| 1 | A Scottish knight — Sir John Mercer — was imprisoned in England . |
| 2 | His son , in revenge , was harrying English shipping as far away as Cherbourg , and doing it to some purpose . |
| 3 | John Philpot , one of that new class of merchant financiers which the city of London was now producing , fitted , equipped and manned a fleet from his own resources , and captured the young Mercer in a brilliant Channel fight . It was naturally a highly popular victory with the Londoners , but it brought heavy censure from nobles who still believed that they had a monopoly of leadership . |
| 4 | But , at_last , Gaunt sailed . Opposing him was the French Admiral , Jean de Vienne — a great sailor and an able strategist . Obedient to the policy of his King , de Vienne avoided trouble at sea as cleverly as Du Guesclin avoided it on land . Gaunt was compelled to give up his search for an elusive foe , and , afraid to return home without something to show , he foolishly attempted to besiege the well_-_protected fortress of St Malo . This involved the dreary method of mining operations in which Gaunt , under the black Prince , had shown considerable skill at the siege of Limoges . When all seemed to be going well , a sortie surprised the Earl of Arundel , who at that moment had charge of the mine ; the mine collapsed , and with it Gaunt 's hopes of fame and glory . Gaunt was compelled to return to England a disappointed and now even despised failure . The ‘ ribald ’ Londoners , who cursed Gaunt as the murderer of Hawley , were also expressing their disappointment at the non_-_arrival of booty , and comparing the failure of a subsidized duke with the independent success of a London citizen . |
| 5 | These dreary years of ineffective fighting provide obvious morals for those who are judges long after the event . |
| 6 | It seems obvious that , though the longbows of yeomen could pierce the plate and mail of French knights , a brilliant battle was no substitute for a sound policy , and that , if archers had no target , campaigns became mere marauding route marches . |
| 7 | It seems obvious that if an expedition to Brittany was compelled to attack via Calais , then the primary essential to the success of the French war was a navy in unquestioned command of the Channel . |
| 8 | It seems obvious that divided forces were dissipating the advantages of a ring of bridge_-_heads which included Calais , Cherbourg , Brest , Bordeaux and Bayonne , and that there was no hope of final victory without a large_-_scale and concentrated invasion . |
| 9 | But none of these deductions were drawn at the time , because large_-_scale war required money , and the citizens who had the money were not yet sufficiently at one with nobles and King to think their money well spent in financing a ruling class which despised them . |
| 10 | The Commons were glad enough to enjoy the fruits of victory , they were not so eager to advance the needs of dynastic or baronial wars or even to provide the means for economic war , largely because it was not yet established that those who supplied means should also have control of ends . |
| 11 | In this cruel process which was hammering out nations on the anvils of war , there was a constant stirring of those in authority to find some simple way out_of the complicated financial impasse which always resulted , and in the story of the experiments and expedients to which the exchequer resorted is the story of the prelude to the peasants ' revolt of 1381 . |
| 12 | In appreciating this story , modern conceptions of governmental duties must be set aside . |
| 13 | A modern government needs taxation not merely for defence and offence but for a very wide range of social services . |
| 14 | A mediaeval oligarchy needed taxation in_order to supplement the private wealth of the monarchy ( the royal income from the revenues of crown lands , the fees of feudalism and the fines of justice ) and to provide enough cash to meet royal expenses , and especially the expenses of waging war . |
| 15 | Social service as a function of government was quite alien to mediaeval thought — its substitute was the mutual self_-_help of communities , whether those communities were monasteries , manors , townships , or wards and guilds of a city . |
| 16 | A mediaeval tax was therefore in essence a forced payment whose return was the uncertain bounty of booty and the vague advantages of military glory ; it was therefore always granted grudgingly and coupled with the vain hope that , in the words of parliament after parliament , the King might ‘ live of his own resources and carry on his war ’ . |
| 17 | When ‘ his ’ war did not bring victory and booty , a new group of Lords might oust the unsuccessful leaders , and the Commons , who usually supplied the hard cash , might be bold enough to demand the production of accounts , and even at times the impeachment of the unsuccessful . |
| 18 | But the Commons were not the people , and even a full parliament was not yet a true mirror of the nation . |
| 19 | The people — Langland 's ‘ folk ’ and Gaunt 's ‘ knaves ’ — were villeins still tied to the feudal obligations of work or villeins who had bought their release , free labourers who worked for the highest bidders , free yeomen who had prospered enough to become successful farmers , the artisans , craftsmen , journeymen and small tradesmen of the towns , and the retainers and men_-_at_-_arms in the pay of landed Lords . |
| 20 | None of these classes , except the yeomen , paid or expected to pay direct taxes . |
| 21 | During the fourteenth century , the traditional methods of financing the exchequer had become stabilized . |
| 22 | When the King and his council required additional funds , they were usually granted an export tax on the wool trade , collected by_means of that ‘ staple ’ system which ensured that prices , quality and tax could be efficiently supervised and controlled , together with a subsidy or tax on all movable property . |
| 23 | There were two other sources of public revenue — first , the Church , which wisely followed the lead of the Commons and in its own convocations granted equivalent contributions , and second , the foreign merchants , with whom the King 's officials had formerly made private bargains at ‘ colloquies of merchants ’ , and whose payments were now authorized by parliamentary sanction at a rate roughly fifty per_cent in excess of the rate for native merchants . |
