Company of Merchant Adventurers

The Company of Merchant Adventurers, also known as the Merchant Adventurers of England, was an association of English cloth merchants that emerged by the fourteenth century and grew into one of medieval and early modern England's most powerful trading organizations, holding a near monopoly on the export of unfinished English woollen cloth to continental Europe. The company received royal charters from the fifteenth century onward confirming its privileges, and it operated through a fellowship structure that shifted its main continental trading base among cities including Antwerp, Emden, Stade and Hamburg as political and commercial circumstances changed, most notably relocating from Antwerp after that city's decline as a trading centre in the later sixteenth century. Rival to the older Company of Merchants of the Staple, which had controlled the wool trade, the Merchant Adventurers instead specialized in finished and semi-finished cloth and became closely associated with London's mercantile elite. Its monopoly privileges were curtailed by Parliament in 1689, and although fellowship structures persisted in a reduced form into the eighteenth century, the company's dominance over English overseas cloth trade had by then given way to newer joint-stock trading enterprises.