Economics and the Wars of the Roses By Brian Wainwright
A number of economic factors had a particular
influence on England at the time of the Wars of the Roses. The purpose of this
article is to explore some of them, though it is necessary to go back to earlier
periods of history, certainly the fourteenth century, to understand the roots
of these issues.
One of the most significant was the relative shortage
of labour. It has been estimated that between 1348 and 1350 the Black Death
killed 1.5 million people out of a total population of around 4 million. At
this time there was no large-scale immigration. Indeed most people rarely, if
ever, travelled more than a few miles from their home village or town, so there
were no means by which numbers [of people] could be made up in the short term.
The population of England and Wales was slow to recover. In 1500, 150 years
after the Great Plague, it is estimated at between 2.2 and 2.6 million,
depending which source is preferred.[1]
A second and often overlooked factor is the damage to
national finances caused by Edward III’s disastrous foreign policy. Though this
brought the ‘glory’ of Crecy and Poitiers, it also led to a long losing war
which the country could not afford to finance, and a threadbare exchequer that made
Richard II’s task an exceedingly difficult one. Novel forms of taxation to meet
the deficit led to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and to class warfare by means
of legislation, including a vain attempt to hold down the level of wages by
statute. (There was a labour shortage, remember? It was inevitable that real
wages would rise – and they did – but the ultra-conservative landlords sitting
in Parliament acted like so many King Cnuts.) Richard II did bring about
national solvency through his peace policy and by the proscription of certain
rich enemies. At the end of his reign the exchequer was full and there were
barrels of gold stacked up in Holt Castle. The policies of the three successive
Lancastrian kings reversed this temporary prosperity, and by the 1450s the
disastrous outcome of the French war left the country virtually bankrupt. The
direct impact on the great lords was that they could not (generally) recover
the debts the Crown owed them, nor did they rely on receiving the salaries for
the offices they held or the grants due to them from the exchequer. For someone
like the Duke of York, who had run up large debts in Crown service while in
France and Ireland, and who relied on exchequer grants for a fair proportion of
his basic income, this was a matter of direct concern.[2]
Thirdly, arising principally from the labour shortage,
there was a fall in the value of land. It’s pretty obvious that if you have no
one to work your land that land quickly reverts to waste and produces little or
nothing. Some villages were completely wiped out by the Black Death and were
simply abandoned.[3] Historically, lords had relied upon serf labour
to work their demesne lands; now those serfs were fewer in number and aware of
the increased real value of their labour. The difficulty in carrying on in the
same old way accelerated a trend that had started at least a century earlier;
lords gave up their own direct involvement in agriculture and leased out not
only demesne land but whole manors and lordships. It was more straightforward
to collect fixed cash rent from one person than to bully and cajole sundry
discontented serfs into performing labour service. The tenants (mostly people
of substantial means) often turned former arable land over to sheep farming,
displacing what population was left. Alternatively they relied upon hired
labourers. Where feudal obligations remained, they were often commuted for cash
or avoided altogether. Land rents were rarely, if ever, reassessed to take
account of inflation or any added value the tenant had developed. A
conservative attitude to economics led to a general assumption that if a piece
of land was worth £1 a year in 1300, it was still worth that in 1450. Indeed
the main purpose of producing a valor for a lord’s lands was to ensure his
officials were not cheating him, not to provide evidence that income could be
increased.[4]
A fourth issue was the damage caused by the Glendower
Rising from 1400 to (circa) 1412. Obviously this had little
impact on those lords with no Welsh property, but most of the great magnates
(including the King) did have substantial Welsh lands. Obvious
15th Century examples are the dukes of York and Buckingham and the
Earl of Warwick. In the 1390s quite astonishing sums were raised from this
relatively poor country, even allowing for the fact that the Welsh were not
required to pay Parliamentary taxation. For example when Henry Bolingbroke
(later Henry IV) visited his lordship of Brecon for the first time in 1397 he
was granted a subsidy of £1,333 payable over three years, adding at least 35%
to the existing far from modest demands on his tenants there during that
period.[5] In 1393 the Earl of March drew no less than £2,775 from
his Welsh lands, while in the same era Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel was
taking at least £1500 a year from his relatively small lordships in the north
east of the country.[6] To set these figures in context, at this
time the theoretical endowment for an earldom was 1000 marks of annual income
(just under £667) and for a dukedom £1000. The enormous damage done by the
Glendower rising slashed net income for these lords almost completely in the
short term, and the wrecked Welsh economy took a very long time to recover.
