TAXATION BY THE COMMONS
1297-1461

The years subsequent to 1297 up to the time of the Tudors comprise a period of differentiation within Parliament itself. Save for the event of the year 1340, when the statute was passed which completed the movement punctuated by Confirmatio Cartarum, to the effect that every form of taxation must have the sanction of Parliament in order to be legal, the three centuries showed greater progress inside the walls of Parliament than beyond them. Struggles there were in plenitude between king and Parliament Character of the period to secure adherence in practice to the theory enunciated in 1340, but the great question was that of the ruling power within Parliament. It is during this period that the Commons come forward as the sole initiators of taxes, leaving to the Lords merely the coÖrdinate power of consent. In close interrelation with this monopoly of power over the public purse, comes, in consequence of the theory that supplies must wait upon redress of grievances, the advance toward control by the House of Commons of the entire machinery of government, legislative and executive.

It is a period of confusion and contradiction. Time and again constitutional life seems to be dead. War, disputed succession to the crown, tyranny, slip-shod government,—these and more tend to make the years 1297-1461 a bundle of scenes ill-bound together. The Wars of the Roses, the struggles with France for various causes and with varied consequences, the doting of monarchs upon foreign favorites, all contribute toward popular distraction from that interest in government, that keen hostility to maladministration, which makes for constitutional progress. There was no leader to prick the public conscience; no Simon de Montfort or Edward Plantagenet to inaugurate reforms in the great matters of government.

When Edward I put his name to Confirmatio Cartarum at Ghent, on the 5th November, 1297, he had still ten years to live. In 1301, he re-confirmed the Charters in a bill of some twelve articles forced from him by the barons in a manner which he denounced as outrageous, and thereby concluded the baronial conflict. The barons presented their claims at the Parliament of Lincoln The Parliament of Lincoln, 1301 which was summoned for the 20th January, 1301, and included amongst them, beside the plea for a confirmation of the Charters, a demand for the enforcement of general reforms, this last to be the prerequisite for a grant of money. A fifteenth of all movables was then voted to the king, to be paid upon the completion of the reforms, the date proposed being Michaelmas next coming.[188] The clergy, who still professed adherence to the bull “Clericis laicos,” with the approval of the baronage averred that they could not acquiesce in any grant of money in the face of papal prohibition. Edward, in his reply to the claims made by the barons, declared his unwillingness to admit the validity of the assertion that papal consent was necessary to the clerical grant. His confirmation of the Charters was dated 14th February, 1301.[189]

Edward’s last years were years of financial difficulty. In 1302 at the Parliament held on the 1st July, at London, he received from the lay estates and the clergy a fifteenth of temporal goods.[190] The same year saw him turn back to the aid pur fille marier Edward’s financial expedients which the barons had granted twelve years previously in June, 1290; and in 1303 he attempted to obtain the consent of the merchants to an increase in the custom on wine, wool, and merchandise. He called a meeting at York, quite irregular in its constitutional aspect, and presented the matter for its consideration. The merchants would not listen to the plea and the matter, as far as denizens were concerned, was dropped.[191] Five months previously, on the 1st February, Edward had had better fortune in a similar effort with the foreign merchants. On the principle that the crown had the right to close the ports to merchant strangers, Edward entered into negotiation with the leading men amongst them, and in return for a grant of all the privileges and liberties essential to them, they agreed to a fifty per cent. increase over the rates paid upon wools and leather by English-born merchants. Beside these were new duties Tunnage and poundage and other customs upon other commodities, whether they be exported or imported: wine, 2s. on the tun, a custom which was to achieve notoriety under the name of tunnage; cloth, from 1s. to 2s. on the piece depending upon the dye; general merchandise, 3d. in the pound of 20s., subsequently called poundage; and wax, 1s. per quintal.[192] This agreement between king and merchants, known by the title “Carta Mercatoria,” was not technically in contravention of Confirmatio Cartarum, notwithstanding the provisions of the latter against the levying without national consent of any but the “ancient prises” and the custom on wool previously granted. Confirmatio Cartarum was a grant to Englishmen and to Edward’s sharply legal mind, its liberties did not extend to foreigners, however closely knit their relations might be with the king’s own people.

In 1304 Edward took from the demesne cities and boroughs and the royal demesne a sixth of movables.[193] The records of the Parliament of 1305,Tallage, 1304 far from noting any complaint against the king’s tallage, contain this memorandum: “To the petition of archbishops, bishops, prelates, earls, barons, and other good men of the land, praying that the king wills to grant them the power to tallage their ancient demesne ... even as the king has tallaged his demesne, it was answered, ‘Let it be as petitioned.’”[194] This is all but final evidence against the validity of De tallagio non concedendo.[195]

The great Edward died at Burgh-upon-Sands on Friday, the 7th July, 1307, and the sceptre fell into the nerveless hand of Edward II. Edward II, 1307-1327 The new king did not inherit his father’s great attributes nor his good fortune; he was improvident and unperceptive, the faithful dupe of advantage-seeking associates, the lavish spender of money he did not have, the chief enemy of himself. At last, when he had reigned some twenty years, he was put down and his son succeeded in his stead. Edward II’s accession was undisputed; at Carlisle, on the 20th July, he received the homage and fealty of the English baronage, and six months later on the 25th February, 1308, he was crowned. The coronation oath he was obliged to take in French, not being familiar with the Latin tongue. The oath was more than usually stringent; the last of the four promises required of the king was this: “Sire, do you grant to hold and to keep the laws and righteous customs which the community of your realm shall have chosen, and will you defend and strengthen them to the honor of God, to the utmost of your power?” Edward answered, “I grant and promise.”[196]

Edward did not call a Parliament between October 1307, and April 1309.[197] He was in fear, apparently, of an attack upon his foreign favorite, Piers Gaveston, and was desirous of shielding him, as Charles I attempted to shield Buckingham three centuries later, by doing without a Parliament. The only merit of the favorite seems to have been the deep, and in its consequences the pathetic love with which he inspired the young monarch. He was self-seeking, avaricious, willful, and capable of exercising a domination over the king as complete as it was profitable to himself. At last, however, the loans, which his Italian bankers, the Friscobaldi had supplied Edward, withered away and he was obliged to issue a summons to a Parliament.

