- 9 -
There is no single criterion for judging what constituted a town in fourteenth-century England.1 It has traditionally been supposed that a town needed to possess a charter from the king or some other lord granting certain distinct privileges in return for the regular payment of a fixed rent or fee farm. The most common such privileges were the right to self government by locally elected officials, to hold markets and fairs and have a gild merchant, and to claim free or ‘burgage’ tenure for all inhabitants. This definition, however, is far too restrictive, for many important urban communities, including Westminster, St Albans, Boston, Leicester and Warwick, lacked such comprehensive charters in our period.2 The medieval town is best defined in economic terms: that is, as a community where the majority of the population was involved in non-agricultural pursuits such as manufacturing, retailing and servicing. Many towns were extremely small, with populations as low as 500.3 But the poll tax returns of 1377 list some forty places with more than 1,000 taxpayers, whose total populations were probably in excess of 1,500 or 2,000. Apart from London, which had at least 40,000 inhabitants in 1377, there were only a dozen or so towns with over 4, 000 people: these were York, Bristol, Coventry, Norwich, Lincoln, Salisbury, Lynn, Colchester, Boston, Beverley, Newcastle upon Tyne and Canterbury.4 It is with the political and economic life of these and the other more substantial provincial towns that we are primarily concerned in this chapter.
The records of the first poll tax indicate that the forty largest cities and towns accounted for just over 8 per cent of the entire population of England. It is difficult to tell whether such a proportion holds true for the whole of Edward III’s reign, since there are no comparable figures for the period before the plague. Some towns clearly suffered a major reduction as a result of the pestilence: if the population of London in 1300 was as high as 100,000, as now seems possible,5 then the capital evidently dwindled to less than half its size in the course of the following seventy years. On the other hand, certain large towns such as York and Colchester may well have remained stable after 1348, or even increased in size as a result of considerable immigration from their rural hinterlands.6Indeed, the period 1350–75 was one of considerable buoyancy for most provincial towns: the ambitious public building programmes carried out at such places as Coventry, Norwich, Bristol and Colchester provide an important index of urban prosperity, if not of actual size.7 In the absence of proper statistics, it would probably be fair to say that the ratio of urban to rural dwellers did not alter drastically in the course of the fourteenth century, although the proportion living in towns may have risen slightly after the plague.
The medieval chartered towns have sometimes been regarded as havens of democracy, because all their inhabitants were free. Indeed, even villeins from rural areas who resided for a year and a day in such towns were assumed to have been released from their servile status. In practice, however, the towns were just as hierarchical as county society, and political influence was confined to an elite group of merchants who controlled the export and wholesale trades, dominated the gilds, and monopolized local office. Having made their names and fortunes in business, some of these men actually joined the ranks of landed society. John Pulteney, a prominent London draper knighted by Edward III in 1337, had extensive holdings in the home counties and the midlands and built himself an impressive mansion at Penshurst in Kent.8 Many others, however, were content with town life and preferred to invest in commercial enterprises rather than land. It was the extraordinary wealth controlled by this comparatively small group that brought them into contact with the government and allowed them a growing influence in affairs of state. In examining the role of the townsmen in the mid-fourteenth-century polity, we shall therefore be concerned primarily with the members of these merchant oligarchies.
THE CITY OF LONDON
London enjoyed by far the largest concentration of population and wealth in medieval England. Its early development as a self-governing community and its proximity to the royal administrative capital often brought the city into conflict with the crown, and it played a major part in some of the political revolutions of the later Middle Ages.9 It also controlled the domestic money market, and came to dominate the crown’s credit dealings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. London is therefore a special case, and obviously cannot be used to illustrate the crown’s general policy towards the towns. But the actions of the Londoners often reflected, and sometimes helped to mould, the political will of the realm. Edward III’s relations with the city therefore tell us much about the general character of his regime, and deserve first place in our discussion of urban society.
Edward’s policy towards London was conditioned largely by the actions of his father and mother. The city had been locked in conflict with Edward II since the 1310s, and had bitterly resented the loss of its privileges during the London eyre of 1321. Not surprisingly, the city authorities supported Queen Isabella’s invasion, and during the winter of 1326–7 they organized a ‘commune’ specifically dedicated to the task of removing Edward II from the throne. Indeed, it was the political pressure applied by this commune, together with the menacing presence of the London mob, that really persuaded those assembled in parliament at Westminster to acknowledge the overthrow of the old regime and support the succession of Edward III. This done, the Londoners lost no time in presenting parliament with a comprehensive list of their grievances. The government responded by pardoning the city from all former offences and debts, and granted a charter containing the most comprehensive and generous statement of the city’s liberties yet known. London was never again to be subject to royal wardens; it was to be exempt from purveyance and from the jurisdiction of the household courts; its fee farm was fixed at the token sum of £300; and it was allowed to regulate its own internal trade.10 It is a striking demonstration of Queen Isabella’s ineptitude that these sweeping concessions failed to secure the loyalty of the city. By the time of the Salisbury parliament of October 1328 the Londoners were already finding fault with Roger Mortimer and offering support to Henry of Lancaster.11 The events of the 1320s had proved that neither confrontation nor liberality could guarantee effective control over the city. What was really needed was trust, consistency and co-operation. It was the majority rule of Edward III that eventually provided those conditions.
The charter of 1327 had been made in the king’s name and in full parliament, and it would have been very difficult for Edward III to challenge its validity. As it was, the charter became the most potent symbol of the new political alliance built up between crown and city after 1330, an alliance which lasted, with only minor disruptions, for over forty years. The only real dispute in the course of this reign arose as a result of the statute passed at York in 1335, which allowed all merchants, native and foreign, to trade freely throughout England.12 This conflicted directly with the clause of the London charter of 1327 allowing the city to organize its own trade. It is doubtful that Edward intended to snub the Londoners, for in 1337 he specifically exempted the city from the statute.13Later, however, when the regime of Edington and Thoresby was attempting to claw back the king’s lost powers, the crown took a conscious decision to bring London into line with the rest of the country. The Statute of York was reaffirmed in 1351 and, despite regular petitions from the Londoners, the council now refused to acknowledge their former immunitty from the legislation.14 Although the government made a partial concession in 1367 by prohibiting foreigners from trading in retail, it insisted that the other regulations of 1335 and 1351 should stand, and it was not until 1376 that Edward’s ministers were once again induced to allow the Londoners to regulate alien trade.15 This long-running controversy should make us cautious about assuming that Edward III simply bought the goodwill of the city by an endless stream of constitutional concessions. Nevertheless, the trade dispute is interesting largely because it is unique. The parameters of the relationship between crown and city had been determined before Edward III achieved power; but once in control, the king never really challenged the extraordinary range of privileges now enjoyed by the Londoners.