There was a glut of vacant property and tenants increasingly refused to accept land
except of the basis of English tenure which (perhaps surprisingly) was more
favourable to the tenant.[7] It is safe to say that the revenues
from Welsh lands and lordships in the 15th Century never again
approached the dizzying heights of the 1390s.
What were the impacts of these changes on 15th
Century noble families? First, we should be clear that none of these people
were not exactly starving. It was possible to live as a gentleman on £5 a year,
while a £100 a year was a reasonable income for a quite wealthy knight. Yet the
nobles needed huge incomes to maintain their status. Put yourself in their
place for a moment. It goes without saying that you and your lady must be
dressed in the best, and ride top quality horses. These things do not come cheap.
Silk and similar luxury fabrics are in real terms much dearer than in the 21st
Century. It is not unknown for a great lady’s dressmaker’s bill to exceed
£1000.[8] A good warhorse can cost £80 and even a relatively cheap
one for riding will be around £5. The castle that belonged to your grandfather
may not be up to the standards required for modern living. Rebuilding it will
be an expensive option, and if you decide to build a new mansion instead it
will cost in the region of 7000 marks (£4667)[9] for something
roughly appropriate to your rank.
Then there is the matter of your household. The more
important you are, the more people you will have to employ. The wage roll is
quite likely to run to hundreds of men and a few women. (The expected number of
staff for an earl was around 200[10]) Now it’s true that labour is
cheap, but the wages, food and livery coats for so many people add up. In
addition, many of the employees will be gentlefolk and expect expensive cloth
for their liveries and decent wages. Nor is this the end of the human resources
issue. Someone will have to be paid to collect your rents and manage your
estates; in fact you will almost certainly have your own council, with several
lawyers on it. Everyone knows how expensive they are. There will be at least some
retainers, paid to show up when you go to war and also sometimes to attend you
in peace, so everyone can see how rich and powerful you are. Then there are
‘feed men’. Your hangers-on, people you want to influence and have on your side
– local officials, for example. Their annuities all add up.
Next, consider your children. Apart from the cost of
bringing them up, clothing them, giving them horses and so on, the daughters
will certainly need dowries. We are looking at hundreds, if not thousands for
each one, depending on how high up the social scale they marry. As it’s
disgraceful to marry them much below their social class, this is going to be
costly, especially if you’re a medieval version of Mr. Benet. Even nunneries
aren’t cheap to enter, not if you want one of the few top-class ones, like
Barking or Sion. Then there are your younger sons. The days have long gone when
you could simply give them a sword and a coat of mail and send them off to the
crusades. You are now expected to provide them with at least some
land. However, there’s still a social taboo against alienating inherited land
from the eldest son, so you are going to have to buy or otherwise acquire it.[11]
Because of that taboo, land is in short supply and purchasing it takes luck and
knowledge. Usually the only people who want to sell are either childless or in
very serious debt. You are likely to be up against other bidders and even if
you do succeed you’ll have to be quite sure that you have good title and there
are no other claimants. Do you think there might be a few lawyer’s fees
involved?
Then there’s your soul to worry about. You’ll
certainly be generous to the church during your life, if only because it’s part
of your status. Yet as you get older, and start to worry about dying (given
that this is the 15th Century you won’t need to be that
old to have concerns) you’ll certainly want to do more. It’s too expensive
nowadays to found a monastery (the mortmain licence alone is prohibitive) but
you’ll certainly want to put money aside to ensure you have a good funeral
(with plenty of tips handed out so people will pray for you), a fine tomb (so
people will remember you and pray for you), and some provision for priests to
say masses for you for a very long time. You may be able to put some of your
estates in trust (enfeoffment) to pay for all this, but one way or another it
will cost.
