=47. The “foreign” trade of this period was that between towns, even in the same country.=—The student who has begun the history of commerce with the notion, as common as it is erroneous, that the foreign trade of a country is more important than its internal trade, and who is impatient to arrive at the description of this foreign trade, will be disappointed to learn that even in the latter part of the Middle Ages it scarcely existed in the modern sense. We mean now by foreign trade that between states—between the United States and Germany, for example. In the manorial period, as has been suggested, foreign trade was rather that which existed between manors. In the period under discussion it was that which existed between towns. The towns existing inside the boundaries of a modern European country did not, it is true, differ as much among themselves, in their products, as they differed, taking them altogether, from the towns of another country. But the expense of transportation restricted most trade still to a comparatively small radius, and the town, rather than the country, was the natural trading unit. The radius of profitable trade, for most articles, was so small that an English town would have its most important commercial relations with the other English towns rather than with the towns of foreign countries. The town, moreover, was the unit for regulating trade. Each town would have its own customs tariff, and to a merchant of London it made little difference whether he traded with Southampton or with Paris; national regulation was less important than municipal. Climatic and historical influences, it is true, made a clearly marked distinction between the great sections of Europe, the North and the South, the East and the West, and we shall have to take up some of these sections in detail; but we shall use our time most effectively by spending it not on the features of trade in the different modern countries considered separately, but on the characteristics of trade common to all the advanced countries. =48. Small size of the medieval towns.=—A point deserving special emphasis in the description of the medieval town is this, that though the town comprised practically all the mercantile and manufacturing population of a country, and though it marked a tremendous advance over the village, yet the town was a very small affair when measured by modern standards. In England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the average size of the first class of towns was probably below 5,000 inhabitants; few had more than 10,000 and many had less than 1,000. On the Continent, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, even celebrated cities like Nuremberg and Strassburg had not over 20,000 inhabitants. Frankfort on the Main had scarcely 10,000, and other cities which played a great part in economic and political history had even less.