FINANCE
Finance plays as prominent a part in public as in private life, and the
fortunes of a nation are as much built upon a money basis as those of an
individual. This somewhat obvious truism is particularly applicable to
the reign of Henry II., owing to the important share taken by hired
mercenary soldiers in his numerous campaigns, the wealth at the king’s
disposal frequently enabling him to dispense with the service of
disaffected or untrustworthy vassals. And the main source of this wealth
was England, or at least it was from England that were drawn those extra
supplies that formed the critical margin of safety, for while we hear
constantly of treasure sent from England to the king or his ministers in
Normandy we find no trace of any surplus from Henry’s continental
treasuries reaching the treasury at Winchester. Fortunately we possess
the material for our examination in the series of revenue accounts known
as the Pipe Rolls, complete from the second to the last year of the
reign.
The treasury, with the controlling machinery of the exchequer, had been
fully organised under Henry I., and an analysis by Sir James Ramsay of
the one surviving Pipe Roll of that king’s reign, that for the
thirty-first year (1130), shows the total royal revenue to have been
about £27,000. During the anarchy that prevailed under Stephen’s nominal
sovereignty the organisation of the exchequer virtually fell into
abeyance. While there is no evidence of Stephen having been at any time
in difficulties for lack of money, it is clear that his permanent and
assured revenues must have been very small. The districts in which his
power was sufficiently established to ensure the collection of the royal
dues varied from time to time and at best were limited, while their
yield was still further reduced by the lavish grants of crown demesnes
with which he had been compelled to purchase the allegiance of powerful
barons. Henry II., on coming to the throne, had, as we have seen,
resumed possession of the royal demesnes thus alienated, and he also
entrusted the re-organisation of the exchequer to Nigel, Bishop of Ely.
Order was soon restored, though it was several years before we find the
same elaboration of the financial network as was exhibited in 1130.
A careful analysis of the Pipe Roll for 1156, the first of the series,
shows that the total amount of the revenues dealt with, which exclude
the issues of the three northern counties, still at that time in the
hands of the King of Scotland, was in round figures £21,650. But of this
£6000 has to be deducted for portions of the royal demesnes which had
been granted to various persons, and for payments pardoned or remitted
by the king. Another £2250 had not been paid and was still owing, a
certain proportion being bad debts. Of the remainder, £9120 was paid
into the treasury in cash and £4260 had been spent by the sheriffs and
other accountants on the king’s behalf in payment of alms, repairs to
buildings, wages and miscellaneous purchases. The actual revenue of this
year may therefore be taken as about £13,000, or rather less than half
that of Henry I. in 1130.
Turning now to the consideration of the sources of revenue, the first is
the farms (_firmæ_) of the various counties and honours, these being
fixed sums at which the sheriffs of the counties or the farmers of the
honours compounded for the issues of the lands under their control. Upon
occasion a county might for some reason be without a sheriff, in which
case one or more wardens (_custodes_) would be appointed, and they would
answer in detail for the issues and receive payment in reward for their
services. In some cases the totals of these issues amount, as we should
expect, to more than the fixed farm, the difference between the two sums
being what the sheriff would have for his labour. But occasionally, and
notably in the case of London,[44] the yield under _custodes_ was
considerably less than under a sheriff. It is hardly conceivable that
the sheriff, in addition to the labour and responsibility of his
official duties, should have been expected to make a loss over the
render of his farm, but our knowledge of the methods by which the
various moneys were collected before they reached the exchequer is too
slight to enable us to explain this phenomenon. An incident which throws
upon the question a light so uncertain as to render it almost more
obscure occurred at the beginning of the Becket controversy. At a
council held at Woodstock in 1163 the king demanded that a certain
payment customarily made to the sheriffs from the lands of the counties
under their control should in future be entered on the rolls and
accounted for at the exchequer. Archbishop Becket rejected the demand,
declaring that the payments in question were voluntary, that they
depended upon the good conduct of the sheriffs, and that he would never
consent to pay one penny on this account to the king. The chronicler who
relates this incident at most length adds that the payment in question
was two shillings from every hide, but this was almost certainly an
error due to confusion with the Danegeld; the “sheriff’s aid,” about
which the dispute arose, was not levied on any fixed basis but varied in
different parts of the country.[45] So far as we can see, the object of
King Henry was to make the sheriffs more entirely dependent upon
himself, drawing them into the position of the _custodes_ as mere
salaried officials of the exchequer; incidentally, no doubt, he hoped at
the same time to obtain a substantial increase of revenue by
appropriating the “aid.” The objection voiced by Becket seems to have
been based precisely on the king’s wish to make the sheriffs responsible
solely to himself; under the existing arrangement a sheriff who abused
his authority ran the risk of losing the emoluments of his office, and
even with this check these officials and their underlings not
infrequently misused their power, extorting money from those under them
and failing to account at the exchequer for money received. So
notorious, indeed, did their maladministration become that, as we have
seen, in 1170 Henry was driven to take summary action, removing all the
sheriffs from office and appointing commissions to inquire into their
conduct. Some of the officials thus removed were fined and very few were
restored to their former position, but the new men appointed do not seem
to have been greatly superior to their predecessors, and it is clear
that whatever the sheriff lost or made over his farm he certainly
possessed valuable perquisites, both legitimate and of doubtful
legality.
