If instead of going to a fair he tried to sell, in a town, produce from another country or from a different part of England, he was in a position of even greater difficulty. In a strange town he was as much an alien as in a strange country, and there was scarcely any limit to the vexations and sufferings that on that account he would have to endure. In London, for example, alien merchants were forbidden to remain in the city for more than forty consecutive days. While they were there they might not sell anything by retail, nor have any business dealings at all with any but citizens. There was a long list of articles that they were altogether forbidden to buy. They might not stow their goods in houses or cellars; they had to sell within forty days all that they had brought with them; they were allowed neither to sell anything after that time, nor to take anything back with them. They were continually annoyed by the officers of the city.[140] All these disadvantages the Jew would have to endure to the full while competing with many powerful organisations which were engaged in foreign trade, and had, after long struggles, secured from the king special charters of privilege. Such were the companies of the merchants of Germany, who had their steelyard in London and their settlements at Boston and Lynn; the Flemings, who had their Hanse in London; the Gascons who enjoyed a charter; the Spaniards and Portuguese; the Florentines, most powerful of all, and the Venetians, whose enterprise was, at the beginning of the fourteenth century at any rate, carried on under the auspices of the Republic.[141] The last opportunity for the Jews was to take part in the export of English produce. English wool was the most important article of international trade in Western Europe. It was brought from monasteries and landholders chiefly by the rich and powerful companies of Flemish and Italian merchants, and sent to Flanders and Italy to be woven and dyed.[142] The Jews had, apparently, long taken some slight part in wholesale trade,[143] but the amount of capital that it required, and the power of the rivals who held the field, made it impossible for many of them to take to it immediately as a substitute for money-lending. Still it was the only form of enterprise in which they would not be at a hopeless disadvantage; and some Jews, those probably who had a large capital and were able to recall it from the borrowers, followed the example of the Italians, and made to landholders advances of money to be repaid in corn and wool.[144] VIII.--THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE JEWS.