School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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Subject: history × Type: PhD thesis × Start date: 2008 × End date: 2008 × Author: DALTON, HEATHER GAYE ×

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    Roger Barlow: Tudor trade and the Atlantic world
    DALTON, HEATHER GAYE ( 2008)
    This thesis is about Roger Barlow. He was born near Colchester, sometime between 1480 and 1496, into a family with connections to the woollen cloth trade, and he died in Pembrokeshire in 1553. Barlow lived and traded in Seville during the 1520s as a member of a community of English merchants who prospered there. When Sebastian Cabot sailed from Seville in search of a route to the Moluccas or Spice Islands, Barlow accompanied him and joined in his exploration of the Rio de la Plata. He returned to Castile in late 1528 before returning to England around 1530 and marrying the daughter of a Bristol merchant. In the mid 1530s, Barlow moved to Pembrokeshire and cooperated with his brothers to further the Crown's policy for Wales while building up an estate around the dissolved commandery of the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem at Slebech. He retained his links with trading networks in London and Bristol and in 1541 presented the king with a cosmography, subsequently titled A Brief Summe of Geographie, and a proposal, initially developed with fellow merchant, Robert Thorne. The crux of the proposal was that the English should undertake exploratory voyages to establish a trade route to the East via the Northwest Passage. As Barlow had inserted his personal account of the Rio de la Plata, including a description of a Tupi cannibal feast, into his cosmography, this would have been the first personal account of the Americas to appear in English, had Henry supported its publication. The contention of this thesis is that Roger Barlow's story is significant because it reveals the complex and influential role of guilds and informal merchant networks during the Henrician period, the nature of England's trading relationship with Spain and its Atlantic settlements before the Reformation, and the reactions of merchants, power brokers and monarchs to the New World during the first half of the sixteenth century. As well as connecting a myriad of geographical locations, Barlow's story links the mercantile world with that of the landed gentry and the clergy at a time when both social structures and forms of belief were being challenged. Barlow accumulated a knowledge of the world and its opportunities that was extraordinary for an Englishman in the first half of the sixteenth century. Such knowledge was the bedrock of the exploration, settlement, colonization and mercantile developments that gained momentum in the century that followed.