This additional channel through which capital and credit could flow in and out of the country was rendered more indispensable by the gradual stoppage of trade with Central Europe through the Netherlands. But in the second decade of Elizabeth fresh hostilities arose between the Merchant Adventurers who had settled at Hamburg and the Hanseatic League with the result that the German merchants were in 1576 excluded from trading in Blackwell Hall, and later in 1580 deprived of all their remaining privileges in England, whilst the Adventurers lost their foothold in Hamburg.[18] At the very moment when the foreign channels for the export trade were thus being closed the native channels were being seriously narrowed through the action of the same vested interests. The monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers extended only to the Low Countries and Germany. The trade with Spain and the Baltic, with Venice and the Levant and Morocco had been free to all Englishmen and had been opened up by enterprising merchants, frequently from the lesser parts, who more truly deserved the title of Adventurers than the corporate monopolists of the markets nearer home. But between 1575 and 1588 each of these branches of foreign commerce was monopolised by a chartered syndicate formed after the model of the Merchant Adventurers and controlled largely by the same group of Londoners. Prices went up by leaps and bounds. “When every nation,” said Harrison, “was permitted to bring in her own commodities ... we had sugar for fourpence the pound that now ... is well worth half-a-crown, raisins and currants for a penny that now are bidden at sixpence. I do not deny that the navy of the land is in part maintained by their traffic, but so is the price of wares kept up now that they have gotten the only sale of things upon pretence of better futherance of the common wealth into their own hands.”[19] [Footnote 18: R. Ehrenberg, _Hamburg und England_, chap. iv.] [Footnote 19: W. Harrison, _Description of England_, Book III., chap. iv.] Far more serious, however, was the monopoly of the export trade in cloth. In 1586 the Privy Council was receiving alarming reports of the discontent in Somerset. The poorer sort, who were wont to live by spinning, carding and working of wool, were starving for lack of work and on the point of rebellion. An accidental fire at Bath was taken for a beacon lighted to proclaim a general rising. “This great matter of the lack of work,” writes Burleigh to Hatton, “not only of cloths, which presently is the greatest, but of all other commodities which are restrained from Spain, Portugal, Barbary, France, Flanders, Hamburg and the States, cannot but, in process of time, work a great change and dangerous issue to the people of the Realm, who heretofore in time of outward peace lived thereby, and without it must either perish for want or fall into violence to feed and fill their lewd appetites with open spoil of others, which is the root of rebellion.”