Epstein, Mordecai: The English Levant Company: its foundation and its history to 1640 (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd, 1908)

260 the early history of

those trades and with your suppliants as of
late it hath done with the trade of Barbary
and those merchants which some persons of
like disposition to these enforcing into that
trade and so everlaying the same have brought
our English cloth there into contempt and
advanced their dross and base sugar to high
price and so not only spoiled and overthrew
that trade but have undone themselves and
many an honest merchant, old traders, whose
living before it was. Assuredly no better
success is to be expected in this trade if more
should be admitted, for in very truth, the
one half of us already traders are too many
and in number sufficient to maintain that
trade with as much of the commodity of this
realm as possibly can there be vented, as the
present time proveth, having now at this
instant in those parts of English commodities
more than by any means sufficient vent can
be found for the same. So if more or others
should be permitted to deal in that trade an
oppression and confusion of the same must
needs follow. The damage whereof should
specially redound to your suppliants who have
been at so great a charge in preferring the