| 24 | In addition to these revenues , the King had the financial benefits of his position at the head of the feudal system , as its chief landowner and the recipient of the fines of royal justice . |
| 25 | It was , therefore , a complicated and not very satisfactory financial system in which the borders between private and public purse were as ill_-_defined as the borders between private and national war , and in which the comparatively simple obligations of the feudal pyramid were becoming hopelessly involved with the complex bonds of trade and industry . |
| 26 | Furthermore , it had ceased to provide sufficient revenue for the needs of continental war . |
| 27 | It was a problem which had been worrying the servants of the royal household for some time — including those political clergy whom Wyclif had denounced — and , in the last year of Edward 3 's reign , they had devised an experiment to overcome their difficulties . |
| 28 | They had invented the poll_-_tax . |
| 29 | Every adult — defined as over fourteen years of age — except the beggar , was to pay a groat ( 4 d ) to the royal exchequer . |
| 30 | From the point of view of its inventors , it was a simple method of bringing the whole nation within the obligation of contributing to the glory and stability of the realm as a whole — or , as later centuries put it , ‘ broadening the basis of taxation ’ . |
| 31 | Its obvious injustice was that it assessed all men equally — the poor paid exactly the same as the rich ; but , as hitherto the poor had never paid anything , and as the rich still supplied the traditional revenues as_well , there was a case for a tax which took a_little from everybody . |
| 32 | On the other hand , there was the more relevant objection that not everybody had consented to the tax — the poor were not represented in parliament . |
| 33 | In the event , the first poll_-_tax of 1377 ( also called the ‘ tallage of groats ’ ) while naturally rousing much resentment , produced but meagre returns — there was as_yet no trained bureaucracy to make tax collecting either fair or productive . |
| 34 | Two years later , the inventors of the first poll_-_tax tried again . |
| 35 | In a great council held in February 1379 , the Lords had adopted the significant course of raising loans by compulsion on a large scale from many of the landowners , monasteries and towns — so desperate were the financial needs of the exchequer . |
| 36 | It was a drastic method of which much more was to be heard in later years , and it was followed by presenting the parliament called to Westminster at Easter with the necessity of repaying the loans . |
| 37 | The anger of the Commons was only appeased by the voluntary production of accounts which proved the desperate need for funds , and as a result the second poll_-_tax was agreed . |
| 38 | ‘ Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur ’ was an accepted legal maxim , but it was not yet carried to its logical conclusion — the people were still to be taxed by the Commons . |
| 39 | But this time there was a very interesting attempt to apply a sliding scale to the payments demanded . |
| 40 | The definition of an adult was altered to read ‘ over sixteen ’ , and , where the poorest were to pay a groat , the Duke of Lancaster and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York were to pay ten marks , and between these two extremes a graduated scale of payments was fixed for the different classes of laymen and clerics . |
| 41 | Again the resentment was widespread and the results disappointing — a tax estimated to yield <pound>50,000 in_fact raised only <pound>27,000 . |
| 42 | In the following year , 1380 , the last and most notorious third poll_-_tax was agreed by a parliament which met at Northampton . |
| 43 | There were dark reasons for a meeting so far away from the capital in a town with poor communications and not over supplied with hostelries and lodgings . |
| 44 | London was again in turmoil ; but this time over a question of trade rivalry . |
| 45 | A rich merchant from Genoa had been murdered , and John de Kyrkby , a Londoner , was one of those charged with the crime . |
| 46 | It is clear from the chronicles that this was a sordid quarrel between monopolists and interlopers . |
| 47 | The city merchants were jealous of foreign merchants who could tempt court and baronage with rarer luxuries than those within the scope of English traders , and whose prices could not be controlled in the interests of the city rings . |
| 48 | The chronicler Walsingham remarks that the Genoese 's chief crime was that he proposed to sell pepper at a mere 4 d the pound ! |
| 49 | At the same time , the news of the war was disheartening — a Breton expedition led by the Earl of Buckingham was not going well , and an expedition of Gaunt to Scotland was as unpopular as Gaunt himself . |
| 50 | At Northampton , the Commons might be more amenable — they could be faced with the realities of the financial situation , and urged to provide the means for a solution . |
| 51 | A sum of <pound>160,000 was demanded — a staggering figure to mediaeval eyes . |
| 52 | It was determined that <pound>100,000 was a fairer target , and the parliament agreed to find two_-_thirds of this sum providing the clergy supplied the remainder . |
| 53 | The method of assessment to which the Commons agreed was that of the first poll_-_tax . |
| 54 | The manifest injustice of this method had been to a certain degree corrected by the sliding scale of the second poll_-_tax , but this lesson was ignored , and the injustice trebled in weight by a flat_-_rate tax at treble the rate — every adult had to pay three groats , but this time an adult was re_-_defined as anyone over fifteen . |
| 55 | Trebling the rate was arrived at by a simple arithmetic which argued that , as the first poll_-_tax had supplied <pound>22,000 , a tax of three times the rate would produce <pound>66,000 . |
| 56 | The only concession made in view of the objections to the first two poll_-_taxes was the suggestion that the rich should help the poor — but this was only a pious hope because no machinery was provided for carrying it into effect , and a subordinate clause went far to nullify what small effects it had — no man and wife together were to pay more than twenty shillings , a restriction which applied to the generous rich as_well_as to the mean . |