CHAPTER VI

THE CROWN INTERVENES

EDWARD I. was the first king of that England which came into being after the Norman Conquest who identified himself with the English nation, devoted himself to a Beginning national ideal, and applied his policy to national of National consolidation. National consolidation was the Regulation. last thing of which his two immediate predecessors had dreamed; and before them, even to the two first Henries, England was rather a province in a much more extensive dominion than a nation. Previous kings had concerned themselves with the strengthening of their personal ascendency, with the administration of justice, and with their relations to other potentates, especially the Pope and the King of France. But they had not concerned themselves with commerce, because commerce had not yet made its importance manifest. Their interest in economics had practically been confined to seeking devices profitable to the royal exchequer— the exaction, and where possible the extension, of the claims of the Crown on the pockets of the subjects of the Crown. They had not thought of developing national wealth as a function of government or as a method of increasing their personal sources of supply; they had not thought of commerce as either an object or a weapon of diplomacy.

But from the time of Edward 1. commerce began to be not merely an incidental, but a natural and normal matter of State regulation for State purposes. It became a factor in the constitutional problem at home and in international relations abroad. In their spontaneous and undirected development, commerce and industry had hitherto progressed

on strictly local lines, till they had reached a stage when their further effective development demanded something like national organisation. Constitutional progress had simultaneously reached a stage when the finances of the State, which meant the finances of the Crown, also demanded organisation on national lines. Under the auspices of the greatest of the Plantagenets these two movements reacted on each other in producing a development of commerce fostered and regulated by the Crown and parliament. The development and the regulation of commerce were both intimately bound up with the constitutional development, so far at least as that was concerned with taxation and finance. We have to realise in the first place that the revenue of the State and the revenue of the king were not distinguishThe Royal able. There were public charges which were not Revenue. borne by the revenue at all. Neither the feudal levies nor the shire levies, when the king went to war, were charged upon the revenue; the services of bridge-building and the maintenance of fortresses and roads-what had been included under what was called the trinoda necessitas in Saxon times were obligatory upon the freemen. But war involved heavy expenses beyond what these obligations covered. These expenses had to be met by the treasury, and it was to this end that the danegeld, originally levied as ransom money by Ethelred, was appropriated. The theory was that the central government was the king's government, and wars, especially on foreign soil, were the king's wars, for which the king must pay. The king had a sufficient revenue to live' of his own' under ordinary circumstances, but under exceptional circumstances he must raise an extra revenue.

In order to live' of his own,' the king's revenue was derived mainly from two sources, the royal manors, and the recognised fines and fees which he was entitled to claim from his feudatories by feudal law. To these was added the practically arbitrary exaction of the danegeld or land-tax, theoretically for military purposes. In the reign of Henry II. a tax was for the first time imposed upon

Taxes.

movables; that is, roughly speaking, upon personal property as opposed to real property. This was known as the Saladin tithe, because the object of it was the equipment of a crusade for the recovery of Jerusalem, which the great Sultan had recaptured. Henry II. was also responsible for another new and very important impost, called scutage, whereby the feudatories were permitted to substitute payment for personal service in the field—much as they were permitting the villeins to substitute payment for agricultural service.

The Saladin tithe and scutage were neither of them arbitrary exactions, the one being imposed by assent and the other being a voluntary arrangement. Unscrupulous monarchs, however, had found various excuses for appropriating other sources of revenue. Thus William Rufus in particular had habitually refused to fill vacancies in Royal bishoprics and abbacies, and had seized the Devices. revenues for himself while he kept the posts vacant. Feudal rights, which were intended merely to secure to the lord efficient control over his vassals, were wrested into instruments of tyrannical extortion until Magna Charta approximately defined the legal limitations to the exactions of the Crown, and required the assent of the council to further taxation. Still, the limitations of the Charter, several times repeated with variations, did not cover the whole field, being in the main directed against forms of taxation which touched the barons directly. The Crown continued to find warrant for exacting contributions from particular localities, and by way of bargaining with particular groups, to claim tolls on merchandise at the ports, and to grant privileges in return for value received. But the time was now arriving when the question of the royal revenue was assuming a new aspect. Hitherto the protest had been against arbitrary and tyrannical exactions; it was about to become, instead, a question of the control of public expenditure a question of making the Crown dependent on the goodwill of the nation for supplies adequate to the necessities of the State, or at least to the carrying out of the king's policy.

Edward I.

When Edward 1. returned from crusade to take leisurely possession of his kingdom after his father's death, the country had only recently recovered from the disorder of the barons' war, ended by the defeat and death of Simon de Montfort and the victory of the Royalists. But the victor had learnt sundry lessons besides the art of war from the adversary whom faction had helped him to conquer. Edward had no intention whatever of surrendering a fraction of effective royal power; but he had seen that autocratic power, whether wielded by a king or by a dictator, lost more than it gained by being exercised in an arbitrary fashion. Every success of the barons against the Crown had been derived from their insistence on law, and if the Crown was to be strengthened, it must be recognised as the champion of law. It has been said that Edward, renowned as a legislator, was not in fact a maker so much as a codifier of the law. Without detracting from his claims to be regarded as a monarch who made it his primary aim to secure the welfare of his people, we may recognise that his legislation consisted in no small part in what were effectively declaratory acts, affirming an interpretation of the laws the most favourable to the Crown and the least favourable to baronial independence to which a general assent could be obtained; while other statutes, imposing uniformity where hitherto practice had varied, followed the same line. Constitutional governEdward I. and ment was immensely furthered by the shaping Parliament. of the Model Parliament in 1295, and the Confirmation of the Charters two years later; but prima facie, the Model Parliament was rather a counter-balancing of the Barons by the Commons than a subjection of the Crown to the People. As for the Confirmation of the Charters, that was in plain terms a defeat for the Crown, extracted from an exceedingly reluctant king. The point we are pressing is that it was Edward's policy to procure indisputably legal sanction for the maximum of royal authority where royal authority was in danger of being disputed-the maximum which would command general assent. He did not volun

tarily impose limitations on his own powers from an abstract desire to increase popular freedom, but he accepted limitations because in so doing he was obviating risks.

Now we shall find that the action of Edward I. in relation to commerce, like his action in relation to the constitution, was actuated by the double motive; the desire Edward I. and to promote the welfare of the people and the desire Commerce. to increase the revenues of the Crown in a manner sanctioned by the law, from sources which promised much more than had hitherto been extracted from them. And the method was to develop the towns, and at the same time to organise commerce in the manner which would make it yield the maximum toll to the Crown with the minimum of friction.

Edward III.

The reign of Edward II. is an anarchical interlude; an interlude, that is to say, in which there is no policy. The activities of all the prominent characters of the reign were directed by personal motives and to personal ends, with only the most superficial pretence of consideration for the public benefit. The absence of definite policy continued to characterise the opening years of the reign of Edward III. But during the five and twenty years when the monarch was in the full plenitude of his physical and intellectual powers, a positive policy was again distinguishable. The young ruler who, after the coup d'état which overturned Mortimer and Isabella, was first seduced by the attractions of an attempted reconquest of Scotland, turned ambitious eyes across the Channel, and deserted the contest with his northern neighbours to enter upon what developed into the Hundred Years' War with France. It is scarcely necessary now to explode the once popular belief that Edward engaged on the war with France out of pure aggression and lust for military glory on a palpably untenable pretext. The primary motive of the war is definitely to be found in the fact that the King of England happened at the same time to be a great feudatory of the King of France, where the Crown had for some time past been persistently endeavouring by fair means or foul to strengthen itself at