The primary reason for Edward’s deferential attitude was that he needed the financial services offered by the city. In March 1340, at a time of considerable political unrest, the king asked the mayor and aldermen to authorize the levy of a corporate loan of £20,000.16 The figure was pitched artificially high in order to allow room for negotiation, but the sum of £5,000 eventually agreed upon still represented a considerable charge on the citizens. A number of similar loans were raised in the following years: £1,000 in 1342, 2,000 marks (£1,333 6s 8d) in 1346, and £5,000 in 1371.17 The citizens, either corporately or individually, also claimed to have invested at least £120,000 in the various credit operations launched by Edward III between 1337 and 1349.18 Despite the theoretical obligation on the king’s subjects to assist him with loans during times of war, both the city and the private companies were inclined to drive hard bargains. In 1351, shortly after the Statute of York had been reintroduced, the authorities successfully dodged another request for a corporate loan of 20,000 marks (£13,333 6s 8d); and in the 1370s, when the king was no longer regarded as creditworthy, the London bankers were able to charge exorbitant rates of interest on the sums advanced to the exchequer.19A stable and amicable political relationship was therefore crucial if the king were to be able to tap the city’s wealth for the upkeep of his wars.
Such considerations obviously explain why Edward III, in contrast with every other king from Henry III to Richard II, never suspended the Londoners’ rights of self-government. He came close to doing so in 1341, when the city was subjected to the general commissions of oyer and terminer set up to investigate administrative abuse throughout the realm. But as soon as the government was informed that this infringed the 1327 charter, it abandoned proceedings in the capital, and the eyre which was to have been held at the Tower of London was quickly bought off by the citizens for the relatively modest sum of 500 marks (£333 6s 8d). Although the fiction was maintained that the eyre had been held, and might be renewed in future, this was to be the last such intrusion into the city’s rights under Edward III. 20 After the Good Parliament, when John of Gaunt tried to get the discredited financiers Richard Lyons, Adam Bury and John Pecche readmitted to the freedom of the city, it was rumoured that the crown intended to extend the jurisdiction of the marshalsea court into London, and was even planning to take over the administration of London. This created considerable disquiet, and explains why certain prominent Londoners were to support the great revolt of 1381.21 But the disturbances of 1376–7 were simply another consequence of Edward III’s removal from public affairs and the collapse of political consensus in his last years. In the mid-fourteenth century the Londoners emerged as one of the most privileged groups in political society. The fact that Edward III regarded this as an opportunity rather than a threat does much to explain the extraordinary stability of his regime.
THE PROVINCIAL TOWNS
To test whether or not the London model is typical of Edward III’s attitude towards the towns, we may turn to the evidence of the royal charters. There are ninety-five separate grants to cities and towns recorded on the charter rolls between 1327 and 1377.22 Of these, thirty-eight simply confirmed previous grants, and fifty-seven included new privileges. Their chronological spread is very uneven. No fewer than twenty-six charters were granted during the ascendancy of Mortimer and Isabella, and another thirty-eight were issued in the decade between Edward’s assumption of power and his return from the continent at the end of 1340.23 To some extent, this pattern was typical: any new ruler was expected to ratify or amplify his predecessor’s grants. But the sheer number of such grants made while Mortimer and Isabella were in power suggests something out of the ordinary. In the parliament of Northampton of 1328 there were already complaints that the king’s rights were being eroded by too many lavish concessions to towns, and it was ordered that all new franchises should be withdrawn pending an inves-tigation.24 This apparently did little to stem the flow of favours; and it was only after the seizure of power by the young king in 1330 that a rather more cautious attitude was adopted. When the government was presented with a request for a full declaration of the franchises of Bristol in January 1331, for instance, it decided only to issue a simple charter of confirmation, and delayed a fuller statement until a proper investigation had been carried out.25 Even so, the comparatively large number of charters granted in the period 1330–40 suggests that the king had not departed significantly from the policies of his mother. As in so many other areas of government, it was the crisis of 1340–1 that really brought about a permanent change. The last thirty-six years of the reign produced only thirty-one royal charters to towns, two of which were subsequently withdrawn and one of which related to Edward’s own new foundation at Queenborough (Kent).26 On this basis at least, it is possible to argue that Edward’s policy of buying favour from the towns largely came to an end after 1341.
There are certain other indications that the crown adopted a firmer attitude towards urban privileges during the second half of the reign. Prior to 1348, for instance, the town courts usually took responsibility for enforcing the Statutes of Winchester and Northampton, and the government only very rarely appointed special peace commissions to serve in towns.27 Even when it did so, it normally appointed the mayors and bailiffs of the relevant towns to act as justices. After the Black Death, however, the situation changed. In 1354 a complaint was made in parliament about the lax observance of the new statutes on wages and prices in the city of London, and legislation was passed threatening punitive action against the city authorities.28 Similar shortcomings elsewhere probably explain the spate of separate peace commissions issued for certain urban areas during the 1350s, 1360s and 1370s.29 It is extremely interesting to notice that most of these commissions were staffed not by town officials but by a mixture of royal lawyers and private individuals drawn from the urban oligarchies. The town authorities were not unduly concerned about this development: indeed, some of them had a vested interest in encouraging the peace sessions since the profits of these courts could be used to pay off their fee farms.30 Nevertheless, the experiment did have political implications, for it signified the king’s right to assume superior jurisdiction within areas normally immune from immediate royal justice. It was only in 1373, when Edward III raised the town of Bristol to the status of a county and made the mayor and sheriff ex officio justices of the peace, that the crown abandoned its policy of sending in outside judges; and it was not until the 1390s that town officials generally won the right to act as justices of the peace in their own areas.31
The charters and the peace commissions therefore suggest that the second half of Edward III’s reign witnessed a general attempt to restrict the amount of power exercised by the towns. It would be unwise to make too much of this, however, since the king’s decisions were normally determined by local circumstances and personal preference, not by a pre-ordained policy. This can be shown by Edward’s response to the numerous jurisdictional disputes which arose between secular and spiritual authorities within the towns. Sometimes the king sided with the burgesses. By a series of awards between 1334 and 1348, for instance, Edward transferred a considerable amount of power from the Prior of Coventry to the townsmen;32 and in 1354 he allowed the citizens of York to regain control of Bootham from St Mary’s Abbey. 33 In other cases he prevaricated. Between 1327 and 1358 no fewer than four different royal judgments were given in the long-standing dispute between the Abbot and men of St Albans.34 And on other occasions the support of a powerful ecclesiastical institution meant more to the king than the goodwill of a town. Edward was quick to support successive bishops of Winchester in upholding their various market rights in and around the city;35 and after the St Scholastica’s Day riot in Oxford in 1355 the king transferred many of the town’s hard-fought privileges to the university.36 The most important point about these disputes, in fact, is not so much the way they were resolved as the fact that they were always submitted to the king for arbitration. Under an inadequate or unpopular government, townsmen were often tempted to resolve their internal problems by violence: witness the outbreaks of disorder in London, Bury St Edmunds, Abingdon, St Albans and Northampton in 1326–7, and the many urban uprisings which took place during the great revolt of 1381.37 The fact that the Oxford riot of 1355 was more or less the only serious disturbance in the intervening period says much for Edward III’s reputation as an impartial judge and honoured lord.
