se means of
existence were less open to suspicion. Indeed, we know that the great
proprietors, lay or ecclesiastical, employed certain of their serfs or
of their _ministeriales_ in a sporadic commerce of which we have already
mentioned above the principal features. They commissioned them to buy at
neighboring markets the necessary commodities or to transport to places
of sale the occasional surplus of their grain or their wine. Here too we
discover no trace of capitalism. We merely find ourselves in the
presence of hereditary servants performing gratuitous service, entirely
analogous to military service.

Nevertheless commercial intercourse produced even then, in certain
places particularly favored by their geographic situation, groups of
some importance. We find them along the sea-coast--Marseilles, Rouen,
Quentovic--or on the banks of the rivers, especially in those places
where a Roman road crosses the stream, as at Maastricht on the Meuse or
at Valenciennes on the Scheldt. We are to think of these _portus_ as
wharves for merchandise and as winter quarters for boats and boatmen.
They differ very distinctly from the towns of the following period. No
walls surround them; the buildings which are springing up seem to be
scarcely more than wooden sheds, and the population which is found there
is a floating population, destitute of all privileges and forming a
striking contrast to the bourgeoisie of the future. No organization
seems to have bound together the adventurers and the voyagers of these
_portus_. Doubtless it is possible, it is even probable, that a certain
number of individuals, profiting by circumstance, may have little by
little devoted themselves to trade in a regular fashion and have begun
by the ninth century to form the nucleus of a group of professional
traders. But we have too little information to enable us to speak with
any precision.

The operations of credit follow much the same course. We cannot doubt
that loans had been employed in the Carolingian period, and the Church
as well as the State had occupied itself in combating their abuses.[10]
But it would be a manifest exaggeration to deduce from this the
existence of even a rudimentary capitalistic economy. Everything
indicates that the loans which we are considering here were only
occasional loans, of usurious nature, to which people who had met with
some catastrophe, such as war, a fire, or a poor harvest, were forced to
have recourse temporaril