It was a characteristic of all governments of the Middle Ages to grow in size and scope. Since no government can exist without financial support, as personnel grew and documentation increased, so government became more and more expensive. Within those rising expenses the costs of war can be seen to have played a major part. The demands of war, now becoming more frequent and more prolonged, rose from the late thirteenth century onwards, to the point when, two centuries later, war might account for between half and two-thirds of public receipts and expenditure.
It is undeniable that not only in France and England, but in other parts of Europe such as Spain and Italy, the graph of public military expenditure rose very sharply in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. In some respects there was nothing new in this. In England, for instance, the need to provide some paid troops had been recognised in the mid-twelfth century; more had been progressively spent on war ever since the beginning of the thirteenth century, which had witnessed fiscal innovations in the reign of King John, whose financial resources for the task of saving Normandy were already inadequate. But it was the final quarter of the thirteenth century which, in both France (involved in war in Aragon, Flanders, and Aquitaine) and in England (taken up in conflict in France, Wales, and Scotland), witnessed an increase in war taxation on an unprecedented scale. In England, this rise in expenditure was part of a wider difference between Edward I and his great nobility on the matter of their obligation to render him military service abroad; while in France, in the years 1302–4, Philip IV raised considerable taxation from his subjects in commutation for their obligation to serve him in the defence of the country. Generally speaking, the English king had an advantage over his French counterpart at this period. France had been involved in relatively few wars in the course of the thirteenth century; England, on the other hand, had been involved in both Wales and Scotland, a practical experience, both in the raising of troops and in securing material payment for them, which was to prove invaluable in the early years of the Hundred Years War.
We need to know why and how such historically significant developments took place. In France the thirteenth century had witnessed a gradual advance in what was regarded as a vassal’s obligation, from defence of his lord (the king) to defence of the crown (thecorona) and, by the end of the century, defence of the kingdom (the regnum).6 In the last case the kingdom could mean both a physically delineated area of land and a concept, the common welfare of those who inhabited it. Both meanings were important, but, perhaps because it was a reality which could be expressed in conceptual terms, more could be made of the notion of the common welfare. Emphasis was placed upon the general obligation to contribute, either directly through personal service or indirectly, through taxation, to the defence of that welfare. In exceptional circumstances, such as in moments of attack from without, the king, responsible for the protection of those under his charge, could demand help which none, either privileged or exempted, could refuse. War, or threatened invasion of territory, came to constitute an emergency, which necessitated an immediate and unsparing response. When the king judged that a state of common peril had been reached, his subjects, concerned for the common welfare, were expected to fulfil their obligation, both towards it and towards their ruler, by giving unstinted assistance in whatever form it might reasonably be sought.
The lord who issued the summons or demanded the tax was the king acting as curator of the kingdom as a whole. But this did not mean that the best interests of the kingdom might not be served at a local level. It was the king of England who called out the local ‘reservists’ to counter an attack upon the maritime lands; likewise the king of France might authorise a local tax, as Charles VI did in April 1383 when he ordered the people of Perigueux to tax themselves for three years at a rate of 5 per cent on goods sold within their jurisdiction, the money raised to be employed towards the repair and improvement of the defences of the town, at that moment in an area threatened by the English. Furthermore, the text reveals, the raising of such a tax had been carried out locally for some time without royal approval: in pardoning the people this technical offence, the king made it clear that over-all direction of matters of defence, even at a very local level, should be carried out under royal supervision. When, in March 1441, the people of Dieppe sought permission from Charles VII to tax their commercial activities in order to pay for their town’s fortification, they emphasised to him that they dared not do this without royal permission, and that accounts of the sums collected would be made available to the royal captain. Local defence was thus seen in the wider context of the defence of the country as a whole, and as a matter to be controlled by the crown. The implications of this were clear. War, even its local ramifications, was becoming a matter of state.
In France, what had happened under Philip IV to make the nation responsible for giving all assistance to the king, his lieutenants and officials in times of recognisable peril to the community came to be accepted during the first half of the fourteenth century as the norm, in spite of a short period of protest in 1314 and 1315 when the newly-evolving doctrines clashed with local interests and privileges, especially in Normandy. But one important matter was not yet clear. What would happen if there were a period of no recognisable peril, not to speak of a truce or peace? Could taxes, justified in time of war, be imposed in changed circumstances? And if imposed and collected, but not yet spent, what would happen to them if hostilities ceased? The question was first formally raised in 1298 by Pierre d’Auvergne who argued that once the cause for levying taxes had passed, then they should no longer be raised, since the cause for their being raised no longer existed or applied (‘Cessante causa, cessare debet effectus’).7 Implied here was the notion that taxes were exceptional, and were only to be raised in emergencies. What constituted an emergency was something to trouble the conscience of the king and his advisers. But one thing, already clear by the end of the thirteenth century, became even clearer by the end of the next generation: the king’s subjects would pay taxes only in time of real military crisis (hence the need to declare war formally) and they came to demand refunds (which they received in 1302, 1304, 1313, and 1314) when taxes paid were not used because of an early cessation of hostilities. Not surprisingly the cynical argued that it was best not to pay until there was peace: then there would be no reason for paying at all!