This dependence on the king’s grace can be further illustrated through the extant financial records of the towns. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many urban corporations were to pay out quite substantial sums of money to members of the nobility in order to secure influential political support. But in the mid-fourteenth century such douceurs were still comparatively rare. 38 Local lords obviously needed to be placated. Lynn, for instance, made regular gifts to the Earl of Suffolk and the Bishop of Norwich; Exeter curried favour with the Earl of Devon; and Winchester and London courted their respective bishops.39 But there was no general reliance on the magnates to forward the interests of the towns. Instead, it was the king and his officials who were the real beneficiaries of urban generosity. London led the way in this respect, regularly sending wine and victuals to the court and making free gifts of money to both Edward III and the Black Prince.40 In 1337 the sum of £369 was raised in the city in order to make presents to the king, queen and lords during a great council at which London was endeavouring to obtain exemption from the 1335 Statute of York.41 It is noticeable that the most regular entries in the accounts of the provincial towns relate to royal administrators. John Thoresby, keeper of the privy seal, was in receipt of a fee of £1 from Cambridge in 1347, and the chamber clerk Thomas Bramber was given £10 by the city of Norwich in 1351.42 Those who profited most of all from such generosity were the royal judges.43The towns freely accepted that quite major expenditure was sometimes necessary in order to secure royal favour: Hull, for instance, paid a fine of 250 marks (£166 13s 4d) in order to have the privilege of appointing its own mayor and paying its own fee farm in 1331.44 In 1373 the authorities of Lynn paid out £107 in their successful bid to obtain a wool staple in the town, and in 1376–7 they spent over £500 on gifts, bribes and other expenses incurred in the capital during a legal dispute with the Bishop of Norwich.45 So long as Edward III remained king, then, the towns naturally looked to the crown, its courts, and its professional agents for protection and advancement. Their later reliance on the magnates was merely a reflection of the decline of royal authority that set in after Edward’s demise.
THE TOWNS AND WAR
That the king attached some importance to maintaining good relations with the towns is shown by his special efforts to keep them informed on the progress of the war. The fact that the sheriffs were instructed to make their proclamations in the principal towns and market places possibly means that townsmen were rather more aware of political and military developments than were their rural neighbours.46 In any case, the crown was not content simply to rely on this general network of information. In 1346, separate letters recounting news of the victory at Crécy were dispatched to the Cinque Ports and twenty-nine coastal towns.47 The London records in particular contain transcripts of important diplomatic and personal correspondence: the king’s letter to his eldest son relating the events of the battle of Sluys, official responses to papal proposals for peace, a letter of the Black Prince sending news of the victory at Poitiers, and so on.48 The London material is not necessarily typical, but there are scraps of evidence to suggest that provincial towns were also in regular communication with the king’s military and diplomatic agents. The citizens of Winchester were informed of Edward III’s safe return home after concluding the treaty of Brétigny in 1360; and the men of Leicester received letters in the 1340s and 1350s both from the king and from their lord, the Earl of Lancaster, on the state of the war.49
Townsmen were also encouraged to participate in the celebrations following major campaigns. In 1344 the wives of certain prominent Londoners were invited to attend the tournament at Windsor, and their husbands seem to have taken an active part in many of the jousts held in the capital.50 Henry Picard of London is said to have put on a great banquet in the 1360s attended by both Edward III and the captive John II.51 Naturally, there were no merchants in the Order of the Garter, and it was still extremely rare for members of the urban patriciate to be knighted. But the crown was quite prepared to accept and play on the aspirations of the trading classes. The sumptuary legislation of 1363 put merchants owning goods and chattels valued at £1,000 on a par with those holding £200 worth of land, and allowed them – and their wives – to wear fine cloth and silk, silver jewellery and miniver (though not the prestigious ermine).52 The ostentation which characterized courtly life was therefore aped by the top ranks of urban society, and despite the gibes of the chroniclers,53 there is little to indicate that the king himself showed any disdain for such developments.
The crown’s principal motive here, of course, was a financial one. By keeping the towns well informed on the progress of the war and by appealing to the well-established tradition of mercantile snobbery, the king naturally hoped that he might persuade the leaders of urban society to support his enterprises with hard cash. The contributions made to state finance by the townsmen fell into three main categories: direct taxes, customs duties on overseas trade, and loans. It will be helpful to discuss each of these before attempting to evaluate the more general political implications of the government’s fiscal relations with the commercial community.
Taxes on movables were in some respects the least oppressive of the charges on the towns in the mid-fourteenth century. The differential scale adopted in such taxes after 1332 ensured that towns paid a higher proportion of their wealth than did the countryside: a tenth as against the rural fifteenth. But tax commissioners seem to have found it particularly difficult to assess the movable property of townsmen, and the decline in certain urban valuations during the early fourteenth century suggests that some towns, or groups of townsmen, became increasingly adept at the art of underassessment. 54 The anomalies became still greater after 1334, when it was decided that the towns, like all other communities, should be responsible for collecting their own contributions to royal taxation. As a result, the number of taxpayers in Leicester rose from seventy-three in 1332 to some 445 in 1336; and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that lesser men were now having to contribute a larger share of the total assessment.55 A more serious development from the king’s point of view was the decision to allow a number of important cities and towns to compound for their taxes with block payments.56 In 1335 Edward was already complaining that the 1,100 marks (£733 6s 8d) offered by the city of London in lieu of assessment was quite inadequate;57 but he did nothing directly to increase it, and the figure remained unchanged for the rest of the reign. If we take the forty towns and cities that contributed over £25 to the fifteenth and tenth after 1334, we find that their total assessments came to £3,035, or just 8 per cent of the national assessment.58 This correlates remarkably well with the demographic evidence already discussed. However it is equally clear that it failed to reflect the considerable financial capital controlled by the urban communities.
Nor did the various experiments in direct taxation carried out after 1334 redress this imbalance. The ninth of 1340 seems to have weighed particularly heavily on the countryside.59 Admittedly, the parish subsidy of 1371 put pressure on those urban areas with large numbers of churches: Norwich, which paid £94 12s for a conventional tenth, now had to find £266 16s, and the more prosperous parts of the shire were prevailed upon to assist the city.60 In many other cases, however, the urban assessments seem to have fallen in 1371: London’s contribution, for instance, was just £638.61 In practice, then, the extra burden of this tax was carried almost wholly by the rural population. All this helps to explain why townsmen made so few complaints about taxation. In 1348, at a time when they were suffering from certain other controversial fiscal exactions, a number of towns put in requests for the reduction of their quotas for the tenth.62 Otherwise, the silence is almost unbroken. So far as direct taxation was concerned, urban dwellers clearly had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
The towns also made a comparatively small contribution to the periodic levies of men, arms and victuals taken to support the war effort. London itself is known to have supplied at least 500 archers and 600 armed men for the French war between 1337 and 1360, as well as 200 infantrymen for Edward’s campaigns in Scotland.63 But few other urban areas gave major assistance. In 1327 the men of Oxford promised to send fifty men to Scotland, but only because this was made a condition of the grant of a new royal charter.64Although most provincial towns were theoretically subject to arrays and prises, they very often managed to secure immunity by bribing the king’s agents.65 It was only in 1346–7 that the crown made any real effort to remedy the situation by demanding specific quotas of troops from 131 cities and towns in the south and the midlands.66 The experiment provoked hostile reaction, and the government was forced to commute the levies to cash payments and to promise that they would not be used as a precedent for future demands.67
The one wartime levy which did have a major impact at least on the coastal towns was the requisitioning of ships and mariners for the transport of the king’s armies.68 Ships were simply seized from their masters, who rarely received any compensation for the time that their vessels were out of commission. The towns themselves were also responsible for raising and paying the sailors employed on the king’s service. The resulting burdens were considerable. The authorities of Lynn paid out well over £200 between 1336 and 1341 on shipping and mariners; and in 1340 the burgesses of Newcastle claimed that they were owed no less than £723 for ships impressed during the Scottish wars.69 In 1360 Bristol complained that the town was almost completely denuded of ships and open to attack as a result of the king’s demands; and the large convoys conscripted for the transport of the Black Prince and his army to Bordeaux led to protests in the parliament of 1362.70 Finally, in 1372–3, the crown ordered selected towns and cities to build one or two ‘barges’ or ‘balingers’ which were then to be maintained at local expense and used for the king’s service whenever required. The resulting costs were considerable: London spent £620 on a single vessel.71 In Edward III’s later parliaments there were many complaints about the inordinate demands being placed on shipmasters and others involved in seagoing trade.72 At the local level, indeed, the results could be catastrophic: one of the chief reasons for the dramatic decline of the port of Yarmouth in the second half of the fourteenth century was the incessant pressure applied by the government on the town’s merchant fleet.73
It would obviously be a mistake, then, to suppose that the relatively privileged position enjoyed by the towns with regard to direct taxation signified political timidity on the part of the crown. In fact, the major reason why the towns were not required to contribute more to the fifteenths and tenths and to the arrays was that their richest inhabitants were also paying out very substantial sums in customs duties and loans to the king. These sources of income formed an increasingly important element in the system of public finance, and their development does much to explain the course of politics in Edward III’s reign.
