Merchant travellers seem, in general, to have congregated together in parties or small caravans, both for companionship and as a measure of mutual defence against robbers. In such cases they probably carried tents with them, and formed little encampments at night, like the pedlars and itinerant dealers in later times. Men who travelled alone were exposed to other dangers besides that of robbery; for a solitary wanderer was always looked upon with suspicion, and he was in danger himself of being taken for a thief. He was compelled, therefore, by his own interest and by the law of the land, to show that he had no wish to avoid observation; one of the earlier Anglo-Saxon codes of laws, that of king Wihtræd, directed that “if a man come from afar, or a stranger go out of the high way, and he then neither shout nor blow a horn, he is to be accounted a thief, either to be slain, or to be redeemed.”
So prevalent, indeed, was theft and unfair dealing among our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, and so much litigation and unjust persecution arose from disputed claims to property which had been, or was pretended to have been, purchased, that it was made illegal to buy or sell without witnesses. It would be easy to multiply examples of robbery and plunder from Anglo-Saxon writers; but I will only state that, according to the Ely history, some merchants from Ireland, having come to Cambridge in the time of king Edgar, to offer their wares for sale, perhaps at the annual festivities of the Beorna-wyl, mentioned above, a _priest_ of the place was guilty of stealing a part of their merchandise. We know but little of the trades and forms of commercial dealings of the Anglo-Saxons; but we may take our leave of the period of which we have been hitherto treating, with a few figures relating to money matters, from the Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the Psalms (MS. Harl. No. 603). The cut No. 52 represents, apparently, a man in the market, or at the gates of a city, taking toll for merchandise. The scales are for weighing, not the merchandise, but the money. The word _pund_, or pound, implies that the money was reckoned by weight; and the word _mancus_, another term for a certain sum of money, is also considered to have been a weight. Anglo-Saxon writings frequently speak of money as given by weight. Our cut No. 53 is a representation of the merchant, or the toll-taker, seated before his account book, with his scales hanging to the desk. In the first of these cuts, a man holds the bag or purse, in which the money received for toll or merchandise is deposited. The cut No. 54 represents the receiver pouring the money out of his bag into the _cyst_, or chest, in which it is to be locked up and kept in his treasury. It is hardly necessary to say that there were no banking-houses among the Anglo-Saxons. The chest, or coffer, in which people kept their money and other valuables, appears to have formed part of the furniture of the chamber, as being the most private apartment; and it may be remarked that a rich man’s wealth usually consisted much more in jewels and valuable plate than in money.