Under the Capetians prolonged war was exceptional. The conflict between Valois and Plantagenet, however, changed all that. From the time in, say, 1325 when the principle of ‘cessante causa’ was still applied, it would be only some thirty years or so before another principle, momentous in its implications, would quietly win acceptance: the right of the ruler to raise permanent and general taxation. There can be little doubt that it was war and its needs which constituted the major cause in bringing about this change. In France the war against England led to a great and probably unforeseen extension in the financial demands made by the crown upon the country. Most influential was the need to raise the ransom promised to the king of England by the terms of the treaty of Brétigny. The financial millstone which the ransom represented (some sixty years later Henry V was still demanding that it should be paid off in full) was the first and most important factor in justifying the French crown in the logical development of its fiscal policy, the making permanent over a period of years, and in peace time, of a tax raised to satisfy a major expense of war, the ransoming of the king.
To this a second factor came to make its own contribution. Although the decade 1359–69 may appear as a period of relative peace in France, it was also the period in which the Companies showed themselves most active, resulting in the urgent need to raise funds required to build defences against this new social scourge. In this case, if the authorisation to raise taxes came from the centre, the levy and expenditure was largely local. The importance of this, however, lies primarily in the fact that whole areas of France were continuously subject to demands for greater sums in taxation. It might be some consolation that monies thus raised would probably be spent locally, for this undoubtedly encouraged people in their willingness to pay, in some places considerably more than in time of open war against the English. What seems certain is that the meeting of such regular demands, together with the raising of contributions towards the royal ransom, gradually made people accustomed both to the idea and the practice of taxes raised for the common good.
In England the story was not radically different. As already suggested, the wars against Scotland had accustomed the population to the payment of taxes for war. It was a fact, too, that English people had for some time been used to paying direct taxation on moveable property and that from about the time the war against France began in Edward III’s reign such subsidies, standardised in value in 1334, with each local community paying a sum which it divided among itself, were regularly granted by Parliament. In England, as in France, the 1360s (paradoxically the period of relatively restrained military activity) witnessed the most telling developments. In 1362 and 1365 to save the king’s ‘estate and honour’ (in fact to help pay for the defence of Calais, Aquitaine, and the Scottish border) Parliament voted a wool subsidy, followed in 1368 by a further two-year subsidy, again on wool. In 1369, inspired by fears of possible attacks on Calais and English coastal counties, the lords and commons jointly authorised yet another, this time a three-year, levy on wool, in effect the imposition of an indirect tax to meet an alleged deficit in the royal finances. It is clear that such decisions constituted a recognition of general obligation to pay for the country’s defence in peacetime. Thus both England and France were reaching a broadly similar stage in the development of their respective taxation systems at much the same time.
One great difference between the Middle Ages and later times was that the medieval state scarcely used the credit system to start wars. A ruler, wrote the English Dominican, John Bromyard, about 1360, ought not to embark upon a war unless he could reasonably expect to pay for it, a view which would have been widely accepted at the time. From the very first steps, the practical need to have cash readily available imposed itself. The custom of paying indentured soldiers a ‘prest’ (or prêt or imprestanza), an advance on their wages to enable them to pay for their equipment, placed a considerable burden upon the king. Such an example underlines the need to raise money quickly, and in part explains the great difficulties experienced by Edward III when his cash resources ran out in 1341. What, then, was available to a ruler bent on war? He could farm out the collection of a tax which had been authorised: this had the advantage of bringing the money in quickly, the disadvantage that the farming system was open to abuse and was consequently unpopular. The grant of a loan, in itself a form of taxation since the ruler had use of the money for what was sometimes an indefinite period, was also a common practice: for this to work, the king’s credit had to be good, so that even so great a grantor of credit as Cardinal Beaufort had one of his loans to Henry V formally recorded in the Roll of Parliament to ensure repayment. The practice of ‘advancing’ the date by which a subsidy should be collected was also employed: Parliament had to ask Henry V not to continue doing this when, half way through his reign, his need for money suddenly grew. Finally, there was the practice of debasement carried out by princes whose prerogative it was to decide the value of currency. By 1295 Philip IV, in urgent need of cash, was using this method which he undertook to end by 1306, but only in return for the promise of a subsidy. Such manipulations of currency, which were not difficult to arrange, were particularly unpopular among the nobility and clergy whose revenues came largely in prearranged sums from landed sources; the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, especially those who derived their wealth from cash sources based on trade, were less alarmed. None the less, for all its short-term advantages to the crown, debasement was a divisive factor in society, a weapon to be used only in times of extreme crisis. As might be expected, the practice gradually disappeared as other resources of royal revenue became more widely and permanently established.