Parliament met on the 27th April, 1309, with a full attendance of clergy, lords, knights and burgesses. In response to Edward’s urgent request for funds, the lords, burgesses and knights granted him a meagre twenty-fifth, but only on condition of a redress of grievances, these being detailed in a schedule of eleven articles.[198] Two of the eleven have to do with taxation; the first was directed at the abuses of purveyance; the second hit more nearly, having to do with the New Customs which Edward I had provided for in the Carta Mercatoria of 1303.[199] “And as to the customs which the king taketh by his officers—,” so goes the memorandum in the Rolls,Tentative abolition of the New Customs “that is to say, of every tun of wine, two shillings; of every cloth which alien merchants bring into his land, two shillings; and of every pound value of avoir de pois, three pence—the king willeth at the request of the said good people that the said customs of wines, clothes, and avoir de pois, do cease at his will, in order to know and be advised what profit and advantage will accrue to him and his people by ceasing the taking of those customs; and the king will have counsel according to the advantage which he shall see therein: saving always to the king the ancient prises and customs anciently due and approved.” The king gave orders that the conditional grant of the twenty-fifth be collected.

The trouble over Gaveston, however, was not settled, and he became increasingly worrisome to the barons. Furthermore the customs were collected not by Englishmen but by Edward’s Italian bankers. The Lords Ordainers, 1309-1311 In March 1310, meeting in council, the barons drew up a petition praying against the impoverishment of the exchequer despite grants of money; the king, so they said, was still exacting prises and living by purveyance contrary to the engagement of 1309. Edward, still hoping to shield Gaveston, assented to the election of a commission of twenty-one, known as the Lords Ordainers, who exercised his authority for the space of a year and a half.

The Lords Ordainers, recalling in their composition and purposes those who put forward the scheme of reform in the Provisions of Oxford of 1255, proceeded to promulgate ordinances for the correction of abuses. On the 2d August, 1310, six ordinances were made public and received the confirmation of the king.[200] By the fourth, it was ordained “that the customs of the realm be kept and received by people of the realm, and not by aliens; and that the issues and profits of the same customs, together with all other issues and profits of the realm arising from any matters whatsoever, shall come entirely to the King’s exchequer, ... to maintain the household of the king, and otherwise to his profit, so that the king may live of his own, without taking prises other than those anciently due and accustomed; and all others shall cease.”[201] Despite the apparent inclusion of the “New Customs” within the meaning of this ordinance, their resumption was ordered the same day, on the ground that during the period of their prohibition, prices had not been reduced.[202]

Parliament met on the 8th August, 1311, to receive the final report of the Ordainers, and sat for two months. Thirty-five additional articles were drawn up in Parliament.[203] New Customs abolished By the tenth article new prises are to be abolished, and by the eleventh the New Customs are done away with in their entirety. “New customs have been levied,” says the ordinance, “and the old enhanced, as upon wools, cloths, wines, avoir de pois, and other things, whereby the merchants come more seldom, and bring fewer good into the land, and the foreign merchants abide longer than they were wont to do, by which abiding things become more dear than they were wont to be, to the damage of the king and his people; we do ordain that all manner of customs and imposts levied since the coronation of King Edward, son of King Henry, be entirely put out, and altogether extinguished for ever, notwithstanding the charter which the said King Edward made to the merchant aliens, because the same was made contrary to the Great Charter ..., saving nevertheless to the king the customs of wools, woolfells, and leather; that is to say, for each sack of wool, half a mark, and for three hundred woolfells, half a mark, and for a last of leather, one mark ..., and henceforth merchant strangers shall come, abide, and go according to the ancient customs....”[204] On the 9th October, the day upon which Parliament rose, the order went out which made the ordinance effective.[205]

Gaveston, the hated favorite, whose corruption and acts of oppression had furnished the immediate cause for the reform movement, was amply provided for. He was put under sentence of perpetual banishment and in order to safeguard themselves against the return to power of him and his kind, the barons reiterated the demand made in 1244, that the appointment of ministers be subject in the future to their council and consent.[206] The king gave his assent to the ordinances on the 30th September and two weeks later they went out to the sheriffs for publication.

The Parliament which met in 1312 granted Edward no money. His position was desperate and he turned everywhere in the hope that he could raise funds wherewith to meet his necessities; the merchants and the clergy, even the Pope, were induced to lend him money. But they could not satisfy his needs; therefore in December, 1312,Tallage of 1312: Riots in London and Bristol the Council determined to levy a tallage on the demesne towns and the royal demesne of a fifteenth of movables and a tenth of rents.[207] The imposition met with opposition, resistance being most riotous in London and Bristol. The objections which the people of Bristol raised were not based upon legal grounds; it so happened that at the moment certain of their burgesses were confined in the Tower of London, and that grievance, so they maintained, warranted their refusal. The basis for resistance raised by the citizens of London was not so casual; they claimed immunity from a royal tallage on the ground of the “ancient privileges” guaranteed to them under Magna Carta. Neither cited De tallagio non concedendo as the defense of their actions, and the presumption against the validity of the so-called statute is therefore enhanced. The king secured his payment by way of compromise; the Londoners granted a “loan” of £400 and another of £1000, from which sums they were to be relieved at the time of collection of the next general aid. Many other towns escaped upon the ground that they were not situated within the royal demesne. The principle that the king could levy tallages upon his own demesne thus remained unquestioned; but no tallage was levied during the rest of this reign.[208]

It is unnecessary to follow Edward II to Deposition of Edward II his melancholy end. His deposition came more as the result of stress in his own household than because of any strain which he put upon the constitution. Favorites, an unfaithful wife, and factions which he bred among his barons, did more to bring about his dethronement and his subsequent murder than any condition of taxation. In the list of grievances which Bishop Stratford drew up as furnishing cause sufficient for the overthrow of Edward, nothing appears which has any connection with the question of taxation, much less any assertion of parliamentary right to control it. The king consented to the election of his son in his stead on January 20, 1327. Eight months thereafter he died; few doubt that he was murdered.

