During the fourteenth century the foreign trade of England had greatly increased; there was a constant intercourse with Flanders, with Bruges above all other towns, for the sale of home produce: wools especially, and woolfels, cheese, butter, tin, coal,[318] etc., with the {239} Rhine country, with Gascony, with Spain, for the purchase of wines;[319] with the Hanse towns, Lombardy, Venice, and the East. Unintelligent regulations constantly interfered, it is true, with this development, but so strong was the impulse that it went on steadily. One of the most persistent and most noxious of these regulations was the prohibition to export money or bullion, which governments were never tired of renewing.[320] English merchants were forbidden, when purchasing goods in foreign countries, to pay for them with money; they had to pay in kind, with wools, cheese and other home produce, which of course might or might not be found acceptable by the vendor. It was, in other words, forbidden to use money as a means of facilitating exchange, which is its very _raison d’être_, and people had to return to the primitive practice of _troc_, or exchange in kind. It had sometimes worse effects than that of impeding transactions; foreign merchants might, as once did the Flemings, show their appreciation of the rules imposed on their English purchasers by answering their proffer of wools and cheese with a beating and imprisonment until they would alter their laws or their minds. For {240} which treatment, English merchants sent doleful complaints to Parliament. In such cases retaliation upon Flemings in England might be demanded, but no thought was entertained, even by the injured party, of repealing laws considered as an indispensable safeguard for the kingdom.[321] Not much wiser were the rules applied to merchant shipping, made worse by constant change, a defect which was noticeable in every trade regulation of that time. Some are curious as being an attempt to establish the long lived, but more moderate rules devised by Cromwell in 1651: “Item, to increase the navy of England which is now greatly diminished, it is assented and accorded, that none of the king’s liege people do from henceforth ship any merchandize in going out or coming within the realm of England in any port, but only in ships of the king’s liegeance.” But the very next year this impossible statute was altered so as to practically annul it: “It is ordained and granted that the said ordinance only have place as long as ships of the said ligeance in the parts where the said merchants happen to dwell be found able and sufficient.”[322] The same unsteadiness of purpose was shown in almost every branch of the yet unbaptized science of political economy.