Ages knew.

Fortunately we possess certain narratives which enable us to support
this thesis with concrete examples. It will suffice to cite here the
most characteristic of them, the biography of St. Godric of
Finchale.[12]

He was born of poor peasants in Lincolnshire, toward the end of the
eleventh century, and from infancy was forced to tax his ingenuity to
find the means of livelihood. Like many other unfortunates of all times,
he at first walked the beaches on the outlook for wreckage cast up by
the sea. Then we see him, perhaps by reason of some fortunate find,
setting up as a peddler and travelling through the country with a little
pack of goods (_cum mercibus minutis_). At length he gathers together a
small sum, and one fine day joins a troop of town merchants whom he has
met in the course of his wanderings. Thenceforward he goes with his
companions from market to market, from fair to fair, from town to town.
Having thus become a professional merchant, he rapidly gains a
sufficient sum to enable him to associate himself with other merchants,
charter a boat with them, and engage in the coasting trade along the
shores of England, Scotland, Denmark, and Flanders. The company is
highly successful. Its operations consist in carrying to a foreign
country goods which it knows to be uncommon there, in selling them there
at a high price, and acquiring in exchange various merchandise which it
takes pains to dispose of in the places where the demand for them is
greatest and where it can consequently make the greatest gains. At the
end of some years this prudent practice of buying cheap and selling dear
has made of Godric, and doubtless of his associates, a man of important
wealth. Then, touched by divine grace, he suddenly renounces his
fortune, gives his goods to the poor, and becomes a monk.

The story of Godric, if one omits its pious conclusion, must have been
that of many others. It shows us, with perfect clearness, how a man
beginning with nothing might in a relatively short time amass a
considerable capital. Our adventurer must have been favored by
circumstances and chance. But the secret of his success, and the
contemporary biographer to whom we owe the story insists strongly upon
it, is intelligence.[13] Godric in fact shows himself a calculator, I
might even say a speculator. He has in a high degree the feeling, and it
is much more developed among minds without culture than is usually
thought, for what is prac