The reign of Edward III dates from the 24th January, 1327. Edward III, 1327-1377 He was crowned five days later at the age of fourteen and took the same stringent oath as that which had failed to bind his father. Parliament appointed a council of government which was to be in constant attendance upon the king; but the queen and her familiar, Mortimer, assumed so dominant a control over the young king that the influence of the Council was nil. Edward went through the formality of confirming the charters and forbidding illegal assessment of aids. His rule really did not begin until November, 1330, when Mortimer was killed.

Edward III, being no statesman, but a warrior, energetic, without scruple, lavish, and ambitious, was not a figure designed to loom large in constitutional history. He did not mould events as did his grandfather; he watched them move. As a matter of fact there was advance. Tallage was prohibited and there came, too, the abolition in law of other forms of arbitrary taxation.

Edward had in mind in 1332 the reduction of Scotland.[209] To that end he revived a financial expedient which had not been exercised since his father’s embarrassment in 1312, and tallaged the demesne cities and boroughs, and the rural demesne.Tallage of 1332 and its withdrawal On the 25th June, he sent out orders for the collection of a fourteenth of movables and a ninth of rents.[210]

Parliament met three months later, on the 9th September, and a request formulated by the prelates, earls, barons, and the knights of the shires, was addressed to the king praying the recall of the commission for the tallage; Parliament offered as a substitute a fifteenth from the shires and a tenth from the towns. Just why a Parliament in which the Rolls do not note the inclusion of the burgesses should accomplish such a substitution, which obviously benefited the townsmen, is not clear, unless a considerable portion of the knights dwelt within the royal demesne or in small towns formerly subjected to the exaction of tallage. In his acceptance of the grant Edward promised for the future that he would not lay such a tallage, “Except as was customary in the time of our ancestors, and as he might rightly do.”[211] It was not, however, until the sweeping legislation of 1340 that tallage became illegal.

In parallel to the struggle against tallaging the royal demesne was the contest with the king in the matter of the custom on wool. Edward in 1328 confirmed the reËstablished scale of 1322 New Customs become a regular means of revenue which his father in his hour of supremacy had laid upon the alien merchants, in amount equal to the “nova custuma” of Edward I. From this time the New Customs became a part of the regular revenue of the crown, though Parliament did not yield its sanction until a time some fifty years after the first levy, when, in 1353, it gave its assent to the Statute of Staples.

But the regulation of the relations between king and merchant denizens, and incidentally through them, his relations (aside from the New Customs) with the aliens, is not so briefly told. Throughout the reign of Edward III the question was being quietly fought out as to whether or not the king might tamper with the wool customs irrespective of parliamentary sanction. In 1332 Edward issued an ordinance which provided for the collection of a subsidy on the wool of denizens; the rate was to be half a mark on the sack and 300 woolfells, and twenty shillings on the last of leather. A year later on the 30th June, 1333, Edward recalled his ordinance, but he did not relinquish his grasp upon the customs; by negotiation with the merchants, he received ten shillings on the sack and 300 woolfells and a pound on the last. In order to bolster up the legality of the proceeding, he issued a royal ordinance to the same effect.[212]

In August of the year 1336, when the king’s arms were meeting with great success on the northern border, Edward, confident in his popularity, sent out royal letters forbidding the export of wool.[213] Parliament met at Nottingham the following month full of pride in the military prowess of the king, and granted him liberal aids. Not only did the barons and knights contribute a twentieth, the towns a tenth, the clergy a sixth, but the merchants, who were at this moment, so it appeared, on the verge of attaining to the dignity of a fourth estate in Parliament, granted him forty shillings on the sack of wool; and the foreign merchants were to pay an additional twenty shillings.[214] In the hope that its action would encourage the domestic manufacture of cloth, Parliament in March, 1337, passed a statute forbidding the exportation of wool, and offering foreign operatives special inducements to settle in England.[215] The embargo was to continue until the king and his Council should decide otherwise. Thus empowered, Edward and his Council issued an ordinance imposing upon denizens a custom of £2 on the sack and on 300 woolfells, and £3 on the last of leather; the unfortunate aliens were to pay double.[216]

The effect upon the people was immediate; unable to sympathize with the project of importing skilled labor and seeing only the curtailment in profits normally accruing from their chief article of export, they were led almost to the point of revolt. The Parliament which met in September 1339, in answer to the general cry for reform, brought forward measures aimed to allay the popular irritation. The barons made the curious grant of “the tenth sheaf, the tenth lamb, and the tenth fleece, payable in two years,” and they “willed that the maletolt of wool lately levied afresh, be entirely removed and held to the old rate.”[217] The knights and burgesses, questioning their ability to grant money to the king without first consulting their constituents, desired the matter deferred to a subsequent Parliament. They mentioned six grievances upon which they demanded redress. They asked release from the customary aids and prises, and “that the maletolt of wool and lead be taken as of old, for that the same is now increased without the assent of Parliament.”[218] The new Parliament, in accordance with the will of the knights and burgesses, was summoned for the 20th January, 1340.