By 1327 there were two permanent taxes on overseas trade.74 The ancient custom was paid by all merchants, native as well as alien, and consisted of a standard charge of 6s 8d on every sack of wool exported from England. The new custom, on the other hand, was paid only by foreigners, and included small charges for the import of cloth, wine and general merchandise, as well as an additional export levy of 3s 4d on each sack of wool. The most valuable taxes on overseas trade, however, were the extraordinary wool subsidies or ‘maltolts’ (literally, ‘bad taxes’) imposed on top of the customs duties at times of war. Prior to 1327 there had been only one major levy of this type, collected by Edward I between 1294 and 1297 and set at the rate of £1 13s 4d on every sack of wool. The first subsidy collected by Edward III, to support his Scottish campaign in 1333, was charged at the relatively modest rate of 10s per sack (see Appendix 3). But at the start of the French war in 1336 the subsidy was fixed at £1, rising by 1338 to £1 13s 4d for denizens and £2 13s 4d for aliens. In 1340 a uniform rate of £1 13s 4d was established. After a short break in 1341–2 it was raised to £2, and continued at this level for the next twenty years. In 1362 parliament took a momentous decision by allowing the king to carry on levying the subsidy during peacetime, albeit at the reduced rate of £1 per sack. In 1365 it went up again to £2, and then fell to £1 16s 8d in 1368. Finally, on the resumption of the French war in 1369, it rose to £2 3s 4d and stayed at this level for the rest of the reign. Other short term subsidies and forced loans were also charged on overseas trade from time to time, raising the total level of taxation still higher. At one point in 1340, for instance, it was claimed that native merchants were being charged a total of £4 and aliens an amazing £5 3s 4d for every sack of wool they exported.75
The adoption of the wool subsidy as a permanent element in the taxation of overseas trade meant that the profits of the customs increased enormously (see Appendix 4). During the first ten financial years of Edward III’s reign (Michaelmas 1326–Michaelmas 1336), the customs and other extraordinary levies on overseas trade yielded an average of just over £14,500 per annum. Unfortunately, it is difficult to judge the immediate effect of the new charges imposed in the late 1330s, for the wool trade was subject to a series of embargoes around 1340 and the customs system itself was farmed by syndicates of merchants between 1345 and 1349.76 But the fact that this farm was fixed at £50, 000 a year says much for the transformation that had occurred in the meantime. In 1351 the crown returned to the direct administration of the ports, and we have reasonably comprehensive customs accounts for the rest of the reign. These provide some remarkable statistics. In the exchequer year 1353–4 the taxation of overseas trade produced a total of £113,400, and in 1361–2 it yielded almost £110,000. The mean annual yield in the period 1353–62 was no less than £87,500, over six times the average for the first decade of the reign. The yield dropped to about £61,000 a year in 1362–9, but then recovered slightly to reach some £65,500 a year in 1369–75. Altogether, the crown’s net income from the taxation of overseas trade between 1351 and 1376 stood at approximately £1,750,000. In other words, the profits of the customs in these twenty-five years alone exceeded the total income from direct taxation levied on the clergy and the laity in the course of the entire reign. Not only had Edward III’s wars produced a dramatic increase in indirect taxation; they had also made the customs and subsidies the single most important weapon in the financial armoury of the late medieval state.
In immediate terms, it was of course the merchants who had to pay the customs duties. Their ability to do so says much both for their wealth and for the extraordinary profits they made out of selling English wool on the continent. In 1336–7, for instance, the price for wool on the domestic market was only about half its value in the Low Countries.77 Consequently, it was possible to expend considerable sums in purchasing, customing and transporting wool and still benefit from the deal. On the other hand, the merchants were highly sensitive to any erosion of their profit margins, and they inevitably reacted to high customs duties by trying to push down domestic prices. In 1337 the crown agreed to fix a scale of minimum prices in order to protect the interests of wool growers and up-country merchants, and for the next decade the value of wool remained reasonably stable. After the Black Death, however, wool failed to keep up with inflation, and by the early 1360s the domestic market was severely depressed.78 It is therefore easy to see why the producers claimed that they were indirectly burdened by the taxes on overseas trade.
The resulting political conflict between the greater merchants and the wool growers will be traced later in this chapter. Here we need only mention the economic and financial implications. It was possible to avoid high rates of export duty if one converted raw wool into cloth and sent it to the continent in its finished state. It was not long before enterprising manufacturers and merchants realized this, and sponsored the development of the native cloth industry.79 In 1347 the crown attempted to make good the gaps in the customs system by imposing a general duty on cloth exports.80 But low rates meant that the cloth custom was of only marginal significance: indeed, in the decade 1352–62 it produced only about £500 a year for the crown.81 As wool exports declined and cloth exports rose, the total value of indirect taxation was bound to fall, and fifteenth-century kings were to find it impossible to alter the customs system in their favour. The trend was already evident in Edward III’s last years, though it was still a long way from threatening the financial stability of the crown. In fact, Edward III had transformed the economic base of the English monarchy by tapping that potentially enormous supply of wealth controlled by the merchants. That he was the first king to do this on any regular basis says much for the authority and sheer ingenuity of his regime.
LOANS
Edward’s ability to manipulate the merchants for his own benefit is also demonstrated by the raising of loans. No previous king had systematically attempted to use the domestic money market, and Edward III himself preferred to deal with the Florentine banking firms of the Bardi and Peruzzi during the first decade of his reign.82 The only general attempt to raise money from English merchants during this period was a forced loan imposed on all those involved in overseas trade in 1327, which yielded some £7,400.83 The situation was transformed, however, after the opening of the Hundred Years War. The Italian firms remained important until the early 1340s, when they went bankrupt; and certain other foreigners such as the Hanseatic merchants and Tidemann Limberg of Dortmund continued to support Edward’s regime thereafter.84 But the sheer scale of royal expenditure from 1336 forced the government to find alternative sources of credit, and drove it into negotiations with the English merchant classes.