You may think you can skip some of this – so you can,
but if you do, you would ‘lose worship’, that is, people would not respect you
as they should one of your rank. The medieval concept of largesse is a foreign
language to the 21st Century monarchy and nobility in the UK. They
would regard it as nouveau riche if not downright common.
Medieval nobles were more like Arab oil sheikhs, who routinely hand out Rolex
watches to their gardeners and chauffeurs. You must not only spend, but be seen
to spend, lavishly and with open-handed generosity. Warwick the Kingmaker
allowed random strangers to take hunks of meat from his kitchen; it was part of
his image as a great man.
To some extent the greatest peers were protected
against declining land incomes by a series of what might be called ‘corporate
mergers’. McFarlane points out that in 1300 there were 136 families whose heads
had received at least one personal summons to Parliament (in effect, they were
peers). A further 221 peerages were created over the next 200 years. However,
by 1500 there were only 61 peers, and only 16 of them had unbroken male descent
back to 1300.[12] It is a mistake to think this was entirely down to
the slaughter of the Wars of the Roses, or the political turmoil during the
reigns of Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI. The principal cause was
infertility. To some extent this may have been caused by inbreeding. Prior to Magna Carta great
heiresses had been handed out to all sorts of dubious individuals, including
foreign mercenaries and penniless knights.[13] By the 15th Century
they were the exclusive preserve of the nobility, and everyone ‘suitable’ as a
marriage partner was some kind of cousin. One result of this was to concentrate
the bulk of land in the ownership of fewer and fewer individuals.
The Warwick[14] family is an excellent
example – perhaps even the best. Back in the 13th Century, William
Beauchamp of Elmley was lucky enough to marry Isabel Mauduit, who turned out to
be heiress to her brother, the Earl of Warwick, when he died without issue.
(She was heiress of her mother, who represented the still earlier Beaumont
earls.) His descendant Richard Beauchamp (1382-1439) married two heiresses in
succession; firstly the Berkeley heiress, and then in 1423, the real jackpot,
the Despenser heiress, who by a remarkable chance was the widow of his cousin
and namesake, Richard Beauchamp of Abergavenny. This lady brought with her the
vast Despenser inheritance, including the senior share of the former de Clare
lands,[15] including the Marcher Lordship of Glamorgan, the biggest
and best of all such lordships, and the former Burghersh lands of her
grandmother. As a bonus, because Beauchamp of Abergavenny had died without a
male heir much of his endowment also returned ‘home’ to Warwick as it was
entailed to the male Beauchamp line, while Warwick retained effective control
of what was left. Beauchamp and Isabelle Despenser had one son, Henry, who
eventually inherited everything apart from the Berkeley lands, which went to
his half-sisters.[16]
In 1434 Henry Beauchamp married Cecile Neville[17]
and at the same time his full sister, Anne Beauchamp, married Richard Neville,
son of the Earl of Salisbury. Salisbury had received the lion’s share of the
Neville lands because his mother, Joan Beaufort, had been given a jointure in
them and preferred her own eldest son to his elder half-brother, the Earl of
Westmorland. In addition, he had married Alice Montagu, heiress of the Montagu
(or Montacute) earls of Salisbury. This marriage cost Salisbury a net dowry of
4700 marks (about £3,133) a figure only exceeded in the 15th Century
by the 70,000 florins (about 14000 marks or £9333) supposedly attached to Lucia
of Milan[18] when she married Edmund, Earl of Kent. Kent never saw a
penny. Richard Beauchamp undoubtedly did, and the size of the net dowry
(bearing in mind there was a gross figure offset by Anne Beauchamp’s dowry)
demonstrates the exceptional value of his heir’s marriage.
Henry Beauchamp was created Duke of Warwick, but died
young leaving a daughter who died in infancy. Salisbury’s investment paid off
handsomely as his son now inherited the combined Warwick estates; of course on
his father’s death in 1460 he also inherited the Salisbury/Neville lands into
the bargain. ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’ in his person represented no less than 5
magnates who had attended Richard II’s court: Warwick, Salisbury, Beauchamp of
Abergavenny, Westmorland (in part) and Despenser, Earl of Gloucester. He was as
rich as any of his forbears but whether he was as powerful or rich as those five
men combined is a moot point. I am pretty well certain he wasn’t as
rich as they, together, had been.