At this session no new legislation was undertaken. Edward was abroad and his absence discouraged the members from enunciating new principles. They showed themselves, however, sympathetic with the royal necessities. The lords again offered the tenth sheaf, the tenth fleece, and the tenth lamb; the commons granted 30,000 sacks of wool, on the condition of the royal acceptance of certain articles drawn by them, and in case their reforms were not favored by the king, they made a free gift of 2500 sacks of wool.[219] Edward called a new Parliament which met the 29th March, there being in attendance a large body of merchants. The prelates, barons, and knights made a gift of the ninth sheaf, fleece, and lamb in complement to the baronial tenth of the previous January, and the towns gave a ninth of movables; a fifteenth from the rest of the nation, such as had no wool and yet were not townsfolk, completed the grant, save for a custom on each sack of wool, on every 300 woolfells, and on every last of leather, of forty shillings.[220] But the gifts were conditional; the king was to accept the articles prepared by the commons. Being amenable to their will, he referred the petitions to a committee, part of which was selected by the commons themselves, with the understanding that it should draw up statutes embracing such of the matters prayed for as were of a permanent character.

The first statute met the demands of 1339. “And for this grant,” it says, speaking of the liberal wool subsidy mentioned above,Statutory abolition of the maletolt and of all unauthorized taxation “the king by the assent of the prelates, earls, barons, and all others assembled in Parliament, hath granted, that from the feast of Pentecost that cometh in a year, he nor his heirs shall not demand, assess, nor take, nor suffer to be taken more custom of a sack of wool of any Englishman but half a mark of custom only; and upon woolfells and leather the old custom.... And this establishment lawfully to be holden and kept, the king hath promised in the presence of the prelates, earls, barons, and others in his Parliament, no more to charge, set, or assess, upon the custom, but in the manner as afore is said.”[221]

The second statute was still more sweeping: “We ... will and grant for us and our heirs, to the same prelates, earls, barons, and commons, citizens, burgesses, and merchants ... that they be” not “from henceforth charged nor grieved to make common aid, or to sustain charge, if it be not by the common assent of the prelates, earls, barons, and other great men, and commons of our said realm of England, and that in the Parliament; and that all the profits rising from the said aid, and of the wards and marriages, customs, and escheats, and other profits rising of the said realm of England, shall be put and spent upon the maintenance of the safeguard of our said realm of England and of our wars....”[222]

The importance of these two acts is readily apparent. The promise of Edward to abide by the recommendation of Parliament in the matter of the subsidy on wool, was an admission by the king that not he but they had final control over the laying of customs duties. Thus was established the principle to be defended and likewise to be questioned in the future, that Parliament alone had power to lay a tax on wool. In the second place, by the statute which provided that no charge or aid should be levied but by consent of Parliament, tallage died a legislative death.[223] And not only was this statute aimed at tallages but as well at every species of unauthorized taxation. Parliament the sole taxing authority in law Thus was enunciated the profoundly important principle that Parliament was the sole authority for levying taxes not merely on the nation at large, as had long been the practice, but in every department of the government, on the royal demesne as readily as on the shires themselves. If the practice of future years had lived up to the ideal expressed in this statute, it would be possible to draw a line at the year 1340 and say that thereafter Englishmen exercised the right of taxing themselves.

The commons perceived, apparently, that the incidence of indirect taxation fell upon the nation quite to the same degree as direct taxation. The customs, in the beginning undisputedly within the royal prerogative, and according to royalistic advocates unceasingly so up to relatively modern times, were contended for almost as heartily as power over direct taxation itself. “The history of the customs,” says Bishop Stubbs, “illustrates the pertinacity of the commons as well as the evasive policy of the supporters of prerogative.”[224] Prior to the accession of Edward III, the struggle for control, centering upon exactions in excess of the antiquÆ custumÆ, was quietly waged between king and Parliament. During his reign and afterward the watchfulness of Parliament kept up.

After the legislation of 1340, Parliament showed itself willing to bargain with the king for control of the customs duties, thus staying within its legal rights. It could only petition, it could not yet enforce; and when the king promised his assent to a petition he frequently forgot his word. An account of what became of the custom on wool is illuminating as Checkered history of the wool customs indicative of the variation between petition and enforcement. In 1340, the king had received by grant of Parliament forty shillings on the sack, for a year and a half, on the understanding that he would abolish the maletolt. After a lapse of two years,[225] Edward procured from the merchants without the consent of the commons, a custom of forty shillings on the sack and issued orders for its collection. The commons, exhibiting more than an elementary knowledge of economic principles, perceived that the tax fell not upon the foreign merchants, but upon the growers of wool. In response to the remonstrance of the commons made in the Parliament of May, 1343, Edward declared to them that the price to be paid for wool, being fixed by the authority of Parliament, would be constant, and that consequently the foreign merchants would feel the incidence of the tax.[226] The commons, duly impressed by so subtle an argument, consented to a reimposition of the exaction for three years under the sanction of Parliament. After the passing of the three years, and the ordinance fixing the price of wool having in the meantime been revoked,[227] the commons, finding that Edward showed no disposition to release wool from the custom, petitioned against its continuance.[228] The king replied that he had secured the assent of the baronage and of the merchants, and that he had already pledged the proceeds of it to his creditors. The commons, finding that they could not win their point, contented themselves with a belief that having established the principle, they could at any time demand a practice of it, and granted the perpetuation of the old rate for two years. In 1348, at the conclusion of that term, the commons again presented a remonstrance, asserting that the wool subsidy was really a land tax. They granted a fifteenth for three years on the condition that the subsidy of wool should cease in three years, and that for the future “no such grant should be made by the merchants.” The wording was particularly conclusive,—no “imposition, tallage, or charge by way of loan or in any other manner,” was to be laid “without the grant and assent of the commons in Parliament.” And the enactment was to remain “as a matter of record, whereby they may have remedy if anything should be attempted to the contrary in time to come.”[229] Edward accepted the grant and assented to most of the petitions, but no new statute was based upon them, a fact which is taken to indicate that the oppressions complained of were recognized as illegal.[230]

