool, exported largely by alien merchants for conversion into cloth in the cities of Flanders and Brabant. Alien merchants had, if they wished to trade in their own right, to take out the freedom of the city. In 1391 the customers of Hull record him, as an alien, exporting raw wool and calf's hides.
