EXCHANGE also signifies a place in most considerable trading cities, where the merchants, agents, bankers, brokers, interpreters, and other persons concerned in commerce, congregate on certain days, and at certain times of the day, 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, in Holland, and in several cities of France, these places are called Bourses; at Paris and at Lyons, Places de Change; and in the Hanse Towns, Borsenhalle. These assemblies are held with so much exactness, and merchants and traders are so indispensably required to attend at them, that a person's absence alone makes him suspected of a failure or bankruptcy. The most considerable exchanges in Europe are, first, that of Amsterdam, and, secondly, that of London, called the Royal Exchange.
Even in the time of the ancient Romans, there were places for merchants to meet, in most of the considerable cities of the empire. That which is said by some to have been built at Rome in the year of the city 259, or 493 years before Christ, under the consulate of Appius Claudius and Publius Servilius, was called Collegium Mercatorum, of which it is pretended there are still some remains, called by the modern Romans Loggia or the Lodge, and now usually the place of St George. This notion of a Roman exchange is supposed to be countenanced by the authority of Livy.