Company of the Merchant Adventurers

The Company of Merchant Adventurers of London brought together London's leading overseas merchants in a regulated company in the early 15th century, in the nature of a guild. Its members' main business was the export of cloth, especially white (undyed) broadcloth. This enabled them to import a large range of foreign goods.

In the early seventeenth century, similar groups of investors were formed to develop overseas trade and colonies in the New World: the London Company of Adventurers (which later split into the Virginia Company settling Jamestown and the Chesapeake Bay area, and the Plymouth Company, which settled New England). The Company of Adventurers in Canada sent forces during the Thirty Years War that achieved the surrender of Quebec in 1629.

The company received its royal charter from King Henry IV in 1407, but its roots may go back to the Fraternity of St. Thomas of Canterbury. It claimed to have liberties existing as early as 1216. The Duke of Brabant granted privileges and in return promised no fees to trading merchants. The company was chiefly chartered to the English merchants at Antwerp in 1305. This body may have included the Staplers, who exported raw wool, as well as the Merchant Adventurers. Henry IV's charter was in favor of the English merchants dwelling in Holland, Zeeland, Brabant, and Flanders. Other groups of merchants traded to different parts of northern Europe, including merchants dwelling in Prussia, Sconce, Sound, and the Hanse (whose election of a governor was approved by Richard II of England in 1391), and the English Merchants in Norway, Sweden and Denmark (who received a charter in 1408).

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