Taxation was basically of two kinds. Direct taxes were those raised on an assessment of sources of wealth, both fixed and moveable. In England, mainly since the reign of Edward I, such taxation had been granted with regularity by Parliament. In France, the practice of direct taxation did not come into being until the reign of Philip IV, Edward I’s contemporary. On a number of occasions during his reign subsidies were raised in time of war or threatened war, in 1295 at the rate of 1 per cent (centième), in 1296 at double the rate (cinquantième), the levies being regarded as alternatives to military service, thereby linking taxation closely to war. A hearth tax (fouage), which townspeople paid at a higher rate than their country neighbours, and the rich more than the poor, was also levied; in 1355 it was decided that 100 hearths should pay for a man-at-arms and an archer. The tax, however, bore heavily on the people, and in his last years Charles V tried to grant remissions or reductions to communities known to him to have suffered particularly from the war. One of his very last acts, as he was dying, was to abolish it altogether.
In both France and England the clergy contributed to national taxation. In the last years of the thirteenth century clerical taxation had become a cause célèbre between Pope Boniface VIII, Philip IV, and Edward I: should the clergy contribute to royal taxation? By the early years of the fourteenth century, however, the obstacle of clerical immunity had been largely overcome and the clergy contributed substantial sums when asked to do so.
It was, however, through indirect taxation that the war, both in France and, in particular, in England, was chiefly to be funded. In France the need to raise money in 1341 led, at a time of truce when direct taxation could not be justified, to the establishment of the salt tax (gabelle), which was to last until the French Revolution. If everyone needed salt, other taxes on consumption, principally drink (the medieval value-added tax) were unpopular among the poor who could less well afford than could the richer classes taxes which all had to pay and which were most easily collected in towns, in which they contributed a high proportion of urban taxation, six times more in 1360 than in 1292. Loans, too, were a form of taxation which might be extracted from both individuals and institutions. In England, for instance, royal officials were on occasion expected to forego their salaries which were withheld as contributions towards seeing the government through a financial crisis. On a different scale were the loans occasionally demanded from towns and, in particular, from the city of London to help pay for the war. For if war were to lead to economic advantage, the better pleased and more enthusiastic the towns – and principally the ports – would be.
The ports, much more firmly under royal control in England than in France where, for most of the war, the king did not have regular access to his own coastline, were the collecting points of what was to prove the most lucrative of all forms of indirect taxation, customs dues. Here, the contrast between England and France was very marked. France, more self-sufficient than England, depended less than did her rival upon import trade through her ports, and it was to be only in the sixteenth century that France imposed duties on incoming goods, although exports were taxed in the fourteenth century, especially after 1360, when the need to raise money to pay for King John’s ransom began to make very great demands upon the country. In England, however, the situation was different, taxes being levied on both incoming and outgoing trade. Ever since the end of the twelfth century English kings had been making sporadic, but increasing, use of wool as the basis for an export tax which was becoming more profitable and which, after 1275, came firmly under the control of the crown. By the fourteenth century, perhaps one third of the English king’s revenue came from the export tax, chiefly on wool, wool hides and skins, while tunnage and poundage, the tax on wine and other merchandise raised to protect trade, was becoming increasingly regular and lucrative by the end of the century. We may feel that the French king had, to a certain extent, missed an opportunity; certainly the kings of England must have rejoiced at the contrast in practice which brought them such advantage over their French counterparts.8 Indeed, had it not been for the large sums raised from trade, England’s smaller population and more restricted resources could not have supported a foreign war for so long.
Taxes voted to the crown had to be collected and managed. New taxes would require new methods of organisation to make the most of what was coming to be increasingly regarded as public money, or ‘la pecune publique’. Under the Valois, attempts were made to impose a degree of centralisation upon fiscal measures, particularly in the 1370s. New offices were created. Salt was placed in the hands of grenetiers, many of whom farmed their position; after 1355 élus were appointed to élections, districts in which they acted as assessors of taxes; for the settling of disputes arising out of demands for indirect taxation, a special cour des aides was established in 1390; while a trésorier des guerres oversaw the general problems of handling war finances, in particular the payment of armies.
