III
The history of the Estate of Merchants during the seven
years that intervened between the crisis of 1347 and the
enactment of the Statute of Staples in 1354 may be briefly
outlined in the light of the above interpretation of the
preceding development By the spring of 1348 the resources
of the small group of English financiers who now furnished
the King's supplies were rapidly becoming exhausted, and
Edward was obliged to meet a Parliament in which, as we
have seen, the wool growers and the merchants were united in
their opposition to the restraints on the wool trade and to the
continuance of the maletote A grant of direct taxation for
three years was only to be obtained by a promise that the
illegal indirect taxation on wool should cease Whether under
normal circumstances the King would have fulfilled his
purpose is a point that is perhaps hardly worth discussion
But the circumstances were very far from being normal
The Black Death, which began its ravages in the autumn of
1348, must have greatly diminished the produce of direct
taxation, whilst it gave the King a good reason for not
meeting Parliament until 1351 That Edward therefore
should, in spite of his pledge, seek to retain his hold upon the
maletote is readily intelligible The main obstacle to success
in this direction lay in the impending bankruptcy of the firm
of Chiriton, Swanland and Wendlingburgh, which had been
financing the maletote and the purveyance of wool since 1346 (fn. 1)
As a means of staving off this eventuality the King, in March
1349, attempted to resuscitate an Estate of Merchants on the
lines of that of 1343, except that it was to consist of only half
the number of members He summoned to his counsels at
Easter (fn. 2) an assembly of seventy-six merchants in the hope,
apparently, that by authorising some of their number to take
over the farm of the subsidy, they would not only save the
financial situation but would conter a quasi-legality on the
maletote and provide some guarantee of its efficient collection
If this was the King's scheme it failed A body of thirty-two
merchants was indeed got together who undertook to be
guarantors for Chiriton & Co, but only four or five of them
had been amongst those summoned to the assembly, nor do
they appear to have possessed any other claim to a representative character A year later they were involved in the ruin and
disgrace which, sooner or later, overtook all the King's
creditors, (fn. 1) and the King himself, especially as the truce with
France was expiring, was again compelled to seek parliamentary sanction for his finance
The importance of these middle years of the fourteenth
century in the history of Parliament can scarcely be
exaggerated During the first half of the reign of Edward III
all the main features of our parliamentary constitution had
emerged, but none of them had attained fixity The exclusive
right of a properly constituted parliament, as distinguished
from a Great Council however summoned, to authorise
taxation, and its claim to initiate and determine legislation had
been repeatedly asserted by the Commons and clearly
acknowledged by the King But Great Councils in consultation with irregular assemblies of merchants had continued to
levy new taxation, the petitions of the Commons, even when
fully granted, had remained without statutory effect, and the
representative basis of the Commons, as determined by writs
of summons, had changed its character from one Parliament
to another The conflict on all these connected issues had
been clearly approaching a climax in the January and March
sessions of 1348, but the pestilence of the autumn had enabled
the King once more to repudiate his concessions and to reassume control over finance and legislation.
In view of what had happened, the parliament of 1351 could
hardly be expected to make a new grant of direct taxation in
the simple faith that the King would cease to impose the wool
tax Since the renewal of war necessitated further taxation it
was safer to authorise for a limited period the subsidy which
the King was certain to exact, and to extort in return as many
concessions and safeguards as possible.