Again in 1362 arbitrary exactions on wool received the attention of the commons and the statute passed in that year enacted that thereafter no subsidy should be set on wool without the assent of Parliament.[231] Notwithstanding the explicit and repeated assertions by the Commons that Parliament had the sole right to levy the subsidy, Edward at intervals exacted the maletolt. The matter reappeared in 1371 and was greeted with a similar statute.[232]

The details of the fifteenths and tenths,[233] of the tunnage and poundage, of clerical grants, and of the individual subsidies on wool belong rather to the domain of fiscal history than to a consideration of the growing power of the English Parliament to levy taxes.[234] The constitutional points receive illustration most clearly in the narration of the controversy over wool, since in respect of that and of tallage new questions were involved. As regards the rest, Parliament did not more than confirm itself in habits which it had already formed.

Side by side with the power to grant taxes was growing up the faculty for supervising the expenditure of money so raised. As far back as the second decade of the reign of Henry III, in 1237, William of Ralegh had suggested to the Commune Concilium that it appoint a committee with whom the proceeds of a grant be deposited and by whom the money be expended; that the suggestion was not taken was owing, perhaps, to the ignorance of the baronage. Edward I was too strong to permit of being so controlled, and under Edward II the whole power of the crown was for a time delegated to others; in neither reign was the principle of appropriation of supplies definitely put forward. But in the time of Edward III, owing doubtless to the vast sums thrown into his bottomless war chest, Parliament began to demand a voice in the disposition of the public funds. In 1340, as we have seen, it was denominated in the statute that the “profits of the said realm of England shall be put and spent upon the maintenance of the safeguard of our said realm of England, and of our wars.”[235] The grants of 1346 and 1348, in so far as they accrued from the northern counties, were to be applied to defend the border against the Scots,[236] and in 1353 a subsidy on wool was granted to be applied solely for the purposes of the war.[237]

Whether or not the money was actually applied according to the direction of Parliament was another matter. Efforts to ensure the carrying out of the parliamentary will were begun as early as 1340. In that year a committee of lords and commons was appointed to examine the accounts of Examination of accounts William de la Pole and the other collectors of the last subsidy.[238] In 1341 the Rolls of Parliament have it that “the great men and commons of the land pray, for the common profit of the king and of themselves, that certain persons be deputed by commission to audit the accounts of all those who have received the wool of our said lord, or other aid granted to him; and also of those who have received and paid out his money, as well beyond the seas as in the realm from the commencement of his war until now; and that the rolls and other remembrances, obligations, and other things made abroad be delivered into the chancery, to be enrolled and recorded, just as was wont to be done heretofore.”[239] To the petition the royal response ran: “It is the king’s pleasure that this be done by good men deputed for the purpose, with the addition that the treasurer and the chief baron be of the number; and that it be done concerning this as it was heretofore ordained; and that the lords be chosen in this Parliament. And also that all rolls, remembrances, and obligations made beyond the sea, be delivered into the chancery.”[240]

There is not much reason to suppose that Edward adhered to this promise better than he held to others of a similar character, save that there appears no complaint from Parliament until the last year of his reign. In 1377, in voicing the demand of Peter de la Mare, the commons in the Good Parliament petitioned “that it may please our lord the king to name two earls and two barons, of those who shall seem to him best, who shall be guardians and treasurers as well of this subsidy now granted and of the subsidy which the clergy of England is yet to grant to the king our lord, as of the subsidy of wool, leather, and woolfells granted in the last Parliament.”[241] The lords so chosen were to be sworn before the commons, and were to expend the subsidies “for the said wars and for no other work.” The high treasurer of England was to have nothing to do with it in anywise whatsoever. Decisive action, however, waited upon the next reign.

The long life of Edward III came to an end on the 21st June, 1377. His was a reign which had seen much war, much poverty, much famine, and worse than these, the Great Plague. The time was not well designed, so it would seem, for constitutional advance, yet in the direction of parliamentary taxation, the progress was marked. To be sure, Parliament had not dared to come into open combat with the king, and had, in order to preserve its theoretical power, been many times obliged to sanction a tax after it had been levied. Thus did Edward play with Parliament throughout the argument over the wool tax, yet the nation did secure the enunciation of complete parliamentary control over the levying of taxes of every description in the sweeping legislation of 1340.

But Parliament had shown a disposition to reach out after powers which its predecessors in some instances had exercised and in others foreshadowed. The history of the wool customs shows this if it shows nothing else, that Parliament was inclined to make supply wait upon redress of grievances; that the inclination was not a determination was owing to the fact of Edward’s wars; withholding supply would wreck English military prestige far more quickly than the arms of France. Yet the time was not far distant when the grant would be reserved until the end of the session, and thus secure the redress of grievances before the granting of a supply. By other means, also, Parliament was reaching out to control the executive. By appropriating money for particular purposes, to which expenditure should be limited, and by demanding an audit of accounts to insure adherence to those limitations, the representatives of the nation were securing for it the control of the public purse, not only in the department of income but of outlay.

Throughout the reigns of Edward II and Edward III a process of differentiation had been going on within the walls of Parliament itself, resulting in separate sessions of lords and commons. The process had its beginnings, indeed, in the time of Edward I, yet no instance can be pointed to with certainty showing the separate sessions until 1332. In that year the Rolls of Parliament speak of distinct assemblies. In 1339 the division appears to have become permanent. The House of Commons in 1352 occupied the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey.[242] The separate sessions of lords on the one hand and the knights of the shires and the burgesses was the preliminary of the assumption by the two latter bodies, in name the House of Commons, of the power of initiating tax legislation.

