Excerpt from The Law of Bills, Notes, and Cheques Before answering that question it will be well to recall the state of things existing in England during, let us say, the later period of the Hanseatic League. London and the other commercial towns of England were full of foreign merchants engaged there in trade. These for eigners not only trained the fine hand of England to its cunning in commerce, but what is more to the present purpose, they brought with them the usages of business on the continent whence they had come. The custom of merchants was a foreign importation into England. That is sufficient to explain its unlikeness to the great domestic product, - the common law. What these foreign merchants brought to England in the way of peculiar usage, so far as the present subject is concerned, was negotiability and grace; they brought bills of exchange, and with those instruments, as part and parcel of them, the property of circulation and a short extension of time in ease of the payor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.