This was the origin of the "free trade" enactments of
1351, (fn. 2) which, so far from embodying, as has been generally
supposed, a policy of plenty conceived and inaugurated by the
King (fn. 3) represent the protests made by the Commons against
the King's fiscal expedients in the past and the safeguards
adopted by the Commons against the repetition of those
expedients in the future The Commons pray that, "as the tax
of forty shillings on the sack of wool which the merchants
have granted to the King falls in no wise on the merchant,
but on the people, that it may please the King for the relief of
his people that the said forty shillings be not henceforth
demanded or levied, and that commission be not made for such
special grants except in full Parliament, and that if any such
grant be made outside Parliament it may be held as of no
effect And that all manner of merchants, poor as well as
rich, aliens as well as the King's subjects, the King's enemies
only excepted, may be free to pass with their merchandise
without being restrained by those who call themselves the
King's merchants or by any other individual as long as they
pay the King what is due And in case it please the King
in this his great necessity to have the aforesaid subsidy of
forty shillings for half a year or a year longer, may it please
him to show his will to the Peers and Commons of the land for
their comfort (fn. 1) "
The grant of the subsidy for two more years which the
Lords and Commons were ultimately induced to make was, it
is clear, the price paid for the King's consent to the Statute
in which their demands for freedom of trade were fully
conceded There were, however, three serious elements of
instability in the settlement thus attempted in 1351 In the
first place, the new statute, in empowering all merchants,
native or foreign, to buy and sell freely in all parts of the
realm, set aside, not merely the monopoly of a small group
of financiers, but the gild privileges enjoyed by a considerable
number of that middle section of the trading class from which
the Estate of Merchants had been mainly drawn In the
second place, the King was not likely to accept as final a
settlement which would not only deprive him in two years
time of his main fiscal resource, but would, in the meantime, if
strictly observed, prevent him from offering special terms to
any body of merchants in return for an advance on the
subsidy And in the third place, whilst free trade in wool
was nominally established, the staple at Bruges, in which that
trade had for ten years been concentrated, was still in operation
and possessed all the advantages of a highly organised market
It was this last condition that gave force to the other two,
as it enabled the King to negotiate once more with the
exporting merchants In the autumn of 1351 he obtained
£5,000 in advances upon the security of future subsidy from
over a hundred exporters In half a dozen cases the loans
were made by boroughs in their corporate capacities, including
Norwich, Lynn, and Coventry As early as April the aldermen
and certain leading commoners of London, on behalf of the
city, had given their consent to a much larger loan of 20,000
marks on the same security, but the main body of the
commoners had repudiated the action of their representatives,
and even brought two of them for trial at the Guildhall
Similar opposition to the assessment of the loan was
manifested at Coventry (fn. 3) and York (fn. 4) Without entering more
fully into the wider social and economic significance of these
municipal conflicts we may, I think, take it for granted that
the negotiations of the loans with the mercantile oligarchies of
the towns involved a deliberate infraction of the conditions
upon which the Commons had agreed to continue the subsidy
It foreboded in fact a renewal of the attempt to displace
Parliament by an Estate of Merchants, and it is this attempt
and its failure that afford the main clues to the constitutional
development of 1352-4, as recorded in the Rolls of Parliament.
The issues raised in the Parliament of January 1352 and
the Great Council of July 1352 have not been overlooked by
historians, but their bearing and importance become clearer
in the light of the previous history of the Estate of Merchants
and of the subsequent events of 1353-4 In opening the
January Parliament on behalf of the King, Chief Justice
Shareshill proposed that the Commons should delegate
twenty-four or thirty of their number to negotiate with the
great men of the Council This, it will be remembered, had
been the course adopted with the Assembly of Merchants in
1343, and the result had been to separate the interests of the
delegates from those of the main body of merchants The
Commons refused to derogate from their responsibility as an
assembly, and insisted on continuing to deliberate as a whole.
The other issue was the vital one of their legislative capacity
Again and again since the beginning of the war the King
had purchased supplies by granting the petitions of the
Commons, but no effective way had been found of giving
statutory force to those concessions or of preventing subsequent evasion of his promises by the King In 1348 the
Commons had requested that their petitions might be heard
by a committee of prelates, lords and judges in the presence
of four or six of their own members so that they might
be reasonably answered in the present Parliament and when
they were answered in full the answers might remain in force
without being changed (fn. 1) In 1351 the full text of the principal
statutes enacted in that year, including the Statute of
Labourers and the statute in which the "free trade" demands
of the Commons were embodied, was appended to the Roll of
Parliament As a precedent these steps were of great
consequence, but, measured by the standards of solid
constitutional achievement, they were no more than tentative
beginnings-the expressions of a tendency that might easily
be frustrated
From this point of view the procedure of the January
Parliament of 1352 is of great interest In making his appeal
to the whole Commons for a further grant of supply, after
their tacit refusal to negotiate through delegates, Chief Justice
Shareshill encouraged them to present to Parliament petitions
either for redress of grievances or for amendment of the law.
