Parliament and the Revenues

It was fortunate for Edward that parliament favored the war, for, since the confirmation of the charters, kings of England had to depend upon that body for an important part of their revenues. Parliament had undergone some important changes since 1295, when Edward summoned his people to meet him at Westminster. Then parliament had been composed of three estates, the clergy, the nobility, and the commons. But sometime during the ensuing half-century it had ceased to be an assembly of estates and had separated into two houses.

SEALS OF EDWARD III  

Before and after the assumption of the arms of France. On the seal to the left are the arms first borne by Richard when on the crusades. On the seal to the right may be noticed in addition the royal fleur de lis of France.

The clergy, as such, had ceased to attend, preferring to make their grant of money in their own convocation. The knights, sometime about 1330, had turned away from the nobles, to whom by origin they belonged, and had joined the burgesses. The reason for this is probably to be found in the fact that the knights who came from the shires saw their interests to be identical with those of the burgesses rather than with those of the higher nobles, who in Edward III's reign were already forming a separate social caste, closely attached to the court and the king. The knights, furthermore, were summoned by general writ addressed to the sheriff, and so, like the burgesses, were an elected body; while the lords were summoned individually by writs addressed to theirs name. Thus, by 1332 we find two houses, instead of three estates : a House of Lords, composed of the barons and greater clergy, the latter of whom sat, not as ecclesiastics, but as spiritual lords; and a House of Commons, composed of the knights and the burgesses.

For carrying on the war, parliament made large grants: between 1336 and 1340 it voted a fifteenth from the knights and barons, a tenth from the towns, and a tenth from the clergy ; in 1336 a wool tax of forty shillings a sack ; in 1338 half the wool of the kingdom ; in 1339 the ninth lamb, the ninth fleece, the ninth sheaf. In return, Edward made concessions. He abolished Englishry and the right of purveyance, and consented that parliament should impose all taxes and should see how the money was spent.' But parliament was inexperienced as a national council, and did not hold the king very strictly to his promises.

Sources of Edwards Wealth

What were the sources of wealth that made it possible for parliament to vote such heavy grants for the French war? We have been speaking of towns, burgesses, and wool. These words show that new economic interests were growing up side by side with the old agriculture. Up to this time the towns, which were the centres of trade, had aimed to keep the control of the business in their own hands, in order to prevent outsiders, or foreigners," from getting a share of it. Soon after the Conquest, merchant gilds had sprung up in the majority of towns, and each gild regulated, with great minuteness, trade and industry of every kind within the town. No one not members of the gild could do business in the town except under rigid conditions. Trade and commerce were entirely under the control of the town, that is, they were managed neither by individuals as such nor by the state. In the reign of Edward III the merchant gild began to give place to the craft gilds, of which there might be many in each town whereas there was never more than one merchant gild. The chief difference between these gilds lay in this, that the merchant gild controlled all the trading interests of the town, while each craft gild dealt only with its own particular industry. In time the craft gilds supplanted the merchant gild, and became equally exclusive and narrow in their policy. Trade still remained under the control of the towns, which in the fourteenth century were the chief centres of wealth in the kingdom.

The towns did business, of course, with other English towns, but they also traded with towns abroad. As yet, however, the English had no merchant ships and never went themselves to foreign cities, so that all buying and selling abroad was done by aliens. Furthermore, the right to engage in such foreign trade was conferred on certain specially favored aliens. The merchants of Flanders and northern France enjoyed a monopoly of the trade, and lived in England at the Steelyard, a fortified group of buildings in London on the bank of the Thames. Some of the privileges were later conferred on merchants of the Baltic cities composing the Hanseatic League. Edward III encouraged aliens to bring goods to England, and in 1335, granted freedom of trade to all outsiders. This unusually liberal policy was probably due to Edward's desire to increase his revenue from the customs, and to make it easier to negotiate loans from the aliens, while waiting for the money granted by parliament to be collected. But his scheme was premature; England was not ready for so free a trade, and the policy was reversed in 1392.

At the same time Edward sought to regulate a new exporting business that had grown up under his grandfather. For convenience, merchants were sending the most important or staple goods, such as wool, hides, leather, and tin, to one Continental city, whence they were dispersed. This gathering of exports in one city had many advantages ; the goods in transit were more easily protected against pirates,' the customs duties were more conveniently levied, and the business of buying and selling was more readily carried on. The men who exported these commodities were called Staplers, and the city to which they sent them was called the Staple. At first Edward tried a plan similar to that adopted toward aliens in England, that is, he abolished the Staple and allowed English merchants to send their wool and other commodities where they pleased. But this plan did not work well, and in 1341 he made Bruges the foreign staple town. Eight years afterward, however, for Bruges he substituted Calais, taken from the French in 1347. In 1353 he made ten towns in England, Wales, and Ireland staple towns, apparently in addition to Calais. But, in 1363, Calais became again the seat of the foreign staple, and remained until 1558 the chief centre of England's trade with the Continent.

The increasing wealth of the towns, largely due to the expansion of foreign trade, the greater revenue derived from export and import duties, and the rising credit of the kingdom, which made the negotiating of loans easier, gave Edward the money that he needed to carry on the French war.