Social, Political and Economic Context

Set in a broader context, the reign of Edward III can be seen not, as Langland might have viewed it, as a slow decline into tyranny and corruption despite all attempts at reform, but as yet a further stage on the road levelling the playing field not just between King and aristocracy but between aristocracy, gentry and peasantry. In the Black Death or the wars with France and Scotland, knight and ploughman died alike, whatever the trappings of their funerals or tombs. Death did not discriminate between palace and mud hut, and there is nothing so effective as death to emphasize that rich and poor share a common destiny, however much the rich may wish otherwise. Even without the great pestilence of the 1340s, Edward’s ambitions in France far overreached the capacity of his Exchequer to finance his campaigns. Just as in the 1290s Edward I had proceeded from hubris in Wales to nemesis in Scotland, so now, once again, the greed for glory and dominion threatened thrombosis to a royal administration starved of the blood supply of tax.

Demands for ever higher subsidies to pay for the King’s wars merely excited the Commons, the aristocracy and such new phenomena as the self-governing oligarchies of towns or trades to combine in developing means to defy the King. Rhetoric, the writings of John Wycliffe, in which such institutions as the established Church were brought into contempt, was matched to a new willingness by Parliament to take practical steps to control the executive, and it is highly significant that the chief voices calling for restraint both in Church and state, however much they have been orchestrated by courtiers such as John of Gaunt, now came from the lower clergy and from simple laymen. Where we learn most of the evils of the early Plantagenets from monastic chroniclers, from the letters of great churchmen such as Thomas Becket, or from the Bible commentaries of Archbishop Stephen Langton, all of them written in Latin and therefore veiled behind the polite conventions of a learned tongue, by the late fourteenth century we can turn to an entire literature of protest, now expressed in the English vernacular itself distinct from the French of the King’s court.

Moreover, the subversion of royal authority continued to gather pace, as the King’s dependence upon subsidy and customs duties became habitual. The introduction of customs on wool exports in the 1270s, their raising to unprecedented levels in the 1330s (when the ‘maltote’ of 40s a sack which Edward I had tried but failed to impose in 1297 became not only accepted but standard), the recognition after the 1290s of Parliament’s authority to grant or withhold tax, and the demand, from the 1340s onwards, and again as a result of the French wars, that such taxes be bestowed on a near-annual basis rather than as occasional subsidies to a King in theory expected to live off his own resources in land and the profits of lordship, served initially to gorge the King’s executive with cash. But the cash itself was then squandered on foreign adventures whose essential futility merely excited resistance to further taxation.

Warfare was to some extent a joint-stock enterprise between King and aristocracy, with large profits for those who supplied the armies, ransomed the more valuable hostages or seized the most valuable prizes. Even so, the costs of fourteenth-century taxation fell ultimately upon the land and upon that class of peasant farmer or labourer whose silver was demanded by their lords in increasing quantities but who themselves gained least from either taxation or warfare. This was an age before old age pensions, before a ‘health service’, before the recognition of any public duty to alleviate the effects of poverty or unemployment. The tax ‘take’ was miniscule compared to that of the modern state, but the profits of taxation were almost exclusively targeted towards the pride, glamour and honour of a King whose subjects gained very little from their sovereign’s glory. As in late Soviet Russia, public display and a massive ‘defence’ budget took priority over all other economic considerations. The ‘state’ in medieval England, save at times of particular crisis or royal incompetence, remained very much the servant of the King.

By the time of Edward III’s death in 1377, the Plantagenets had precious little profit to show for the past forty years of warfare and profligate expenditure in France. The heavier customs duties charged on wool, the decision (motivated in part by a desire to make the garrisoning of Calais a self-financing operation, in part by the selfish interests of those wool merchants working in close cooperation with the court) to establish the Company of the Staple at Calais to tax English exports of wool but to allow foreign merchants to buy wool at English markets and to export it in their own ships untaxed, had already begun insidiously to undermine the taxable profits of an industry which had traditionally defined England as a land of wool and hence of wealth. The Chancellor of England now sat on a woolsack, yet another new symbol of Englishness and of English pre-eminence destined for a long posterity. Meanwhile, in part as a result of demography and the falling population, in part as a result of economic incompetence, the woollen industry itself went into decline.

Rather than export wool at the rates now offered by the Staple in Calais, wool growers turned from foreign markets to the domestic production of cloth. The great trading entrepôts of Flanders and northern France themselves faced economic catastrophe as the cloth industry was transformed from a long-distance into an increasingly localized trade. In the process, the King’s profits, both from tax and from customs duties, began themselves to decline. Wool exports fell from an annual average of 32,000 sacks in the decade after 1350 (each sack being measured as twenty-six stones of wool, so comprising a total export of over eleven million pounds of raw wool by weight), to under 24,000 sacks in the 1380s, 14,000 by 1420, sinking thereafter to 9,000 sacks for the thirty years from 1430 to 1460 (just over three million pounds of wool by weight).

By the 1440s, cloth exports had overtaken the export trade in wool. All told, the King’s revenues from customs and tax declined from an average £70,000 in the 1360s, to £45,000 by 1400 and less than £30,000 in the decades after 1430. As with the lack of strategic thinking devoted to the wars in France, the central failure to grasp economic realities, or to address the declining revenues of the crown, was to have fateful consequences in the longer term. A government which attacks the basis of its own tax revenues, which fails to protect the industry upon which it relies for its financial survival, which mortgages its future revenues on the international money markets, and which spends the money thus borrowed on futile wars or a display of the state’s largesse is heading very rapidly for economic and social disaster. Aquitaine or the kingdom of Castile, the objects upon which were lavished the proceeds of the Edwardian fiscal state of the 1360s and 70s, were as remote from the interests and perceptions of most Englishmen of the fourteenth century as the Falkland Islands or the mud and dust of the Euphrates or the Oxus from those of English taxpayers of a mere recent era.