Ashrewd Italian visitor, writing of England more than four hundred years ago, remarked:—“There are scarcely any towns of importance in the kingdom excepting these two: Bristol, a seaport to the West, and Boraco, otherwise York, which is on the borders of Scotland; besides London to the South.” Now York was not a port, though it traded far afield through Hull; London was a port, but it was so much else that its story is confusingly complex; moreover it was not by the Thames but by the Severn that Englishmen first found a pathway to the New World at the end of the Middle Ages. Hence Bristol, then the second port in England, is of peculiar interest to the student of the still unwritten history of English commerce in the fifteenth century—a history unchronicled, but not unrecorded, and quite as significant as the wars abroad and the strifes at home which have too often earned for the century a character of futility.