Edward III left the throne to the keeping of a boy, his grandson, the youthful Richard II. He was only eleven years old at the beginning of his reign, and only thirty-three when his brief attempt at absolutism brought him deposition, and then death. “The fair rose withered,” as Shakespeare described his dethronement, but the withering was due to the attempt of the king, ill-advised and perhaps insane, to climb too high.

In the matter of taxation, however, the chief interest lies in the early part of his reign, when the years of Richard’s minority gave the commons opportunity to enforce the exercise of the principle that taxes should not be levied without their consent, and to foster the theories advanced in the previous reign that they had a right to examine the public accounts and to appropriate supplies.

In the time of Richard II the examination of public accounts and the granting of money for specific purposes, became national issues. At his first Parliament, that of October, 1377, grants of two fifteenths and tenths were made for the prosecution of the French war on the express condition that two treasurers be appointed who should see to the due application of the proceeds.[243] Trouble over audit of accounts The king chose William Walworth and John Philipot, merchants of London, the latter of whom is distinguished as one of the earliest English financiers, and these swore to perform their duties faithfully. It was not without difficulty, however, that the next Parliament, which met in October, 1378, was able to secure an accounting. The commons demanded the accounts and for a time the chancellor attempted evasion, hoping, so it appears, to shield John of Gaunt who was suspected of obtaining money from the treasurers for his private purposes. He was forced to yield and the accounts were laid open to criticism, though with the incidental assertion by the king “that it had never been known that, of a subsidy or other grant made to the king in Parliament or out of Parliament by the commons, an account had afterwards been rendered to the commons or to any one else except to the king and his officers.” More than that, there was to be understanding “that this shall not in future be considered a precedent or an inference that this should have been done otherwise than by the personal volition and command alone of our said lord the king....”[244]

Nevertheless, this same Parliament upon the occasion of its grant to the king, petitioned that it be expended for the advantage of the kingdom, and that competent treasurers be appointed to keep the accounts.[245] The thirteen-year-old king readily fell in with the idea. To the Parliament of 1379 he sent letters in which he said, “That you may be fully informed of the real nature of the said necessary expenditures made and to be made, the treasurers for the said war shall be present and shall appear, at such hour as pleases you, to show you clearly in writing their receipts and expenditures made since the last Parliament.”[246] The House of Commons, later during the same Parliament petitioned for the discharge of the special treasurers, and prayed that the Treasurer of England with the Chamberlains of the Exchequer receive money as “was usual of old.”[247] Here is an early instance of the individual action of the House of Commons. But in 1380, the tide turned back. The commons who were assuming leadership in the situation, hearing from the chancellor of the very serious embarrassment in which the crown found itself, were stung to the belief that there was extravagance in the royal household, or else that the ministers were incapable. They therefore prayed the king to allow the election in Parliament of the chief officers of state.Special treasurers Richard responded favorably and the commission was appointed, with the old treasurers of subsidies, William Walworth and John Philipot, as members.[248] By 1382 the reversion to the system of special treasurers was complete,[249] and from that time, save at moments of great national confusion, these officers were regularly appointed and had as their duties the keeping of accounts, both of income and outlay, which were to be presented before Parliament at its session immediately following.

Over the levy of taxes Parliament, so it appears, had unquestioned control throughout the reign;[250] the king’s household was vastly extravagant and the royal prerogative of purveyance was exercised to excess, but even in the articles of deposition no word of complaint, save in the most general terms, is levelled at the king for laying taxes unlawfully,Taxation by Parliament and this remonstrance is unsupported by specific instances. Indeed, the most violent outbreak on the score of taxation was against Parliament itself.

In 1380, Parliament found itself in this difficult position, that it was under necessity of supplying an immensely large sum, no less than £160,000, as speedily as possible. The French war, an expedition about to be undertaken against Scotland, and the usual expenses of the kingdom had so depleted the royal treasury that the king was sorely embarrassed; he was greatly in debt and his jewels were already pawned. The commons were at a loss to devise the means whereby so great a sum could be raised, and showed a disposition to shirk the burden. The lords undertook it and suggested three methods: a graduated poll-tax, a custom on merchandise, or a number of fifteenths and tenths. The commons, seeing in the first the virtue of rapid assessment and collection, chose it in spite of the disappointing proceeds of the poll-tax of two years previously. A subsidy on wool, the normal income from which would amount to £60,000, was to serve as an auxiliary tax. The clergy undertook to raise a third of the remaining £100,000, leaving some £66,667 to accrue from the poll-tax. The rate varied according to individuals from sixty groats to three, with an understanding that the rich should help the poor, but that in no case should a man pay less than a groat for himself and his wife.[251]

Here was the exciting cause for the Rising of the Villeins which Bishop Stubbs describes as “one of the most portentous phenomena to be found in the whole of our history.”[252] Following closely as did the poll-tax of 1380 upon those of 1378 and 1379, both of which bore heavily upon the lesser people, the impost set fire to tinder which had been long preparing for a conflagration. To enter into an inquiry as to the underlying causes and the ultimate consequences of this rising, would be to travel far afield. It is sufficient to observe that the payment of even so small a sum as a groat, served to bring freshly to the minds of the most ignorant the maladministration in London, and to arouse in them the impulse, however ill-advised or ill-directed, to correct abuses in the executive. The Rising of the Villeins is illustrative of the not unusual conception that bad government is chiefly reprehensible because it is expensive.