The man responsible for shaping the crown’s credit dealings between 1337 and 1349 was William de la Pole, a prominent merchant of Hull who had strong links with the commercial community in London.85 By July 1337, Pole and his business associate Reginald Conduit had brought together a group of fifty English merchants who agreed to lend the king a total of £200,000. In order to raise this capital, they were allowed to seize 30,000 sacks of wool and export it for sale on the continent. The suppliers of the wool were to be given credit notes redeemable only when the company had received repayment of their loan from the crown. The scheme was a workable one, and potentially highly profitable. But the king’s agents in the Low Countries were desperately short of funds, and simply seized the first shipment of wool for their own use. Pole’s associates were forced to take debentures for the wool (the so-called Dordrecht bonds), and when the crown subsequently defaulted on these promises, it left both the wool company and the original suppliers substantially out of pocket. The whole enterprise was a costly failure, and created intense bad feeling among the political community.
Not everyone, however, was ruined by the collapse of the wool company. Pole, for instance, continued to provide the king with large amounts of cash: his loans and other related expenses between June 1338 and October 1339 amounted to at least £112,000.86Pole was caught up in the political backlash of 1340, and was arrested and imprisoned on the king’s return from the continent in November that year. But by 1343 he had managed to ingratiate himself with the government, and put together a new syndicate of merchants led by Thomas Melchbourn, who agreed to lend the king money on the security of the customs.87 In 1345 the same men were permitted to farm the customs for £50,000 a year, on condition that they would use any other profits from the ports to make additional loans. Between 1343 and 1351 three successive monopoly companies advanced the remarkable total of £369,000 to the crown. Indeed, this proved the most lasting and successful of all Edward’s credit schemes. But it had two serious defects. First, the syndicates were themselves forced to borrow money, and too often failed to pay it back. It was later claimed, for instance, that groups of Londoners had advanced some £40,000 to Walter Chiriton’s company during the time of the siege of Calais, and that none of this had been recovered. Secondly, the companies were allowed to buy up Dordrecht bonds at a fraction of their original value. This caused considerable resentment among the lesser merchants, who became extremely reluctant to enter into credit deals with the crown.
In 1346–7 the king was desperately short of money, and for the first time his ministers made a general appeal both to individual merchants and to town governments for loans.88 In the spring and summer of 1347 the exchequer did manage to collect about £11,000 from merchants not immediately involved in the syndicate, but this sum was dominated by a few large donations such as the £4,000 advanced by sixteen citizens of Norwich.89 In 1351 Edward made a further appeal for funds, and for the first time a number of provincial towns offered corporate loans. But contributions from individual merchants were extremely small, and the total raised amounted to a mere £6,500.90 The monopolistic practices of the previous fifteen years had clearly alienated a substantial proportion of the merchant community,91 and the king had little choice but to wind up the farm of the customs between 1349 and 1351.
It was not until 1357 that the crown again required any substantial cash advances. By this stage the political controversy over the monopoly companies had calmed down, and a ban on wool exports by native merchants imposed in 1353 had given the king a powerful bargaining position.92 In return for special licences allowing them to participate in overseas trade, a number of powerful merchants – mostly Londoners – were persuaded to advance loans totalling over £19,800. The new creditors included several former colleagues of the monopolists, such as Henry Picard, Thomas Dolesley, John Pyel and Thomas Perle, and a group of younger men who rose to prominence in the city after the Black Death, including John Not, John Aubrey, Adam Bury and John Pecche.93Whether these men entertained hopes of forming a new cartel is uncertain, since the king required few further loans over the next twelve years. But after the resumption of war in 1369 Edward was to become increasingly dependent on a small group of London financiers, and a return to the dubious commercial practices of his earlier years inevitably precipitated political controversy.
Between 1369 and 1375 the English crown borrowed at least £150,000, and probably considerably more, in order to cover the escalating costs of warfare in France, Scotland and Ireland.94 The townsmen, like the nobility and the clergy, were expected to meet their share of this debt. Between March and September 1370, corporate advances alone accounted for about £9,200, of which £5,000 came from London, 1,000 marks (£666 13s 4d) from Norwich and £600 from York.95 On 24 May 1370, ninety-three named Londoners contributed loans totalling £1,500; and in February 1371 another group from the capital advanced £4,600.96 Even William de la Pole’s widow Katherine was persuaded to send in £200.97 Once again, the loans from the merchant classes were part of a deal with the crown. An embargo had been placed on all foreign trade in the summer of 1369, and it was not until substantial loans had been offered and paid that the government finally lifted the ban in August 1370.98
So far, there had been no discernible trend back towards monopolistic practices. But in 1371 Treasurer Scrope began to make his economies in the exchequer, and the crown refused to honour many of the debts incurred in 1369–70.99 Under these circumstances, it was no longer possible to organize simple credit deals: a general request for corporate loans from the provincial towns in 1375 yielded nothing.100 Instead, the government was forced to offer increasingly advantageous terms to the small number of Londoners still prepared to provide cash advances.101 These new creditors – John Pyel, Richard Lyons, John Hedingham and William Walworth – were allowed to buy up ancient debts at discount and to charge exorbitant rates of interest. From Christmas 1372 Richard Lyons was also granted the farm of the petty customs (the duties on cloth and general merchandise) in all the ports. Finally, in November 1373 John Pecche was allowed exclusive control of the sale of sweet wines in the city of London on condition that he would share the profits of that office with the king. This marked a return to the discredited practices of the 1340s and provoked hostile reaction in the Good Parliament, where the commons impeached Lyons and Pecche, together with William Ellis (Lyons’s deputy in the port of Yarmouth) and Adam Bury (in his capacity as mayor of Calais). The fact that so many of those who had loaned money in 1369–70 had been unable to get satisfaction while the financiers held sway undoubtedly fired the opposition movement: in 1377, for instance, the town authorities of Lynn were still attempting to recover the loan of 500 marks (£333 6s 8d) advanced in 1370.102 But what gave particular vehemence to the attack in 1376 was the widespread belief that the London merchants, acting through Lord Latimer, had deliberately taken advantage of the king’s infirmity to reap material and political advantage for themselves.
The story of Edward III’s credit dealings is particularly complicated, and only the barest outline has been given here. The main point to emerge from this brief analysis is the considerable antipathy which often developed between the majority of political society – including a good proportion of the merchant class – and the relatively small group of wealthy capitalists who tended to dominate the king’s credit transactions. It is often suggested that after the collapse of the farm of the customs in 1349–51 Edward III was forced permanently to abandon his dealings with such cartels and to provide formal guarantees against any further restrictive practices.103 But it is clear from the comparatively small sums raised in 1351, 1357 and 1369–70 that the merchant community was not prepared to compensate the king for the resulting loss of credit. With the onset of the war in 1369, the crown became increasingly dependent on loans, and inevitably returned to the same practices that had been so roundly condemned in the 1340s. In the meantime, however, there had been an important realignment in politics. One of the principal reasons for the commons’ success in 1376 was that they were now able to act in the name of the merchant community. This represented one of the most important political developments of Edward III’s reign, and will provide the theme for the remaining sections of this chapter.