The farms were the only fixed source of revenue, but an uncertain amount
could always be relied upon from legal procedure (_placita_), fines
inflicted for breaches of either the Common or Forest Law, amercements
levied on hundreds, tithings, or townships for murders, payments made
for leave to compound a suit begun in the king’s court, and penalties
due from the defeated party in a judicial duel. For the most part the
items under this head were small, though in the aggregate their amount
was considerable, but not infrequently we find heavy fines inflicted
upon men of wealth, for which no reason is given and which were in some
cases, no doubt, arbitrary acts of extortion on the king’s part. In 1165
Earl Hugh of Norfolk paid half of a fine of 1000 marks, while the Abbot
of St. Edmunds, William Cheyney, and two other East Anglican magnates
were amerced 200 marks apiece. That same year Hugh de Mortimer was fined
500 marks, the Bishop of Lincoln 400 marks, Ivo de Harcourt 300 marks,
Ralf de Cahaignes and Lefwin of York a like amount, the Abbot of
Westminster £100, and Abraham, the Jew of London, £2000. The Jews,
indeed, were a fruitful source of income: their financial genius had
enabled them to concentrate most of the floating capital of the country
in their hands. They had almost as much a monopoly of ready money as
they had of the trade of usury. In this latter respect their monopoly
was protected by the ban of the Church directed against Christian
usurers, and, safe from competition, they lent their money at their own
terms, usually about 60 per cent., to litigants, ambitious prelates, or
impoverished monasteries, at one time financing an unauthorised
expedition to Ireland and at another assisting the king with large
advances.[46] Henry was too sensible of their value to persecute, or to
permit his subjects to persecute, the Jews, but he had no scruples in
fining them arbitrarily enormous sums, which might have been crippling
if they had ever paid more than a fraction of them, and in 1188, when he
ordered his other subjects to pay a tenth of their goods towards the
crusade, he made the Jews contribute a quarter instead of a tenth. In
this latter case one of the London Jews was allowed to compound for his
share of the subsidy by a payment of £200, of which half was to be paid,
perhaps by the grim humour of the king, on the Sunday on which the
canticle “Rejoice, O Jerusalem” is sung. It was in the previous year
that the wealthiest of all the English Jews, the famous Aaron of
Lincoln, had died, and by the law relating to usurers, whether Jew or
Christian, his immense possessions, equal apparently to more than the
yearly revenues of the crown, had fallen to the king, only to perish in
great part beneath the waves of the Channel.