The taxation during the years 1389-1397 was regular and moderate. Richard’s rule for the time was that of a constitutional monarch and his Parliaments exercised the power of initiating taxation without opposition. Parliament was practicing what it had accomplished in theory in the long years of struggle since Magna Carta; it was accustoming itself to the exercise of the powers which in principle it had acquired. Fulfillment in fact was following upon enunciation of principle. Consequently it was with the greater shock to the nation that Richard II suddenly changed from his constitutional habit and took upon himself the powers of a despot.

The temptation came to him as a result of the action of Parliament itself. In 1398, following upon its grant the previous year, of a custom on wool for five years and tunnage and poundage for three years, it granted the subsidy on wool, woolfells, and leather to Richard for the space of his life. Beside this unprecedented liberality, it gave him as well a tenth and a half and a fifteenth and a half for the curious term of a year and a half.[253] Nor was this all. It cut off its own head by delegating its authority to a standing committee of Parliament. The opening was barely offered before Richard took advantage of it. With a revenue for life and a Council subservient to his will, scarcely ever was there better chance for despotism; but the acceptance of the opportunity was the close forerunner of disaster.

With the idea in his head that all was safe in England, Richard went off to Ireland. This gave Henry, the heir to the dukedom of Lancaster, a dream of an unguarded throne to which he could climb. Estranged by reason of his disinheritance, he was ready to act as soon as he saw such a vision. He landed in Yorkshire, moved southward, receiving allegiance of the people as he went, and won away from Richard the powerful supporters of the throne. Richard, returning, fought a battle already lost. He resigned his kingship, and the nation as represented in Parliament, accepted his resignation.

The charges against the king, upon which sentence of deposition was pronounced, were summed up in thirty-three articles. Only four of them in any degree concern taxation. These are: (14) he had not repaid loans made in dependence upon his solemn promise; (15) he had alienated the crown estates, and exacted unlawful taxes and purveyances; (19) he had tampered with the elections by nominating the knights whom the sheriffs were to return, in order to ensure to himself a revenue for life; (21) he had extorted money from seventeen whole shires for pretended pardons.[254]

The charges were doubtless colored by enthusiasm for his deposition. The most serious, that of unlawful taxation, seems difficult to substantiate unless it be taken in connection with the article which asserts that the Parliament of 1398 was packed for the very purpose of securing a revenue for life. The complaint against purveyance seems equally ill-founded; during the reign of Edward III it had assumed the proportions of a great abuse of prerogative, but it was not in the time of his grandson an object of great concern to the nation. Thomas of Walsingham, whose tone is somewhat querulous, gives substance to the charges about the nonpayment of loans and the exaction of money for pretended pardons. “Promising in good faith to repay,” he says, “he never after gave the money back to his creditors.” Further, “The clergy and the common people and the temporal lords were constrained to give the king sums of money beyond the strength of man to bear, in order to buy back his good will.”[255] The step was very short to the forced loans of the Tudors.

The trouble with Richard was that he did not go to school to history. Parliament was putting into practice what it could learn from the experience of its predecessors. Richard, swept with a desire, intense and perhaps insane, to wield the sceptre of absolutism, was blinded to what he might have read, and underwent the consequences.

Henry IV was better advised; at any rate, he was politic enough to live closely by what he had learned. He was suspicious, cautious, slow and faltering in action save in the one supreme instance of seizing the throne; an exceedingly good politician. The power of Parliament and especially of the commons during his reign was more complete than ever before,—fuller, indeed, than it should be again until after the final hand-to-hand struggle with the Stuarts. In the matter of taxation, instances of illegality are rare; Parliament continued to exercise the supreme control in voting taxes; and in the more recently acquired rights of appropriating supplies and examining public accounts, the supremacy of Parliament was established. Not only does this observation hold good during the reign of Henry IV, but it is equally applicable to the two Lancastrians who succeeded him.

In 1400 there appears to have been an exception to this rule. Henry apparently secured an aid not from Parliament but from the Great Council. There was the understanding, however, that the grant was binding not upon the nation at large but upon the members of the Council.

In 1401 the commons attempted to make dependence of supply upon redress of grievances a part of the regular parliamentary procedure. They prayed the king that they know his responses to petitions before setting themselves to the business of granting a supply. Henry met the issue squarely. “On the last day of the Parliament,” say the Rolls, “response was made that this manner of deed had not been seen nor used in the time of any of his ancestors or predecessors, that they should have any response to their petitions or knowledge of the same before they had taken up and completed all the other business of Parliament, be it to make any grant or otherwise. And therefore the king did not wish in any way to change the good customs and usages made and used in former times.”[256] Nevertheless, the commons proceeded to put into practice the substance of their demand by delaying their grants Practice of delaying grants of supply until the last day of the session, when the most important of the petitions would have received answers. Thus the next Parliament, that which met on the 30th September, 1402, withheld its grant until the 24th November; the session closed on the 25th and no business was transacted in the meantime.

The chief advance in the reign of the new king lay not in a fuller control by Parliament in the matter of laying taxation; that would scarcely have been possible. But it lay rather in a differentiation of powers within Parliament itself, leading to a more complete supervision of taxation by the House of Commons. Initiation of tax levies in the House of Commons, 1407 Since the end of Edward III’s reign the theory had been practiced that the commons should exercise a decisive power over the levy of taxes, as illustrated in the levy of the poll-tax of 1380.

The form of making a grant, “made by the commons with the assent of the lords spiritual and temporal” first occurred in the grants to Richard II in 1395.[257] Votes of money previous to that year were made in conjunction with the House of Lords. The phrase was repeated in the grants of 1401 and 1402.

In 1407 came the assertion that to the commons not only belonged decisive power, but that they alone had the faculty of originating taxation. It came not as a direct demand for the yielding of a principle, but as an implication that the practice already existed, and as such it gains in strength.

