the ocean. Britain (or rather England) is full of towns and villages. It has no vines, and but little fruit, but it abounds in corn, honey, and wool from which the natives make great quantities of cloth. London, the capital, may be preferred to every city of the West for population, opulence, and luxury. It is seated on the river Thames, which, by the advantage of the tide, daily receives and despatches trading vessels from and to various countries."[1]
The establishment of Banks, which now began to take place in various parts of Europe, affords an unquestionable indication of the general extension of commercial transactions. Bills of exchange, as already noted, had been in use from the early part of the thirteenth century; and, at least by the beginning of the fifteenth, if not earlier, the form in which they were drawn out, and the usages observed respecting their negotiation and non-payment, had come to be nearly the same as at the present day.[2] Although, however, the origin of the Bank of Venice is carried back to the institution of the Camera degl' Imprestiti (or Chamber of Loans), being an office for the payment of the annual interest on the debts of the republic, in 1171, the Taula de Cambi (or Table of Exchange) opened at Barcelona, by the magistrates of that city, in 1401, is generally considered to have been the earliest European establishment properly of the nature of what is now called a bank. The Bank of Genoa originated in the establishment, in the year 1407, of the Chamber of St. George, which at first, however, was merely an office for the management of the debts of the republic, similar to the Venetian Chamber of Loans.
The false notions on the subject of money to which we had occasion to advert in the preceding Chapter, as hav-
- ↑ Macpherson, i. 611. The whole of the information respecting these countries of the West, preserved by Chalcondyles, has been collected and woven into a spirited sketch by Gibbon, Decline and Fall of Rom. Emp. ch. 66.
- ↑ Copies are given by Capmany, in his History of Barcelona, of two bills of Exchange, dated in the year 1404, which it is believed are the oldest that have been preserved.