THE ESTATE OP MERCHANTS AND THE BURGESSES
Throughout the first half of the fourteenth century it was regular practice for the English crown to summon merchant assemblies, in which it negotiated wool subsidies and forced loans or discussed more general matters concerning trade. Occasionally the king sent writs to town authorities asking for the return of representatives,104 but more usually the crown itself chose the membership of such meetings. The lists of those to be summoned were probably drawn up with the assistance of prominent merchants such as William de la Pole, John Pulteney, Reginald Conduit and Henry Picard, who were better acquainted than were the clerks of chancery with the complicated world of trade and finance. So important was the business undertaken in these assemblies that historians have sometimes referred to a separate ‘estate of merchants’ which often found itself in competition or conflict with parliament. In fact, there is little to indicate that meetings between the council and the merchants were regarded with any particular suspicion by the rest of political society until the start of the Hundred Years War. It was only with the imposition of exorbitant wool subsidies after 1337 that a conflict began to emerge between the relatively narrow group of exporters actively involved in such assemblies and the larger cross-section of wool growers and lesser merchants.
It must not be forgotten, of course, that many merchant communities were directly represented in parliament.105 The methods by which the sheriffs decided which towns ought to have their own members of parliament were surprisingly haphazard, and there were some significant omissions: Coventry, for instance, did not have separate representation for almost a century after 1353.106 Nevertheless, most towns appreciated the privilege and guarded it well. This can be illustrated by the calibre of those chosen as members of parliament. These men were usually drawn from among the urban oligarchies they represented: except in the south-west, very few towns as yet called upon outsiders or members of the landed gentry to serve as their spokesmen in parliament. Many, however, had powerful connections. William Fen, who represented Southwark in 1351, was chamberlain to the Archbishop of Canterbury; and Thomas Leggy, skinner of London, who sat in parliament on two occasions in the middle years of Edward III’s reign, married a daughter of the Earl of Warwick.107 Roger Normanville, a freeman of York and twice representative for that city, was also a long-standing royal servant, keeper of the king’s stud north of the Trent from 1343 to 1350 and controller of the king’s works at York.108The urban authorities were also prepared to reward their representatives handsomely. The crown set a standard rate of 2s a day for the expenses of citizens and burgesses attending parliament, but many towns were considerably more generous. Norwich and Lynn paid 3s 4d a day, and London still more.109 These examples indicate that the towns were anxious to secure the services of able and powerful men who might promote local interests in parliament. By the end of Edward III’s reign the same men had also emerged as the principal spokesmen of the merchant class.
There were two major issues on which parliament and the estate of merchants joined battle: the wool subsidy and the staple. The maltolt, as we have seen, began life as an extraordinary tax collected during periods of active warfare.110 Like direct taxation, it therefore required some form of consent and had to be renewed at regular intervals. The king naturally turned to the merchants for the necessary authorization, not only because they were immediately responsible for paying the duties at the ports, but also because the wool subsidy often formed part of a more complicated trade deal with the major exporters. Thus, the maltolt granted by a group of forty-one merchants meeting with the king during the great council held at Nottingham in September 1336 was the first stage in a series of negotiations leading to William de la Pole’s wool scheme of 1337.111 The commons, on the other hand, claimed that the imposition of high rates of duty affected all those involved in the wool trade, whether producers, middlemen or exporters, and that the king ought therefore to seek authority for such taxes in parliament. The collapse of the wool company in 1338, followed by a further large increase in the level of the wool subsidy, quickly convinced the commons that the only way of guaranteeing the interests of the producers was to control the maltolt themselves.
The following decade therefore witnessed a long-running dispute between the crown, the commons and the merchants (see Appendix 3). In April 1340, when parliament managed to authorize an extension of the wool subsidy, the commons insisted that the high rate set for foreigners should be reduced, and that, once the subsidy granted in this parliament had expired, all such levies should cease.112 But the subsequent political crisis left Edward in no mood for compromise, and the renunciation of the statute of 1341 made it clear that he would accept no parliamentary restriction of his rights. Early in 1341 the king negotiated an additional subsidy with the merchants, to be paid over and above the current parliamentary levy; and in 1342 he simply overrode the agreement of 1340 and negotiated a new subsidy of £2 per sack not with parliament but with a broadly based mercantile assembly.113 The commons reacted quickly, and in 1343 offered to extend the same rates for a further three years.114 Both sides were probably eager to co-operate with the crown at this stage, since the new merchant company put together in 1343 was promising to help those holding Dordrecht bonds and other credit notes to redeem their debts on the customs.115 But such hopes were dashed when this company turned into a private speculative venture in 1345. The result was an important new political alignment between the commons and the lesser merchants.
Until 1343 most merchant assemblies had been sufficiently large to claim to represent a cross-section of the commercial community. But after the setting up of the English company and its gradual evolution into a monopolistic enterprise, both the size and the frequency of such meetings declined. It was not only parliament but also a large proportion of the business community that therefore became alienated from the farmers of the customs after 1345. Such was the bad feeling generated by the Melchbourn and Chiriton companies, indeed, that the crown did not dare to approach any representative body for a renewal of the maltolt. Instead, the king persuaded a group of bishops and magnates meeting in February 1346 to prolong the levy for another two years.116 In March 1347 the regency administration forced a similar council to grant a prospective wool subsidy running for three years from Michaelmas 1348. What was more, the 1347 assembly also authorized the imposition of a permanent custom on cloth and an additional subsidy on wine and general merchandise.117 The assemblies of 1346–7 marked the first occasion in the fourteenth century when the English crown had dared to impose customs and subsidies on overseas trade without the direct consent either of a body of merchants or of parliament.118 Such high-handed actions seem to have persuaded the majority of the merchants that their only hope of maintaining some political initiative was to make common cause with parliament. Their opportunity came in March 1348. The commons now agreed to ratify the wool subsidy granted by the council in 1347.119 They probably had little choice in the matter, since the maltolt had already been assigned to pay off the forced loan of 20,000 sacks of wool currently being collected in the shires.120 But their action provided an important precedent. For the rest of Edward III’s reign, the wool subsidy was always renewed in parliament, or at least by a great council containing representatives of the commons.121 Finally, in 1362, the king formally conceded that no subsidy should be imposed on overseas trade without the proper consent of the community in parliament.122
From Edward’s point of view, of course, the new deal had much to recommend it. Parliament was more or less obliged to extend the maltolt for as long as the war lasted, and the successive wool subsidies of the 1350s did more than anything else to restore the financial stability of his regime. But the commons also derived benefit from the situation. We have already noted that Edward III’s early attempts to extract grants of direct taxation from great councils failed because of his unwillingness to allow such assemblies to present common petitions.123 Once parliament had won effective control over lay subsidies, it made the vital link between supply and redress of grievance and persuaded the king to concede to some of its demands. The commons’ successful bid to control indirect taxation was bound to give this movement further impetus. In September 1353 the king called a great council, including elected representatives from the shires and a limited number of towns, to advertise the new Ordinance of the Staple. This form of assembly, which had fallen out of use since the late 1330s, was probably chosen because the king did not wish to have the new legislation enrolled among the statutes.124 But the government made a tactical error in asking the assembly to authorize an extension of the maltolt. Since they had been called upon to fulfil one of the functions now associated with parliament, the representatives of the shires and towns insisted on acting like their parliamentary counterparts and presented the king with a list of common petitions.125Edward had little choice but to respond, and new laws including the Statute of Praemunire and regulations on the cloth and wine trades were written up on the statute roll.126 This effectively eliminated the distinction between parliaments and representative great councils which Edward III had tried to maintain in the 1330s, and finally persuaded him that all future financial and political negotiation would have to be undertaken in parliament.
