Search

The death of old Richard in January 1482 had released his sons from tutelage and opened a new chapter in their lives. It meant much immediate business for Richard junior, who was charged with making the funeral arrangements in accordance with the terms of his father's will, setting up his tomb, hiring the ‘soul priest’ who was paid an annual salary of ten marks (£6 13s 4d) to ‘sing for the soul’ of the deceased, and superintending the making of the steeple and the altar of St Stephen in St Olave's church, for which his father had made bequests. He had also to take charge of his mother's household in Mark Lane, and of Bretts Place, Aveley, of which he now became owner. There were the usual legal questions about his father's estate to be settled. In March ‘John Croke of the Temple’ told Agnes that he had heard the Escheator of Essex say that he had to go into Essex to hold the inquisition post mortem into old Richard's lands, and there was a story that George's inherited place Mallins was held of the king, so Richard had to take advice of master Molenars [Molyneux] and explain that all the properties were in the name of feoffees. He gave the escheator 40s, ‘and so we be through with him for all matters and perils, but I must bring him at leisure a bill of the day a’ the decease of our father, our age, and of whom our land is holden, ‘at he may set it in the king's books’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before describing the Celys' domestic life in further detail, a chapter must be taken to sketch in the background of international affairs and the fortunes of the Staple trade in the years 1482 to 1485. March 1482 had seen further negotiations dragging on between England and France: ‘upon Palm Sunday the French embassy come into London, and they were worshipfully received with the mayor and all the crafts of London’, but their entertainment was to little real purpose. There had also occurred a disaster to one of the new English ultimate weapons: ‘at afternoon [of 27 March] was the great new gun of brass shot at Mile End, 'at was made at the Tower. And it brast all to pieces.’ On that same day the Duchess Mary of Burgundy died as the result of a hunting accident. It was not long before the Estates of Flanders declared that her widower, Maximilian, was unacceptable as regent for his son, who was in the custody of the people of Ghent. In May there was word in England that Thérouanne had been burnt by the French and that Ghent and Bruges had made their own peace treaties with France, and on 31 July William Cely sent the alarming news that the town of Aire is given up to the Frenchmen, and another castle within a Dutch mile of St Omers, by the means of treason … and the Frenchmen purposeth to be at Gravelines, and they be not letted [prevented] within this two days and less. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The situation of Calais as an outpost of English territory – the last survival of Edward III's gains during the earlier stages of the Hundred Years’ War – had two concomitants which directly affected the members of the Staple company in this period. One was the need to keep the town and its marches garrisoned and fortified against possible attack. The other was the anomalous position of its currency which, as described in a previous chapter, often diverged from the valuation of the same coins at either Bruges and Antwerp or London. The closure of the Calais mint in 1442 had meant that it was no longer possible to insist on the use of sterling coin in the town. But what the government no longer reaped from the recoinage of foreign bullion it could recoup, to some extent at least, by instituting special tariffs to its own advantage. There had been times in the past when the staplers’ stocks of wool were seized to meet the demands of the unpaid soldiers in Calais, or used to provide a loan to one or other side in the quarrels between York and Lancaster. By the agreement reached with Edward IV in 1466, a convenient means was found of discharging the king's own large debt to the Staple company, while at the same time he ensured regular payment of the wages of the Calais garrison. The company now became directly responsible for finding the wages and maintaining the defences of Calais out of the customs and subsidy taxes which were levied on the exports of its members, and which had long formed a substantial part of the crown's revenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Another most unfortunate lacuna in the extant correspondence means that we know little about the Celys’ social activities during the period between October 1484 and January 1487, save for such casual references in extracted accounts as one of their attendance at William Walgrave's marriage on 15 January 1486. Their business affairs are better documented, especially for the years 1486 and 1487, which saw their important new diversification into the shipping trade. Their acquisition, early in 1486, of the Breton fishing-vessel which they renamed the Margaret Cely and her subsequent operations, will have a chapter to themselves. Besides their new commitment as ship-owners, Richard and George started 1486 with a heavy investment in wool, to compensate for their scanty shipments in the previous year. In April they exported 31 sarplers and a poke and 2,194 fells. In addition, they made an exceptional deal with the Spaniard Juan Pardo. Pardo, from a family originating in Burgos, did business in Bruges and also London, where he was associated with Pedro De Salamanca, an associate in turn of Alvaro De Cisneros, who had now replaced Pedro Valladolid as the English agent of the Celys’ customer, De Lopez. There was a whole group of such Spanish (or rather Castilian) merchants, who are to be found in English records trading in a variety of commodities, in what appear to be ad hoc partnerships among themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those starting out in the wool-merchant's business, and many small or part-time staplers like William Maryon and John Cely, might deal almost exclusively in fells, that is the wool-bearing skins of slaughtered sheep. But about 72 percent of old Richard's trade was in shorn fleece-wool, and when Richard and George inherited his business they increased this proportion to some 81 percent. One essential in the training of a stapler, whether he dealt in fells or fleece-wool, was the ability to judge the quality of a fleece and to distinguish wools from different areas of England. The original author of one section in that compendium of earnest advice, the ‘Discourse of Weights and Merchandise’, had observed caustically: If a man buy Yorkshire wool [as] Burford wool or Leominster wool, he should know what he bought ere it were all uttered [i.e. ‘his customers would let him know about it before it was all off his hands’]. Therefore there is an old proverb: ‘he is no wise merchant that buy the cat in the sack’, that is to say, he that buyeth a ring and seeith it not, he trusteth another better than himself, which is against all manner wisdom. This obvious counsel was not always heeded. A case heard at Bruges in 1449 concerned the sale of six bales of English wool called Jorcxwouts wulle (wool from the Yorkshire wolds). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because sales on credit were a normal feature of the Staple trade at this period, new customers of good standing must often have brought letters of introduction, like that which John De Scermere presented to Richard Noneley. No year is given, but the letter was written by Lowis De Moy, the Celys’ ‘Lois De May’, who masquerades in the Public Record Office Index as ‘Allyn Weijlowijs de Moy’, because his valedictory clause, ‘By d'alhu vrij Lowys de Moy’, was misread and mistaken for the whole signature. ‘Lieven Huter Meere’ who is mentioned in the letter may conceivably be the ‘Levyn Demore’ whose name is written on a Cely note of sale to De Scermere (?) in 1478. Quite possibly Noneley sent De Scermere on to George Cely, so that his letter of accreditation came into the Cely collection, from which it was later separated. Translated from its original Flemish, it runs Honoured friend, I recommend me to you and let you know that the bringer of this is a drapier of Ghent. Lieven Huter Meere has prayed me to help him make his acquaintance with the merchants of the Staple of Calais. I understand, moreover, that he is a good young man, and that his business at home is such as to make him a very wealthy clothier, and if he wished to buy eight or ten sarplers of wool here, he should be in good credit. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the extant material from the Celys’ papers in 1480 concerns the routine business of buying and selling wool and fell. The widespread ‘death’ in 1479 had perhaps interfered with trade that year, and although Richard Cely senior had braved infection and bought 27 sarplers of wool in the Cotswolds in April 1479, he kept them in store in England until they were finally shipped to Calais on 23 March 1480. Part of the consignment, which old Richard had described as carefully classed or ‘good packing’, was quickly sold, but when George attended the Antwerp mart in June he received bitter complaints from the buyer, who said that a large proportion of the wool was wrongly designated. By that time Richard had shipped 17 sarplers of new stock, which George endeavoured to keep back until he had sold more of the defective shipment. This was still unsold by November, however, and the wool in the remaining 20 sarplers had to be reclassed and repacked, at the same time as 11 more sarplers had reached Calais with the autumn fleet. For both Cely brothers 1480 was a year of travel. George had a full round of seasonal marts to visit. Richard was assigned to the buying and packing of wool in the Cotswolds in the earlier part of the year, and then accompanied Sir John Weston's party on a number of official occasions, including an embassy to France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The affectionate relationship between the brothers Richard and George gives human warmth and colour to the family correspondence in its early years. Since George was the unsystematic hoarder who preserved these letters, his own side of the correspondence is poorly represented. So while the flavour of Richard's personality comes over directly from his letters to an intimate friend and brother, in the letters we see George chiefly through the eyes of his family and acquaintances, and he makes an appearance in his own right more often in his accounts and memoranda. That Richard was the elder of the two is clear from his position as his father's chief executor and from the inheritance pattern of his parents' properties. It could not be guessed from the brothers’ own correspondence, which was carried on in terms of complete equality. They also shared equally in the partnership which they began in 1476, and carried on until George's death in June 1489. But most of the extant letters from Richard to George were written between 1476 and 1482, because after the death of their father both brothers lived for most of the time in London or close to each other in Essex, and the correspondence then comes from William Cely, managing the Calais end of the business. The handwriting of the brothers is a good indication of the differences in their temperaments and personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The part played by fells – the wool-bearing skins – in the wool trade as a whole has been somewhat under-estimated by students. This neglect no doubt reflects the fact that fells formed a relatively small proportion of the total English wool export. But, equally, contemporary documents reveal little about fells by comparison with the amount