If the death of a usurer brought grist to the king’s mill so did that of
a prelate. However inexcusable from a moral point of view the seizure of
the issues of vacant bishoprics and abbeys may have been, the temptation
must have been strong. For example, the vacant abbey of Glastonbury in
1181 brought in £600 clear, and next year the see of Lincoln accounted
for £1290 and that of York for £1260; Canterbury varied from £1100 to
£1500. The farm of the bishopric of Winchester in 1172 was £1555; Ely
produced nearly £900, and even Bath was worth £425 clear in 1167. Very
few lay honours approached even the smallest of these sums, but with lay
estates as with clerical the death of the tenant was made a source of
profit to the king. If the heir were under age he and his lands would be
taken under the royal protection and either managed directly for the
king’s benefit or granted, for a consideration, to some person of
position, who might or might not be a relation of the heir, while the
tenant’s widow could be sold in marriage or made to pay heavily for the
right of following her own choice. Even if the heir were of age and
there were no widow to mulct, the new tenant would have to pay “relief,”
or death duties, graduated on the simple lines of getting the utmost
possible out of the landowner. For small estates the normal rate of
“relief” was £5 for a knight’s fee, the average value of a fee being at
most £20, but in the case of large estates the amount demanded seems, as
we have said, to have been arbitrarily fixed by the king. In 1185 as
much as 700 marks was demanded of the Countess of Warwick for the
privilege of having her father’s land, her dower and liberty to remain
single. To a certain extent these enormous fines, whether inflicted as
succession duties or for other reasons, were _bruta fulmina_, defeating
their own ends. Usually the debtor contented himself with paying yearly
instalments, sometimes round sums and sometimes strangely complicated
amounts which suggest a sudden demand from the sheriff satisfied by a
prompt clearance of pockets. The first instalment was as a rule
substantial; Fulk Paynel in 1180 paid 200 marks out of the 1000 marks
demanded of him for the honour of Bampton; but in the same year Adam de
Port only paid £40 out of a similar fine for possession of his lands and
his wife’s inheritance in Normandy and for restoration to the king’s
good favour. Fines might thus drag on literally for generations, the
instalments often showing a tendency to dwindle away until they ceased,
and either the king excused the payment of the rest or the sheriff wrote
it off as a bad debt. Almost any payment on account seems to have been
accepted, and in 1187 William Fitz-Ercenbald, who owed £2156 for arrears
of farm of the silver mines of Carlisle, paid in the rather absurd
amount of 13s. 4d.
Although all these sources could be counted upon to yield something
every year the annual yield varied greatly. There were, however, means
of raising extra occasional revenue, of which the amount could be
foretold with some accuracy. In the first place there was the Danegeld,
dating back to Saxon times. This was a tax of two shillings on every
hide of land as rated in the Domesday Survey. It was levied in 1156,
when the accounts show that if it had been collected in full it would
have amounted to £4550, but owing to extensive remissions and
exemptions, extending to a little over £2000, the total yield was only
£2500. For some unknown reason this tax was only levied once more, in
1162, and was then allowed to fall into disuse. Of more doubtful
legality but, as a rule, of greater profit were the “aids” (_auxilia_,
_dona_) assessed upon the counties and boroughs from time to time,
regulated apparently by the king’s need of money and the taxable
capacities of the districts assessed. In 1156 these “aids” yielded
£2100, with a further £100 still owing, while in 1159, according to Sir
James Ramsay, the amount was well over £5000. On the latter occasion the
“aids” were levied upon bishops, certain of the wealthier lords,
clerical and lay, and Jews as well as upon the boroughs; amongst the
biggest payments were those of the city of London £1000, Norwich £400,
York, Lincoln, and Northampton 200 marks each, the Archbishop of York
500 marks, the Bishops of Durham, Winchester, and Lincoln a like amount,
and the Abbot of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, 220 marks. Two years later
York again paid 200 marks, but Lincoln had risen and Norwich fallen to
£200, and London escaped with 1000 marks.