The trend of events leading up to the significant reference is interesting. In 1407 the lords had held a debate in the king’s presence respecting the condition of the kingdom, and had determined upon the number of subsidies needful for national defense. Henry, for the moment forgetting his politics, in a peremptory tone requested the commons to send a delegation to the House of Lords “to hear and to report to their companions that which they should have in command of our lord the king.” The commons sent a committee of twelve in response to the request; they heard that “it was the will of our said lord the King they should report to the rest of their companions” the determination of the lords, and that, “they should see to it that they conformed most nearly to the purpose of the Lords aforesaid.” When the delegates returned, their report was received by the commons as being an infringement upon their liberties. The king, hearing of the temper of the commons, reassuming immediately his habit of the politician, “declares, by the advice and consent of the lords in manner following,” that it is lawful for both houses to commune apart by themselves “of the state of the realm and of the remedy necessary for the same.” So far the king has merely recognized the need for separate deliberations by the two houses; the phrase which implies the existence in the House of Commons of the power to initiate taxation is this: “Any grant by the commons granted, and by the lords assented to.”[258] Thus is admitted by implication the order in which a grant should be made by the two houses. In the same communication the king renounces any right which he might previously have held to know the amount or conditions of a prospective grant until both houses should be of one mind. The grant which eased so sweeping an admission from the king was generous.[259] It consisted of a fifteenth and a half and a tenth and a half, a subsidy on wool, and tunnage and poundage for two years.[260]

In 1410 Henry asked Parliament for permission to collect a tenth and a fifteenth annually, whenever Parliament should not be sitting. Had the request been granted, the result for a frugal monarch would have been hardly less than independence of parliamentary control. He was refused. Without the frequent necessity of calling a Parliament, Henry’s last years, instead of their smooth constitutional trend, might readily have had as tragic a story as those of Richard II. He died in 1413.

His son Henry V came to the throne without dispute, and for a brief nine years fired the souls of the English people with zest of conquest and pride of race. A warrior, the mediÆval ideal of a king, he was yet noble of mind and soul. Had his brilliant career not so suddenly flickered and gone out, he might have won a place beside Edward I; as it was, the constitutional history of his reign reveals no struggle between people and monarch over the sordid wherewithal to fight his battles; both sides apparently honored the other. The taxation during his reign was heavy, but it was voted gladly to the king who could use it as a means to victory at Agincourt. Henry V, whom his people loved enough to make legendary participant in their revellings, died in France, 31st August, 1422.

Henry VI was almost as unfortunate in his birth as in his death, and his life seemed to bring him nothing but disaster. He was barely a year old when his father died, his troubled reign saw the Wars of the Roses, and tradition has it that he died by the hand of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, afterward king. Weak in health, the possessor of a mind which in boyhood showed the feverish precocity that foreshadows an unbalanced maturity, he was nevertheless generous, temperate, mild, and devoted.

The early part of his reign gives one of the few instances chronicled under the Lancastrian kings of an attack upon constitutional usages in taxation. In 1425 while the Duke of Bedford and Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester were acting virtually as regents to their nephew the young king, Bedford together with various other lords announced in Parliament that a certain subsidy, which had been appropriated for a particular purpose, should be levied for the king’s use notwithstanding the conditions attaching to it; they advanced an opinion of the justices favoring their action. The commons vindicated their right, however, in the same Parliament; they made a fresh grant, restating the former conditions, with this explicit addition,Declaration for appropriation of supplies “No part thereof be beset ne dispendid to no othir use, but oonly in and for the defense of the seid roialme.”[261]

It would be both wearisome and profitless to enter into a detailed account of the various subsidies on wool, of income taxes, of fifteenths and tenths which trod one on the heels of the other during the reign of Henry VI. One incident of a constitutional character, however, rises from the general regularity. In 1449, Parliament attempted to levy a tax upon the stipendiary priests, though usage had it that the clergy were to have the power of taxing themselves in convocation; a subsidy of a noble was levied upon each stipendiary priest, for which they were to receive a general pardon at the hands of Parliament. Henry, perceiving that trouble was brewing, addressed the clergy, saying that it was for them to make the grant in convocation, and that it was for him to pardon. Thus Parliament, for the moment overreaching itself, was forced back upon the justice of precedent.[262]

The wars with France and with Burgundy, the heavy taxation incident to them, the rebellion of Jack Cade arising out of it, and the Wars of the Roses in 1453 following closely thereafter; the woeful struggle of Henry, bleached-out in mind, a dependent upon the efforts of a woman Accession of the Yorkists against the rising power of York; the wanton shedding of the noblest blood in England—these neither developed nor confirmed parliamentary power. Edward of York, it is sufficient to understand, became king on the 4th March, 1461, upon King Henry’s overthrow. A momentary turning of the tide set him once more upon it, but his tenure was very brief and ended in tragedy.

The passing of Henry VI brings us to the dawn of the Yorkist and Tudor era. During the reigns of the son and grandson of Edward I and the reigns of Richard II and the Lancastrians, Parliament had developed swiftly, not so much in the assumption of new powers as in the distribution of powers within itself. The commons became a separate body. Burgesses learned to act in the House of Commons in concert with knights of the shires who in the time of Edward I had made common cause with the greater barons. Together they assumed the right of initiating taxes, with the understanding that the hereditary chamber should have solely the power of assent.

The right of Parliament as against that of the king to control taxation was enunciated again and again, not only in the instance of direct taxation, including the levies of tallage, but in the case of the customs, as indicated in the legislation prohibiting the maletolt.

But the enunciation of powers of Parliament was not followed by complete and undisputed exercise of the rights so enunciated. The kings clung to what they deemed their ancient prerogatives and more than once overstepped the law. The Yorkists and Tudors showed a disposition somewhat less amenable.