An Essay to the Restoring of our Decayed Trade. Wherein is Described, the Smuglers, Lawyers, and Officers Frauds &c. — Reading Notes

Statutes as Evidence

Trevers does not merely assert that laws are broken; he recites specific statutes by regnal year and chapter. For instance, he cites Stat. 4. H. 4. ca. 15 requiring merchants to bring wool, woolfells, leather, or lead to the Staple, and Stat. 17 E. 4. cap. 1 forcing foreign merchants to reinvest their English proceeds in domestic goods. He then lists over forty statutes concerning wool and clothing, from 25 Edw. 3. Cap. 4 to 39 Eliz. Stat. 11, referring readers to the statutes themselves. This reliance on legal citation gives the pamphlet the character of a legal brief, grounding its economic arguments in the authority of parliamentary acts.

The Smuggler as Traitor

Trevers reserves his harshest language for those who transport wool and fullers earth abroad. He writes that such offenders “destroy as much as in them lyes, the happiness of a whole Kingdome” and are worse than highway thieves, who only take “part of a particular mans Estate.” The smuggler, by contrast, brings “many thousands to great miseries and languishing deaths.” This moral framing elevates an economic crime to treason against the commonwealth. Trevers also notes that the penalty for transporting sheep or wool is felony, yet fears the severity of the law may deter informers, who are “cautelous” about touching a man’s life.

Dutch Competition and English Complacency

One of Trevers's twelve points addresses “the industry of the Dutch, and other Countries, whereby in a great measure they undermine our Trade.” Though the excerpts do not detail the Dutch methods, the mere inclusion of this point shows Trevers is aware of international competition. He contrasts English natural advantages—wool and fullers earth that no other country can match for good cloth—with the failure to capitalize on them. The pamphlet thus combines protectionist sentiment with a call to revive neglected statutes, suggesting that legal enforcement, not innovation, is the key to restoring trade.

Readers should approach this essay as a primary source on late-seventeenth-century economic thought, not as a complete history of the wool trade. Trevers's reliance on statute law and his targeting of specific abuses—smuggling, legal fraud, official corruption—make the pamphlet a focused polemic. The twelve-point structure and the dedication to a parliamentary speaker indicate an intended audience of policymakers. The excerpts leave unclear how Trevers proposed to balance enforcement with the risk of over-penalizing informers, a tension worth noting.

I keep returning to Trevers’s old rage about wool and fraud, and it puts me in mind of another shelf, where earnest students once mapped Venezuela for our traders. Both whisper of commerce as a fragile, hopeful thing. That latter volume, Venezuela, an economic report Presented by students of the School of Foreign Service, as an aid to the foreign trade of the United States — Context and Discussion, feels like a patient nephew to that cantankerous uncle.