By feudal custom Henry was entitled to call for an “aid” from his
military tenants on the occasion of his eldest daughter’s marriage, and
in 1168 he availed himself of this right, stretching his demands to
include many persons outside the military classes, to whose
contributions he had no just claim. The similar feudal “aid” for the
knighting of his eldest son was never raised, as the young king was
knighted at the time that he was in opposition to his father. Finally,
in time of war the king could call for Scutage, a monetary composition
in lieu of personal service with the army. The amounts demanded for
Scutage varied from one to two marks for the knight’s fee, the larger
sum being exactly equivalent to the wages of a “knight,” or man-at-arms,
for forty days, the period for which the tenant of a knight’s fee was
bound to serve. Scutage was called for in 1156 for the war with Geoffrey
of Anjou, in 1159 for the Toulouse fiasco, when £2440 is said to have
been paid, implying the commutation of the personal service due from
1830 knights, in 1161 and 1162 for war with France, in 1172 for the
Irish expedition, and, finally, in 1175 for the projected expedition to
Galloway. Whether the “assessment for the army in Wales,” raised in
1165, should be considered as a scutage is questionable; it appears to
have been more of an irregular “aid.”
How far the exchequer officials of the period indulged in anticipatory
estimates of revenue, framing their simple and elastic budgets thereon,
cannot be said. Possibly the half-yearly provisional accounts rendered
by the sheriffs at Easter enabled them to foresee whether additional
taxation would be required to bring the revenue up to the required
amount by Michaelmas. Possibly, on the other hand, extra taxation was
put on whenever the balance in the treasury seemed to be getting low.
But however this may have been, the annual revenue was kept by one means
or another at a pretty constant level. Sir James Ramsay gives the totals
alike for 1159, in which year nearly £8000 were raised by scutage and
“aids,” and for 1169, when no extra taxation was levied, as
approximately £20,000. In 1176 the sum actually paid into the treasury
was £14,250, while something like £1750 had been spent by the
accountants on the king’s behalf, giving a total of £16,000. To this
have to be added the enormous sums extorted for breach of the Forest
Law. The total of the fines inflicted on this score was £13,450, the New
Forest accounting for over £2000 and the forests of Yorkshire £1600,
Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset and
Oxfordshire being all above £1000. But considerably less than half the
sum demanded was paid at the time, and the total for the year may be
estimated as between £5000 and £6000, bringing the revenue up to rather
over £21,000.
The money collected by the sheriffs and other officials was accounted
for every year at Michaelmas at the court of the exchequer. The
exchequer (_scaccarium_) derived its name from the great table covered
with a black chequered cloth on which the revenue accounts were set out
by means of counters. It must be borne in mind that ability to read and
write, though not yet considered as in itself entitling the possessor to
“privilege of clergy,” was so far peculiar to the clergy that a large
proportion of the lay sheriffs would have been unable to keep or to
understand written accounts. Even for those more learned the difficulty
of working out complicated sums in Roman numerals must have been
considerable, and indeed it is comparatively rare to find any lengthy
medieval account in which the sums of the items correspond throughout
accurately with the totals given. At the treasury courts, therefore, of
England and Normandy, and possibly elsewhere, an elaboration of the
“abacus,” or calculating board, was introduced. This consisted of a
table, ten feet long by five feet wide, covered with a black cloth on
which were drawn seven vertical columns, representing, from right to
left, pence, shillings, pounds, tens, hundreds, thousands, and tens of
thousands of pounds. These columns in turn were divided by horizontal
lines, cutting the cloth into a series of squares like those on a
chess-board. Within these squares the accounts were set out with
counters. At the Michaelmas session the chancellor, treasurer, and other
officials, with their clerks, sat round three sides of the table, while
on the other side was the calculating clerk with his counters, and near
him the sheriff, who may be regarded as his opponent in the game. Along
one line the calculator set out the amounts due from the accounting
sheriff, and below it he gradually built up the sheriff’s account,
beginning with the money paid in in cash and adding item by item the
sums, expended, for which the sheriff produced either the king’s writs
or tallies,[47] the sheriff’s object being to make the two amounts
balance. In this manner, by ocular demonstration, a long and complicated
account could be easily followed, while for permanent record all the
items were entered upon their rolls by the clerks of the chancellor and
treasurer.
The only coin in circulation in England at this time was the silver
penny, and although sums of 12, 160, and 240 pence were spoken of as
shillings, marks, and pounds for convenience of calculation, such units
had no tangible existence and all money payments were made in pence.
