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International Posts of the Middle Ages
The earliest international posts of the Middle Ages were organized by the trade guilds for their members. Among the first was the Metzger Post organized by the guild of butchers in Germany in the twelfth century. One of the conditions attached to the privilege of setting up as a butcher was the possession of a horse and undertaking to carry mail. To the butcher’s guild is given the credit for having first used the curved horn to announce the arrival of mail – the posthorn which features in many of the emblems of the postal services of the world. The Metzger Post survived till the end of the sixteenth century, when it was absorbed into the official service of the Holy Roman Empire.
By 1301, the Florentine’s merchant’s guild, known as ‘The Draper’s Society’, had organized a postal service operating between Florence and the major trade fairs in France. Members of the guild paid a levy to their messenger, known as the scarcelliogere because of the saddle bag containing their letters.
Monastic posts, operating between the monasteries, abbeys and convents of the great religious orders and their head-quarters in Italy and France, were organized from the beginning of the twelfth century. The monastic messenger was known as a rotularius because of the roll of parchment containing letters. These rolls contained letters and replies and consisted of numerous pieces of parchment sewn end to end, as the roll circulated from monastery to monastery. Such a roll might take several months to go the rounds and would be extremely bulky by the end of the journey. The roll announcing the death of Abbess Matilda (daughter of William the Conqueror) in 1113 was over twenty metres long and had been to 252 religious houses. Monastic rolls of this type continued till the mid-sixteenth century.
Postal services operating between the medieval universities were organised from the beginning of the thirteenth century. The students were grouped into ‘nations’, each of which had its messenger maintaining regular communications with the appropriate country. Thus the English nation of Sorbonne despatched messengers to London, Oxford, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Bergen, Uppsala, Cracow, Hungary, Courland, Bohemia, Moravia, Pomerania, Silesia and the German principalities. The university posts differed from the other early systems in that they were usually permitted to carry private correspondence from the general public. The revenue derived from these posts defrayed the salaries of the teaching staff. These university posts survived in central Europe till the eighteenth century.
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