The article covers installing the package, setting up accounts and syncing the Ethereum blockchain. An important component is to build a way for a ship to associate Ethereum public keys with their ID so it can share its wallet address to peers when asked for. Commerce with Scandinavian countries was evidently of much importance to Lynn, and the efforts to capture a share in trade with Iceland jeopardised this. All these initiatives were aimed not merely at regulating commerce but at ensuring the borough had its cut of the profits therefrom. People should remain careful from such strategies which are claimed to be the best and providing 100% profits. Its budget during the thirteenth century, when courts and their profits were not in borough hands, was founded upon local taxations mentioned above; they were assessed only on moveables perhaps only on commercial goods owned and typically at the rate of between 3d. and 12d. per £. It was essentially the commercial face of the borough, which must have become redundant in some regards as the borough increasingly took control (as reflected in the custumal) of commercial matters.
While such complaints are not entirely to be taken at face value, being devices to seek lower taxation or additional privileges (such as being made a staple town), evidence presented above suggests that the borough may not have been keeping its head above water, financially. It was probably also a convenient port from which to ship wool to the staple towns of Calais and Middelburg. Lynn also faced some very heavy costs in the 1360s and ’70s, largely due to the war with France; there were huge expenditures on the building of a ship and a barge for royal expeditions, the town had to contribute towards war aids, and money had to be pumped into upgrading the town defences. None of the exported cloth was produced in Lynn itself; there does not seem to have been any real effort to introduce manufacturing industries into the town, other than to serve local needs.
A general decline in court business (and therefore borough income from it) in the third quarter of the century hints at a more general economic decline in the town, but efforts were made towards the end of the century to systematize revenue collection better, through chamberlains and Olymp – Full Posting, sergeants. Nor do craft gilds have a very conspicuous role in the medieval history of the town, although we know of a number of socio-religious gilds, some of which appear to have had a craft basis. In 1325 it resurfaced in its aspect of a socio-religious association the Corpus Christi Gild whose alderman had to account before bailiffs and portmen for the property and debts of the fraternity, and which retained a connection with St. Mary Tower. By this period one of the functions of the gild was to present an annual pageant on Corpus Christi day, financed by the borough; groups of craft gilds were each assigned a specific tableau to represent, while the different orders of friars, as well as the Priors of the two local priories and the bailiffs and portmen all had particular role to play. In fact, judging from the financial account of the Gild for 1478/79, the celebrations on Corpus Christi day including a large feast may have been the sole significant function of the Merchant Gild; all burgesses, both intrinsic and foreign, were expected to contribute 4d a quarter towards it and all could attend the feast with their wives and bring a guest for an extra 4d. The income from the monopoly on sale of certain stones was now assigned to hiring a chaplain to pray for gild brethren.
Cloth began to appear among exports from the thirteenth century and became an increasingly important commodity in the fifteenth, but its trade was dominated not by local merchants but rather by the Merchant Adventurers (founded in London, with branches in Ipswich and other towns) and, by the end of the Middle Ages, the merchants of the German Hanse. By the end of the century, from which time taxation records have survived (without any hint that they were an innovation) the tallages were being levied annually and the tallage rolls were being elaborated to the point where they have the appearance of draft financial accounts for the borough: other incomes were being recorded, such as freeman entrance fines, trade licences, and fines for market offences; some assessments due were being assigned to payment of particular borough expenses; and numerous outgoings were recorded as deductions from the assessments of individuals who were owed money by the borough. There is no evidence of any residential clusterings of particular crafts that might suggest areas of significant industrial activity, with the possible exception of Damgate in the latter half of the fourteenth century, where we find a number of individuals active in the cloth-making industry, with a fulling mill built in the 1390s near the north-eastern end, while the western end of Damgate connected with Webster Row and Listergate, names both indicative of activities associated with cloth-making.
