EXCHANGE, signifies also a place in most considerable trading cities, wherein the merchants, negotiants, agents, bankers, brokers, interpreters, and other persons concerned in commerce, meet on certain days, and at certain times thereof, to confer and treat together of matters relating to exchanges, remittances, payments, adventures, assurances, freightments, and other mercantile negotiations, both by sea and land.
In Flanders, Holland, and several cities of France, these places are called bourses; at Paris and Lyons, places de change; and in the Hanse towns, colleges of merchants. These assemblies are held with so much exactness, and merchants and negotiants are so indispensably required to attend at them, that a person's absence alone makes him to be suspected of a failure or bankruptcy. The most considerable exchanges in Europe, are that of Amsterdam; and that of London, called the Royal Exchange.
Even in the time of the ancient Romans, there were places for the merchants to meet, in most of the considerable cities of the empire. That said by some to have been built at Rome in the year of the city 259, 493 years before our Saviour, under the consulate of Appius Claudius and Publius Servilius, was called collegium mercatorum; whereof it is pretended there are still some remains, called by the modern Romans loggia, the lodge; and now usually the place of St. George. This notion of a Roman exchange is supposed to be founded
Exchange founded on the authority of Livy, whose words are as follows: Certamen consulis inciderat uter dedicaret Mercurii ædem. Senatus à se rem ad populum rejecit: utri eorum dedicatio jussu populi data esset, eum præesse annonæ, mercatorum collegium instituere jussit. Liv. lib. ii. But it must be here remarked, that collegium never signified a building for a society in the purer ages of the Latin tongue; so that collegium mercatorum instituere must not be rendered to build an exchange for the merchants, but to incorporate the merchants into a company. As Mercury was the god of traffick, this ædes Mercurii seems to have been chiefly designed for the devotions of this company or corporation.