The constitutional implications of this development need to be kept in focus. The king was still under no obligation to accept and act upon the political demands entered by the commons with their schedules of taxation. Indeed, in the parliament of 1355 the government made not a single statutory concession, despite the fact that the assembly extended the wool subsidy for the exceptionally long period of six years. Nevertheless, the commons’ position had clearly been enhanced by the new assumption that they alone represented a cross-section of the commercial classes. In January 1348 a number of the common petitions recorded on the parliament roll were addressed specifically in the name of the merchants.127 This was virtually the first time in Edward III’s reign that a parliamentary assembly meeting without a committee of merchants in attendance had claimed to represent the mercantile community.128 The evidence should not be exaggerated, but the coincidence is striking. The commons’ claim to speak for the merchants not only strengthened their case for taking over the negotiation of the wool subsidy, but also allowed them an increasing say in the economic policies of the crown. The political impact can best be assessed by examining the second point of conflict between parliament and the estate of merchants.
The staple was a fixed point through which all wool (and sometimes other goods) intended for the foreign market had to pass. From the king’s point of view, the staple was a means of applying diplomatic and commercial pressure on England’s main markets in the Low Countries. Whenever possible, then, Edward III favoured the idea of locating the staple on the continent. The greater merchants tended to see the staple as an opportunity to monopolize trade and to use the customs as surety for loans to the crown. Because they controlled exports, it suited their purposes also to have a continental staple. The growers and the middlemen, however, were interested in the staple chiefly because they saw it as a means of restricting the activities of alien merchants within England. The only way in which they could participate fully in such a system and ensure a share of the higher prices that English wool then reached on the continent was to have the staple situated at home. The resulting clash of interests between these groups tells us much about the balance of power in mid-fourteenth-century England.
The first recorded staple had been set up in 1313 at St Omer in France, and had remained there, with brief interruptions, until 1326, when domestic staples were established in London, Newcastle, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Winchester, Exeter, Bristol and Shrewsbury.129 The major wool ports of Hull, Boston, Lynn and Yarmouth were deliberately excluded from this list in order to prevent the staples from being dominated by wealthy exporters. But this did not work. Both the ports and other inland towns resented the inconvenience and expense of taking wool to two separate places before it was ready for export.130 Although the staple towns themselves put up a vigorous defence of the system,131 the new government of Queen Isabella bowed to public opinion and abolished the domestic staples in 1328. They were revived briefly in 1332–4; but with the outbreak of the French war and the establishment of a series of monopoly companies, the staple was transferred to the Low Countries, and remained fixed there until the early 1350s.132
Because of its close association with the royal financiers and their restrictive practices, this foreign staple became unpopular not only with the producers and up-country merchants but also with many exporters. Consequently, when the farm of the customs was wound up in 1351, it was more or less inevitable that the staple would be transferred back to England. In June 1353 the government ordered the immediate establishment of a series of domestic staples to come into operation in September.133 Once again, these were to be fixed not in the major ports but at important inland towns. The king’s ministers then set about compiling a more detailed ordinance for the administration of the new system. The most important and novel of its regulations was that denizens would be deprived of the right to export wool. This amounted to a drastic but effective guarantee against the creation of further monopoly companies. To compensate for the loss of denizen exports, the government now offered an attractive package of legal and commercial privileges to alien merchants trading in England. The resulting Ordinance of the Staple was presented for ratification in the great council of September-October 1353.134
An integral part of this new deal was the reform of the cloth trade. During its earlier experiments with domestic staples the crown had normally given special incentives to cloth manufacturers;135 and as early as 1334 the men of Northampton had pointed out the positive impact that home staples could have on cloth sales.136 In 1337 the government implemented a range of measures designed to encourage foreign cloth workers into England and increase domestic output. These included the relaxation of the assize of cloth, an unpopular system requiring the forfeiture of any cloth that failed to conform to a scale of standard measurements.137 The worsted manufacturers of East Anglia in particular had complained bitterly about the harmful effects of the assize, and the upturn in exports of this cheap cloth during the 1340s probably owed much to the government’s policy of deregulation.138 For a short while in 1348–53 the crown seems to have contemplated a return to more restrictive practices. A short-lived cloth staple was set up at Calais,139 and the assize of cloth itself was reintroduced in 1351.140 But in the great council of 1353 the king was persuaded to abandon forfeitures in exchange for a sliding scale of excise charges on all cloth sold on the domestic market. This system continued in force until 1373, when a modified form of the assize was re-established.141 In commercial terms the concessions of 1353 undoubtedly worked, and there was a substantial increase in the production of cloth, and especially of the cheaper ranges, for both the domestic and foreign markets.142
Like most of the legislation of the early 1350s, the Ordinance of the Staple and the cloth regulations can be regarded as conciliatory measures designed to win back public confidence after the financial and political controversies of the 1340s. The government certainly went out of its way to demonstrate that it had parted company with the farmers of the customs. It reopened proceedings against Pole,143 and it generally refused to allow former colleagues of the monopolists to take posts of responsibility in the new staples.144 This is not to say, however, that the ordinance of 1353 was forced on the crown against its will. The new Count of Flanders was increasingly hostile towards England, and there was now little diplomatic justification for maintaining a staple in the Low Countries.145 Moreover, the crown stood to benefit substantially from the new deal by charging the higher alien rates of duty on all wool exports and collecting a small but useful revenue from the excise duty on cloth. Finally, the king had no intention of being permanently bound by the new regulations. The great council requested that the Ordinance of the Staple be confirmed in parliament, and in 1354 the commons in parliament asked that it should be enrolled as a statute ‘to last forever’.146 Edward conceded in part, and the legislation was exemplified on the statute roll along with a number of minor additions and alterations.147 Like so many other statutes passed in this reign, however, it was effective only so long as the government wished. The subsequent history of the wool staple helps to put the political concessions of the early 1350s into context, and suggests that, for all their control over financial matters, the commons were still somewhat reluctant to challenge the king’s right to regulate overseas trade.