The Commons, after long consultations with their constituents
on the one hand, and with members of the King's Council on
the other hand, upon the two inseparable questions of supply
and the legislative redress of grievances, appeared again before
the King to present a roll in which a grant of two tenths and
fifteenths was made conditional upon a speedy and favourable
reply to a long list of forty-three petitions attached to the offer
It is true that according to the literal sense of the roll the only
absolute condition was the grant of the first petition, i e that
the fines levied for breach of the Statute of Labourers should
go to the diminution of the taxes, but there can be no doubt
that the favourable replies attached to the great majority of
the other petitions, including the full text of the new Statute
of Treasons, were clearly intended as part of the bargain and
recorded as such upon the Roll (fn. 1)
The solution of his financial problems which the King thus
achieved was but a temporary one Experience had shown
that the expense of the war which had now recommenced
required the simultaneous imposition of the wool subsidy
along with direct taxation Parliament had now made a
grant of direct taxation, whilst the wool subsidy previously
authorised had still a year to run, but the price of this
concession was the acknowledgment of its control over taxation
in future, and it was not at all likely to authorise the simultaneous renewal of both forms of revenue At this point there
was added to the problem a further complication The foreign
staple at Bluges which, through the organisation of a restricted
market, had rendered it possible for the King to secure not
only a high export tax on wool but also monopoly profits
in addition, was ceasing in the summer of 1352 to be
practicable owing to the growing hostility of the Flemings (fn. 2)
If the large revenue hitherto derived from the wool trade was
to be maintained some new arrangement must be made Staple
restrictions were not absolutely essential to the imposition of a
high subsidy, though they made its collection easier, but they
were essential to any scheme of monopoly, and the prospect
of sharing in monopoly profits had been the chief motive that
had induced successive assemblies of merchants to authorise
the subsidy, and to make advances on the security of it
The great majority of the native traders had found that
prospect to be illusory, and in recent parliaments their
denunciations of the staple at Bruges and the forms of
monopoly associated with it had been blended in a common
protest with the wool growers' denunciations of the subsidy
The abandonment of the Bruges staple which was becoming a
political and fiscal necessity might be represented as a valuable
concession with which the King might expect to purchase
some kind of parliamentary authorisation of the continuance
of the subsidy But such a bargain would be most likely
to be successfully accomplished in an assembly dominated by
the native traders, since their objections to the foreign staple
were stronger and their objections to the subsidy were weaker
than those of the wool growers Moreover, the separate
interest of the native traders, more especially those of the home
staple towns, would afford the most convenient basis for a new
arrangement for collecting the subsidy and for negotiating
loans
Some such considerations as these would at any rate serve
to explain the character and the sequence of the assemblies
called together in 1352-3, the Great Council of August 1352,
the Assembly of Merchants of July 1353, and the Great Council
of September 1353 It was in the last of these assemblies that
the Ordinance of the Staple was enacted, but the question had
very probably been under discussion in all three The
development of their representative character is therefore worth
noting Eleven boroughs and the Cinque Ports were represented in the first, twenty-three in the second, and forty-three
(including the Cinque Ports) in the third In the first and
second assemblies the towns represented were, with two or three
exceptions, ports or previously recognised "home staples,"
whilst in the final assembly over a dozen of the chief inland
centres of the wool trade were added (fn. 1)
From the constitutional point of view, however, the
character of these assemblies is determined not so much by
the narrower or wider representation of the mercantile element
as by the due subordination of that element to the larger
social interests that had come to find normal expression in
parliament The Great Council of July 1352, with its thirtyseven knights and fourteen borough members, was a miniature
parliament not much larger than the committee which the
Commons had been invited to appoint in the spring It
would doubtless have been a dangerous precedent for such a
body to have assumed the power of discussing the future basis
of taxation, but as the county members summoned were in a
considerable majority over the borough members, they would
be scarcely likely to sacrifice the interests of the wool growers
to those of the merchants The Great Council was probably
summoned to deal administratively with the threatened
stoppage of the Bruges staple, and as the re-establishment of
the home staples would, apart from the question of the subsidy,
be a popular measure, the King may have mooted the proposal
at this assembly, especially as all the boroughs represented, but
one, were included in the subsequent scheme But from the
King's point of view the "home staples" proposal was a
valuable concession to be sold to the highest bidder, and he
would not be likely therefore to begin serious negotiations
about it except with an assembly that would find it worth while
to offer a high price, i e with an assembly composed mainly
of merchants
In those negotiations two main stages are clearly indicated
by the calling of two quite distinct assemblies in July and
September 1353, but it is only the second of these bodies-the
Great Council-by which the ordinances of the staple were
fully discussed and finally approved that has left us any
account of its deliberations We may be quite sure that the
earlier assembly was called to consider the staple question,
but in what form this was done and what relation the proposals
laid before it or emanating from it bore to the later ordinances
must be entirely a matter for inference or conjecture In its
composition and the form of its summonses the assembly did
not differ from the bodies with which in 1337 and 1343 the
King had concluded his contracts of monopoly except that it
contained, along with seventy-one native wool merchants,
thirteen of the King's Italian and German creditors (fn. 1) The
possibility, therefore, that some project of monopoly was
considered and rejected by the assembly cannot be altogether
excluded On the other hand, it is to be noted that the
merchants summoned were not, as in the case of earlier
assemblies, largely from inland wool-producing districts, but,
with two exceptions, were all from staple towns or from the
ports, a fact which makes it extremely probable that they were
consulted in the drafting of the ordinances that established
the home staples It is indeed not impossible that the scheme
in its main features was drawn up by this purely mercantile
body and was afterwards submitted to the more parliamentary
assembly of September, partly in order to secure a greater
degree of sanction, but still more as a valuable concession by
which a continuance of the wool subsidy might be purchased.