In England the system, which had already proved itself in war, was to be less in need of radical innovation. The accounting system which has come down to us through the public records shows that while expeditions under the command of royal lieutenants were normally financed through the Exchequer, those led by the king himself were organised by a department of the royal household, the Wardrobe, whose work was to be, in Tout’s words, ‘the executive agent in the field’. Sometimes assisted by another household department, the Chamber, the Wardrobe, with an expanded staff, ordered the levy of troops, the purchase of horses, stores and equipment, and was, in addition, closely involved in the diplomatic business of the king, as was appropriate for a body so close to the royal person and members of his council staff who, together, were responsible for decisions regarding war.
But we should not think of the English war machine, in its financial aspects, as completely traditional and unreformed. The publication by Edward III in July 1338 of the so-called ‘Walton Ordinances’ was an attempt to make efficient the government of England, and that included the administration of war. The emphasis was on saving, on ‘value for money’, and on the use of the audit to control expenditure in both war and diplomacy, as the appointment of a special treasurer for war was intended to show.9 Time would prove that the system was not always reliable and was open to abuse. None the less, the use of essentially household departments to finance and organise war, traditional as they may have seemed, enabled the king and his councillors to keep in close touch with those responsible for the huge background effort which war required, and which is all too easily forgotten. That such a successful soldier-king as Henry V should have used the Wardrobe as his basic financial and administrative unit in organising and fighting war speaks a good deal for at least the efficiency of the system, however uninnovative it may appear.
In both England and France, we may be sure, war gave a great boost to the development of centralised institutions and to the royal authority. Equally, it should be emphasised that not all public expenditure related to war was the direct result of centralised intervention or initiative. French historians have, of late, stressed the important factor that in their country there existed two financial systems, one national, the other local, which worked side by side, and which were built up together. This should cause no surprise, given the importance of the region or province in the French political structure. Opposition to the raising of taxes which might be spent in another part of the kingdom militated against involvement in a war being fought perhaps hundreds of miles away. Equally, only when their region and, consequently, their common profit was threatened, were people ready to act. Indeed, it can be argued that the piecemeal and local nature of war dictated by both the English (the enemy from without) and by the Companies (the enemy from within), to say nothing of the very local character of the civil war which dominated so much of Charles VI’s reign, encouraged people to see war in local, rather than national, terms, and that this led naturally to the need for the reaction to come from local initiatives and to be based on local wealth.
The system which was developed in the second half of the fourteenth century fits into this pattern. In some places rudimentary local taxation already existed by 1340. What was lacking was the ability and authority to lay hands upon sufficient financial resources to build, repair, and maintain local defensive systems (principally walls) which constituted the only reasonable form of defence in the war which the enemy was waging. How were these needs to be met, and who was to pay? The answers emerged fairly quickly. Generally speaking, the regions were left to organise their own defence within an over-all, national plan. As to who would pay, the answer was to be broadly the same: the regions and, in particular, the towns. This led to significant developments. Meetings or regional estates voted sums which, by royal authority, could be spent in those same regions. On occasions the crown presented towns with gifts of money to help in a particular crisis: sometimes a local lord did the same. But usually such a royal gift was only the paying over of part of a levy already collected for their own defence to those who had paid it. In a word, although this seemed like outside help, such sums, like that granted to the people of Rodez in 1367, were only helping the citizens to help themselves.
In large measure, money spent on local projects of urban defence had been raised locally. Loans sought from both town-dwellers and those who had property there, but lived outside the walls, frequently raised considerable sums: almost 2,000 écus at Tours and some 4,500 écus at Reims in 1358. But the major contribution (some 61 per cent at Tours in 1358) came from the imposition of local taxes (aides) upon a variety of goods and services: on salt, on wine, and on rents raised on property in the towns, the rate being 10 per cent at Tours in 1364, 20 per cent at Dijon in 1412, the greater sum being levied upon absentee landlords who might not otherwise contribute towards the needs of defence.
In England, too, there were examples of local measures being employed in addition to national ones. Of these murage, first raised in 1220 at a time of threatened invasion from France, was the principal one. This tax, levied upon the sale of goods entering a town, was authorised by the crown and was collected and administered locally, accounts being submitted to the king. As in France, in this case by raising a levy on local trade, an attempt was made to force contributions from the wider community. As in France, too, a direct sales tax such as murage was not the only form of levy imposed for the building of walls. In the fourteenth century taxes on local property were raised: likewise the king could remit what was owed to him in fee-farm, customs dues, or profits of justice. In 1382 the people of Colchester, in their search for saving on communal expenditure, obtained exemption from sending a representative to Parliament for the next five years (an exemption later renewed until 1410), the savings thus made being spent on the building of walls around their town.10
In both France and England it is clear that help was given to encourage local initiatives. It would be a mistake to think that the war was directed from and paid for by Paris or Westminster alone. The reverse of the coin should not be forgotten, for it showed that local autonomy, energy, and initiatives were all exercised for the best purpose, the defence of the common good itself.