The main problem with the new staple system was that it prevented English merchants from participating fully in the remarkable trade boom of the 1350s. In 1357 the king was asked to relax the ban on denizen wool exports, and native merchants were allowed to buy special licences to export wool at the alien rate of duty.148 It was now only a matter of time before a new group of exporter-capitalists emerged. In 1359 it was ordered that all wool shipments to the continent should be directed through Bruges,149 and in 1362 the government presented parliament with a proposal for the complete abandonment of the home staples and the setting up of a compulsory entrepôt at Calais. The commons’ response is of some interest: they could not agree among themselves on the matter, and suggested that the king should consult with the merchants.150 So long as the government summoned a broadly based merchant assembly like those of 1337–8 and 1342–3, the knights and burgesses were apparently quite content to offload responsibility for commercial matters. What they did not envisage, however, and what actually happened, was the transfer of the staple to Calais in 1363 on the sole authority of the king’s council, and the creation of a syndicate of twenty-six merchants who agreed to govern the town on the king’s behalf. This new company had no formal monopoly of the wool trade, but it was inevitable that its members would come to dominate commercial transactions in the new staple.151 Strictly speaking, the ordinance of 1353 remained in force: former English staples were still allowed to elect their mayors and constables and to operate the special legal services which had become indispensable to the trading community.152 But by failing to seize the initiative in 1362, the commons had undoubtedly suffered a severe setback to a policy pursued more or less consistently since the 1320s. It was only the revival of blatant monopolistic practices in the 1370s which forced them into action and finally convinced them of their responsibility to speak for the commercial interest.
In 1369 parliament met to authorize the resumption of war with France. Initial unease about the security of Calais meant that the staple was transferred back to England, although this time it was generally fixed in the port towns.153 But in August 1370 the government on its own authority reestablished the Calais staple, which remained in force for the rest of the reign. The English staples were no longer permitted to collect fees for checking wool prepared for export, and they ceased to have any real economic significance.154 But the removal of the basic administration to the ports suggested that if ever the wool staple should return to England it would inevitably fall under the control of the major exporters. This resulted in an interesting volte-face on the part of the commons. While former staple towns like Lincoln kept up the pressure for a return to the arrangements of 1353,155 the knights and burgesses in parliament now became enthusiastic supporters of the Calais staple.
Issue was finally joined over the government’s habit of selling licences to exporters allowing them to take their wool to other foreign ports. In 1372, 1373 and 1376 the commons claimed – erroneously, as it happened – that the Calais staple had been set up on the authority of parliament, and should not be evaded or repealed without their consent.156 In the Good Parliament it was revealed that Lord Latimer and Richard Lyons had sold so many export licences that both the prosperity and the defence of Calais were severely jeopardized.157 This charge proved vitally important, and was one of the main points on which Latimer and his associate were impeached. The future of the staple itself was not resolved in this assembly, and there was to be continuing uncertainty over where it should be held during the 1380s and 1390s. Contrary to their assertions, then, the commons actually had no established right to dictate the position or the business of the staple; and the ambiguity surrounding the legislation of 1353–4 allowed the crown considerable room for manoeuvre throughout the second half of the fourteenth century.158 On the other hand, the Good Parliament demonstrated very dramatically that it was the commons, not a handful of financiers, who now had the moral right to represent the merchant community before the king.
MERCHANTS AND PARLIAMENTS
The decline of the estate of merchants as a separate political force and the resulting increase in the authority of parliament can therefore be traced to a series of important events in 1348–53. After 1353, in fact, merchant assemblies became the exception rather than the rule.159 In June 1356, 170 merchants were called before the council, presumably to discuss the opening up of overseas trade to denizens; but significantly enough, this matter was actually decided in the ensuing parliament.160 Another meeting of representatives from the staple towns and from Calais was summoned in June 1361, apparently to discuss the king’s plans for the removal of the staple. Once again, however, there was no immediate outcome.161 After the resumption of the war in 1369 the government was content merely to invite those skilled in shipping to come before the council and discuss the defence of the seas.162 In 1373 the merchants made it quite clear that they did not regard these assemblies as representative of their will.163 Rather, it was parliament itself which now voiced their political concerns and demands. The petitions made in the name of the merchants in January 1348 proved the first in a steady trickle of such documents recorded on the parliament rolls for the rest of Edward III’s reign.164Sometimes these petitions may have been the work of separate groups meeting during sessions of parliament. In 1354, for example, it is known that certain unnamed merchants were summoned to parliament for the king’s ‘secret business’; and petitions were entered by both denizen and alien merchants in the course of this assembly.165 But such summonses do not appear to have been a regular occurrence. When Edward III’s last parliament addressed its petitions to the king in the name of the ‘prelates, dukes, earls, barons, commons, citizens, burgesses and merchants of his realm of England’, it was simply reflecting the assertiveness and exclusiveness of parliament as the only assembly which could speak for the whole community of the realm.166
In the light of such evidence, it is surely no coincidence that this period also witnessed a small but definite increase in the number of citizens and burgesses returned to sit in parliament. In 1355 the city of London was allowed the special privilege of sending four representatives to parliament, rather than the usual two.167 Meanwhile, other provincial towns apparently began to make more active use of their rights. Under Edward I, an average of eighty-six towns had made returns to each parliament, but the number had dropped to around seventy during Edward II’s reign, and apparently remained at that level until the 1360s, when it rose again to over eighty. The largest recorded attendance at a single parliament in the course of Edward III’s reign came in 1362, when at least 174 men, representing some eighty-six cities and towns, were elected to serve.168 Since there was no demonstrable change in the form of summons, it must be concluded that the decision to revive or demand rights of representation was a matter for local initiative. Unfortunately, the actual attendance rate of the burgesses at parliament is virtually impossible to calculate. But it is tempting to assume that the decline of separate merchant assemblies encouraged the towns to make more active use of their parliamentary representatives and allowed the provincial merchant communities so often excluded from Edward III’s credit transactions to make their presence felt in central politics.
The results can be measured by the number of matters of specific interest to the townsmen dealt with in the common petitions and statutes of the 1350s and 1360s. The new legislation of 1351 on the freedom of river traffic and the prevention of forestalling, the special provisions made in 1357 for the protection of Yarmouth’s fishing industry, the statutes of 1361 concerning trade with Ireland,169 the periodic discussions on how to regulate and protect the Gascon wine fleet,170 and the general requests that the king uphold the franchises of towns and cities:171 all these examples suggest that the burgesses, acting singly or collectively, had achieved considerable influence over the business of parliament. Their emergence into the very centre of the political arena was finally and dramatically acknowledged in 1376 when they joined in the Earl of March’s victory celebrations following the Good Parliament.172 In social terms the burgesses may still have been regarded as inferior to the knights of the shire; but the successful political alliance between these two groups had allowed the commons to emerge as a major force in English politics.
The relationship between the crown and the townsmen was therefore transformed in the mid-fourteenth century. Edward III came to rely increasingly on English merchants to provide the cash advances needed to fund his foreign wars. Few of these men had sufficient personal resources to lend large sums, and even major financiers such as Pole, Chiriton and Lyons could only realize the necessary financial capital by taking on special commercial privileges, acting as brokers for royal debts, or borrowing from lesser men. Consequently, their private deals with the crown affected a much larger number of merchants and had repercussions for almost all those involved in the production and export of English wool. The imposition of the wool subsidy and the location of the staple became matters of fundamental political importance and dominated relations between crown and parliament throughout the middle decades of the reign. The principal result of this conflict was the demise of the estate of merchants and the emergence of the commons as the mouthpiece of the business classes. Consequently, the crown’s earlier tendency to treat lay society as a series of separate committees or estates was abandoned, and parliament emerged as the only central representative institution with comprehensive authority over taxation and legislation. In this sense the middle years of the fourteenth century marked a turning point not only for the urban communities, but for the whole of political society.