Although the money issued during Stephen’s reign was poorly executed,
such coins as have survived do not bear out the chroniclers’ assertions
that it was debased; but it is probable that the total amount of coin in
circulation was small and that a considerable proportion of it was
forged. In any case Henry had issued a new coinage in 1156, but the
moneyers appear to have not infrequently debased the silver or made
illegal profits in other ways, and in 1158 many of them had to stand
their trial by the ordeal of water and several only escaped mutilation
by the payment of heavy fines. Twenty years later, in 1177, we find what
looks like an organised conspiracy of fraud amongst the Canterbury
moneyers, five of their number being fined between them 2500 marks. At
last, in 1180, Henry entrusted the re-organisation of the coinage to a
foreigner, Philip Aymary, who did his work very well, but so manipulated
the business to his own profit that he was banished in disgrace. This
coinage, although possessing no particular artistic merit, was
technically a great advance on its predecessor, and was so well
appreciated that it continued to be struck, with hardly noticeable
variations, under Richard and John and well into the reign of Henry III.
As a result of forgery, fraud, and the inevitable loss of weight during
circulation the 240 pence which constituted the nominal pound “by tale,”
or by number, rarely corresponded to the standard pound by weight, and
as many of the sheriffs’ county forms were due in “blanched” money, that
is to say, in pounds of standard fineness and weight, it was necessary
to test the money paid in. To begin with, pence to the value of
forty-four shillings were counted out from the mass of money
[Illustration: SILVER PENNIES
1. First coinage of Henry II
2. Type introduced in 1180
3. Penny of Henry II struck for Aquitaine
4. Penny of Eleanor as Duchesse of Aquitaine
]
paid in by the sheriff whose account was under examination. Twenty
shillings of this was then melted down in a crucible and purified by
fire; the resulting ingot was next weighed against the standard pound,
and pence added from the selected money to bring it up to weight; the
number of pence required for this purpose having been noted the sheriff
was charged on all “blanch” sums due that number of pence in addition to
each pound by tale.
When we pass to the consideration of the relative value and purchasing
power of money in the middle of the twelfth century as compared with the
present time we are met by many complications. The average price of an
ox or cow during this reign was from three shillings to four shillings,
occasionally rising as high as five shillings; farm horses fetched three
shillings, but military chargers cost three pounds or more; sheep ranged
from fourpence to sixpence and young pigs were about the same, but when
full-grown they fetched as much as a shilling. A penny a day was the
recognised wage for a sergeant or private soldier, and eightpence a day
for a man-at-arms; the master of the royal yacht received a shilling,
the clerk of the household two shillings, and the chancellor five
shillings a day. Probably we may take the money of that date as roughly
equivalent to twenty-five times the amount in modern currency.
So far as the expenditure of the Crown is concerned we labour under
considerable difficulties, having no records of the nature of the
Liberate and Issue Rolls of later reigns. The only items of expenditure
which have come down to us are such as have been entered upon the Pipe
Rolls as discharged by the sheriffs and other officers out of the issues
of their offices. The heaviest of these expenses were incurred in
connection with building, and especially in the repair and enlargement
of the royal castles. The rebuilding of Scarborough has already been
spoken of, and amongst the scores of entries of work done on castles may
be mentioned the £1000 spent on Oxford in 1166 and 1167, a sum which is,
however, insignificant beside the £4350 spent on Dover Castle between
1182 and 1187, as much as £1248 being spent in the one year 1185.
Nottingham, which appears to have been one of the most habitable of the
castles, accounted for £450 in 1172 and for over £300 in 1175; large
sums were also spent on the king’s hunting seats such as Woodstock,
Clipston, and especially Clarendon. For the adornment of Clarendon there
were provided in 1177 “marble columns,” probably shafts of dark marble
similar to those the introduction of which by St. Hugh in his new work
at Lincoln so struck contemporary writers. But numerous as are the
entries of building expenses, they can represent but part of the sums
laid out by Henry on such operations, nor do we hear anything of the
cost of the army or of the upkeep of the royal household, though we know
from the existing list of salaries that this last item must have
amounted to about £1500 a year. Whatever were his expenses Henry
contrived to amass a great fortune, which his successor, Richard, found
little difficulty in dissipating.