of information available on fleece-wool. For example, there is no schedule of prices to be put beside those which survive for wool. It has recently been implied that the sale of fells at Calais was concentrated in the hands of a few ‘specialists’, while the great majority of staplers dealt almost exclusively in fleece-wool. It is true that, as far as the few surviving particular port books go to show, some men had a decided preference for fleece-wool, while a very much smaller number concentrated their trade on fells. Among the latter were several members of the Skinners’ Company, notably (in 1488) Roger Grantoft, John Pelet and John Pasmer, a merchant adventurer who had joined the Staple company three years earlier. Thomas Granger, George Cely's host, belongs in this category. But the vast majority of established staplers, like the Celys and later the Johnsons, habitually sold both kinds of ware, and even Granger and William Maryon occasionally added a few sacks of fleece-wool to their consignments of fells. An individual's shipments could vary widely from one shipping to another, and the proportions of fleece-wool and fell shipped to Calais also varied considerably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Robert Cely was really the eldest of the family, he did nothing to sustain the dignity and responsibilities of that position, and in time his brothers found themselves acting as nursemaids for Robert. Possibly he suffered from ill-health, certainly he compounded his troubles by weakness of character and a reluctance to accept advice. Robert seems to have been a full member of the Staple Fellowship by 1474 or 5, when Thomas Kesten sold six sarplers of wool for him. He was married – young, perhaps, by the usual standards of merchants of the time – by July 1474, when his father sent him a scolding letter: I understand nothing of receiving of wool, of no good rules of the Place [the staple headquarters], neither in a sale nor in other wise, for the which ye be slow in writing …. And say to George Cely I had no word from him of your coming to Calais, and your wife think ye should have writ to her. Ye forget yourself, what is for to do. Sloth is a great thing, and doth little good [betimes], there as good business doth ease. Since George was also at Calais for much of his time, he and Robert saw a good deal of each other, and in George's memoranda of this date, ‘my brother’ may refer to Robert and not, as it does later, to Richard. George noted that on 24 July 1474 he borrowed 9s from Robert, and he paid for a pair of spurs which Robert had bought from the stapler Ralph Lemington. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The staplers and their customers in the low countries both accounted in terms of pounds, shillings and pence (librae, solidi and denarii), the centuries-old system accommodating two schemes, one based on the unit of a dozen (twelve pence in the shilling), and the other on the unit of twenty (shillings to the pound). The duodecimal unit fitted neatly into its own ‘hundred’ of six-score, used for certain commodities in Britain, but not into the ‘small tale’ hundred of five-score, by which other goods were commonly sold, for example fells at Calais or cloth when priced by the hundred ells. The great advantage of the duodecimal unit was that, unlike the score or the hundred of five-score, it was readily divisible by three. Some of this advantage of a duodecimal shilling was lost in England, because its constituent unit, the penny, was divisible in practice only into a half (the halfpenny, in Latin obolus, abbreviated ob.), and a quarter (the farthing, Latin quadrans). The difficulties caused by this were demonstrated in Chapter 6, when calculations of the custom and subsidy due on fells were examined. In the low countries, on the other hand, the penny was subdivided conveniently into 24 mites, or three units of account named in Flemish the engelsc or ingelsche and in French esterlin, ‘sterling’. The awkwardness of the twenty-shilling pound was mitigated by the existence of another ancient unit, the mark, which expressed two-thirds of a pound, whether weight or money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometime around the mid-fifteenth century the three Cely boys, Robert, Richard and George, were born to an established wool-merchant, Richard Cely senior, and his wife Agnes. The elder Richard was a worshipful citizen of London, proud to be designated ‘merchant of the Fellowship of the Staple at Calais’. He was, it seems, in a minority among the larger exporters of raw wool, in that the wool trade constituted his main business interest. Many of the leading staplers of the period were also merchant adventurers, importing and exporting a variety of other goods in addition to their trade at the Calais wool staple, the only authorized point at which good quality English wool might be sold abroad. But although Richard was not one of the richest or most influential men in City politics, by the time that the Cely papers begin, about 1473, he was a man of substance, with a town-house in a desirable area of London, an estate in Essex, and other land in Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, and was enjoying the seniority in his Company which past office-holding and long continuance conferred. There can be little doubt that merchants (that is, men engaged in wholesale trade) thought of themselves as forming a distinct class in society, however shifting the outer edges of the stratum, however realistic might be their hopes of marrying daughters into a higher class and of making their sons into landed gentlemen, well-beneficed clergy, or rich and influential lawyers, and however close the threat of the sickness, unlucky venture or political reversal which could overturn a man's fortunes and send him and his children into penury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]