tive Englishmen, the Italian bankers were the
only source from which the government could secure ready money. When a
tax had been authorized by Parliament, but the product of it could be
obtained only after a year or more spent in its collection, the
Florentines were at hand to offer the money at once, receiving
security for repayment when the receipts from the tax should come in.
Government monopolies like the Cornwall tin mines were leased to them
for a lump sum; arrangements were made by which the bankers furnished
a certain amount of money each day during a campaign or a royal
progress. The immediate needs of an impecunious king were regularly
satisfied with money borrowed to be repaid some months afterward. The
equipment for all of the early expeditions of the Hundred Years' War
was obtained with money borrowed from the Florentines. Payments abroad
were also made by means of bills of exchange negotiated by the same
money-lenders. Direct payment of interest was forbidden by law, but
they seem to have been rewarded by valuable government concessions, by
the profits on exchange, and no doubt by the indirect payment of
interest, notwithstanding its illegality.

The Italian bankers evidently loaned to others besides the king, for
in 1327 the Knights Hospitallers in England repaid to the Society of
the Bardi L848 5_d._, and to the Peruzzi L551 12_s._ 11_d._ They
continued to loan freely to the king, till in 1348 he was indebted to
one company alone to the extent of more than L50,000, a sum equal in
modern value to about $3,000,000. The king now failed to repay what he
had promised, and the banking companies fell into great straits.
Defalcations having occurred in other countries also, some of them
failed, and after the middle of the century they never held so
conspicuous a place, though some Italians continued to act as bankers
and financiers through the remainder of the fourteenth and fifteenth
century. Many Italian merchants who were not bankers, especially
Venetians and Genoese, were settled in England, but their occupation
did not make them so conspicuous as the financiers of the same nation.

[Illustration: The Steelyard in the Seventeenth Century. (Herbert:
_History of London Livery Companies_.)]

The German or Hanse merchants had a settlement of their own in London,
known as the "Steelyard," "Gildhall of the Dutch," or the
"Easterling's House." They had similar establishments on a smaller
scale in Boston and Ly