Of the assembly that met at Westminster on September 23,
1353, Stubbs says "This body acted very much as a parliament it was in fact a 'magnum concilium,' including a
representation of the Commons except the beneficed clergy
it contained all the elements which were necessary to a
perfect parliament, but these elements were combined in
different proportions" (fn. 1) And Sir James Ramsay says "It
was in fact an expanded merchant assembly summoned to
sanction a change of mercantile policy" (fn. 2) Each of these
descriptions is true, but the whole truth is best expressed by a
combination of both In summoning eighty-two burghers
from forty-three towns specially selected for their interest in
the wool trade, and only a single belted knight from each of
thirty-seven shires, the King undoubtedly intended to give
such a preponderance to the mercantile element as would
facilitate his bargain about the subsidy and the staple, and it
is equally certain that by including the knights and the other
elements of a perfect parliament he hoped to secure parliamentary sanction for any bargain that was struck He was
successful in both these immediate aims, but if he hoped to
establish a precedent he was disappointed The Great Council,
it is true, " acted very much as a parliament", it authorised
a three years' continuance of the wool subsidy and it enacted
the Ordinances of the Staple But whilst consenting to
exercise temporarily the powers of a parliament, it showed in
two important respects an effective desire to safeguard the
rights of a properly constituted House of Commons Its own
attitude and procedure were those of a parliament, and not
those of an assembly of merchants, and it insisted that its
legislative action should be confirmed and recorded by a
parliament summoned on strictly constitutional lines (fn. 3)
The procedure adopted in regard to the enactment of the
Ordinances of the Staple constitutes perhaps the first formal
acknowledgment of the legislative power of Parliament The
ordinance as first presented to the representatives of the
Commons took the form, not of an administrative measure
framed primarily in the King's fiscal interests, but of a
remedy devised against a popular grievance-the admitted
monopoly of the King's financiers in the foreign staple It
had been drawn up by the prelates and great men of the
King's Council without the advice of the Commons, but now
that their assent was sought they were requested to put in
writing any amendment to the ordinance which seemed to
them desirable "And upon that the Commons demanded a
copy of the said points, which copy was delivered to them,
this is to say, one copy to the knights of the shires and
another to the citizens and burgesses And they, after great
deliberation, had between them showed to the Council their
opinion in writing, which writing, having been read and
debated by the magnates, the Ordinances of the Staple were
made in the following form 'Edward by the grace of God,
etc Inasmuch as after good deliberation with prelates,
dukes, earls, barons, knights of shires, and commons of
cities and boroughs, we have, by the counsel and common
assent of the said prelates, dukes, earls, barons, knights and
commons aforesaid, ordained and established' " (fn. 1)
From this it is clear that the Commons took an active part
in framing the ordinances From the actual provisions of the
ordinances, from the demands that they should receive
statutory form, from the later petitions of the Commons that
they should be thoroughly enforced, and from the indignation
of the Commons when they were set aside, it is equally clear
that they represented in the main a body of concessions made
by the King to his people at large This aspect of the matter
is somewhat obscured by the fact that the primary object
of the ordinances was the organisation of the home staples,
and this seems to be a fiscal concern of the King's Even on
this side, however, the purpose of the ordinances was to
displace an unconstitutional and monopolistic organisation of
foreign trade by an organisation which, whilst duly providing
for the collection of the revenue, would leave to buyer and to
seller the greatest possible amount of freedom Viewed as a
whole the ordinances of 1353, and the statute of 1354 may be
regarded as a re-enactment of the "free trade" statute of 1351
with the addition of elaborate machinery intended to secure
the practical realisation of the policy demanded by the
Commons Wool and hides, lead and tin must be taken
before exportation to the staples that they might be duly
cocketed and customed, but they might be bargained for freely
by native or foreign merchants in any part of the country,
and similar freedom was conferred upon the import trade in
wine, victuals and other commodities (fn. 1)
To this general demand for free trade there was a
remarkable exception which has been a stumblingblock to most commentators, but which is seen on
closer examination to be an exception that proves the rule
Native merchants were entirely prohibited from exporting
staple produce, (fn. 2) and a similar though not quite so complete a
restriction was placed on the native importation of Gascon
wines As the King gained by the higher rate of custom
paid by aliens on staple produce, it is possible to regard this
clause of the Ordinance entirely as a concession to his fiscal
interests But those who have followed the history of the
wool trade as it has been recorded will probably find no
difficulty in believing that the exclusion of the native exporter
was supported, not only by the wool growers, but by the
majority of native traders as a necessary safeguard on the
freedom of trade In the incurable division of interest which
this implies, and which was destined to endure for a generation
to come, the Statute of Staples may be considered as marking
the final collapse of the Estate of Merchants as a dangerous
rival to the House of Commons (fn. 3)