Trade

With Manoralism, each manor is self sufficient and thus doesn’t need to go out, not that the serfs had permission anyway. But when the lords started to kick people out, people are now making contact and start trading. What do they trade? Food! With all those food surpluses, they can make money out of them. There’s even a new class now; merchants.

One of the things that come out of trade are Fair Days. Fair Days are days where groups of merchants from different cities cluster together and exchange goods. Bartering is currently still in use but people are transitioning to a money economy now because at first, bartering is easy in the manor. But once you get over 100 goods, it gets way complicated.

Trade by sea is thriving but comes with risks. If Merchant Merlin loads all his goods into a ship, then the ship sinks or gets robbed by pirates the goods are lost. Merchant Merlin has a bad rest of his life. The truth is that overland trade is safer due to the fact that the only real hazard is bandits.

Thanks to the risks involved, the first insurance company is born. A whole new profession is created. The process is: Merchant Merlin joins a group of nine merchants. The ten of them buys ten ships. Merchant Merlin and his nine friends put 10% of their cargo on each ship. That way, if one ship sinks, 90% of their cargo is still there. And the chance of all ten ships sinking in a freak storm is highly unlikely.

Overland trade is the same. Ten people traveling together are safer than one. But the larger the group, the slower they travel. The average group can travel for only 25 miles a day, that isn’t enough to make it from one city to the next. To solve this, inns and rest stops are built. There, merchants can stop, get dinner, have their horses fed, and some sleep before they head out again.

The Hanseatic League, an alliance of trading cities and guilds, was also a result of trade. The league established a trade monopoly in the North Sea.