The “staple” was the town in which one commodity was mainly dealt in.  Every commodity in England had some particular town, where the principal market was for it; just as, with us, the boot and shoe market of the United States is supposed to be in Boston, the money market in New York, beef and hogs in Chicago.  In England, in the Middle Ages, they really provided that a certain trade should have its home in a certain town; not necessarily the only one, but very often in that one only.  Thus there were certain towns for the carrying on of the wool industry; you could only trade in wool in those towns.  The word “staple,” from meaning the town or market, got applied by an easy process to the commodity dealt in; so that when we now say that the Vermont staple is hay, we mean that this is the main crop raised in Vermont.  But the staple—­like the modern stockyard or exchange—­tended to monopoly and was abolished for this reason.

In 1340 and 1344 we find two picturesque statutes showing how the English were getting jealous of the Norman kings:  “The realm and people of England shall not be subject to the King or people of France”—­that is, that the customs and law of France, although their kings were French, were not to be applied to England.  Then in the royal edict that year when King Edward assumed the title, King of France, they caused him to put in a statement that no inference was to be drawn from his assuming the flower de luces in the first quarter of his arms.  The present English coat of arms is modern; instead of having the Norman leopards in the upper right hand and lower left hand, they then had the blue field and the fleurs de lys of France in the upper, and the Norman leopards only in the lower corner; and this lasted until the time of Charles I. In that part of Normandy which now still remains to the English crown, that is, in Guernsey and Jersey, you find to-day that only the leopards, not the arms of Great Britain, are in use.  But then again, in 1344, we have a statute (which, by the way, itself is written in French) complaining that the French king is trying to destroy the English language.  They were getting very jealous of anything French; the Normans had already been absorbed; modern England was beginning to appear.

(1344) And now comes a liberal statute, repealing those restrictions on wool, and allowing it to be exported; and another statute that “the Sea be open to all manner of merchants.”  Now this is the origin of the great English notion of freedom to trade with foreign parts; and was principally relied upon three centuries later in the great case of monopoly (7 State Trials) brought against the East India Company.  And England has assumed dominion of the sea ever since; “the boundaries of Great Britain are the high-water mark upon every other country.”