What else could a lord do apart from marry well? War
profits were certainly one possibility. The French wars may have been (nay, were)
a disaster for the English national exchequer and taxpayer, but they were a
source of potential enrichment for private individuals. I once lightly compared
Richard II’s peace policy to cancelling the national lottery. That is the
easiest way to understand its unpopularity. Imagine you were a penniless
soldier. As long as the wars went on, you could dream of capturing a French
knight, or, better still, a French lord. Though your own lord and the King
would take a big slice of the action, and might even make you settle for a
fixed sum, that reward would still be more than you could ever hope to earn in
a lifetime. Of course, your chance of actually making such a capture was
vanishingly small and you were far more likely to die in a ditch of dysentery.
But people like to dream.
These calculations worked higher up the income scale.
McFarlane cites the case of Sir John Fastolf, who went from the status of
esquire with £46 a year to a knight-banneret with a clear income of £1,450 per
annum.[19] This was mainly, if not wholly, due to his participation
in the war. For a brief period during the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI,
Englishmen were able to receive and hold lands in France. This was a great
incentive to men like the Duke of York, who had younger sons to provide for. Is
it too outrageous to suggest that a compelling motive for the war-party was
French land rather than English patriotism? Of course, the really wise ones
(like Fastolf) sold their French property while the going was good and invested
the profit in English land.
Another way to
boost income was to chase up feudal incidents. These applied at all levels of
society, and were frequently avoided, indeed had often fallen into practical
disuse. A lord could chase these up to some effect. For example, where land was
held by feudal tenure, the lord had the right of wardship during the heir’s
minority. Some feudal tenants sought to avoid this by enfeoffment (putting the
land into trust by nominally granting it to a panel of others while retaining
the tenant’s own use of it). By this method the ‘tenant’ never died, so there
was never any wardship. Naturally lords objected to this practice and tried to
poke legal holes in such enfeoffments. The fact that they themselves were
almost invariably enfeoffing land to keep it out of the sovereign’s hands was
neither here nor there. A particularly nasty trick used by lords was to claim
that prosperous townsmen were their serfs as a way of extracting blackmail.
McFarlane quotes the case of a citizen of Norwich who had to pay £20 for
manumission.[20] One imagines that the lord, or his officials, used
their local knowledge to construct pedigrees of merchant families, and if there
was a remote case that Mr. X was a serf by ancestry they would swoop on their
unfortunate victim. Many people did, of course, have serf ancestors at near
remove. Even the Pastons were descended from bond tenants, and much was made of
it by their enemies before Edward IV declared them official gentlefolk.
Another route to increased income was to become one of
the sovereign’s chosen men. Politics was (and largely still is) about control
of patronage, given that in any economy there are never enough resources for
everyone to be satisfied. The pool of patronage in medieval England was quite
shallow, but there were still a number of lucrative offices in the King’s gift
ranging from Lord Chancellor to gentleman porter of some obscure and
half-demolished castle. Relatively few of these offices required the holder to
do anything much – for example the Lord Admiral had a court, but it was
normally staffed for him by professional lawyers. The office of Lord Great
Chamberlain was the next thing to a sinecure. Joining the King’s Council was
also worthwhile – you might actually have to turn up once in a while, but a
useful salary was paid. In addition, if you were in good odour at court you
might pick up the occasional wardship and marriage and if you were very lucky,
a promotion in the peerage or even a grant of land or an annual payment from
the exchequer. If there was an Act of Resumption on the stocks (every so often
Parliament passed a law clawing back all land given away by the Crown since
such-and-such a date) you would be well placed to get yourself exempted from
it. There was also the possibility of picking up local offices for your clients
– it was often useful to have one of your hangers-on picked as a sheriff, for
example. The client would be grateful and it helped increase the patron’s
influence.
Some offices were particularly valuable. Consider
William, Lord Hastings in his role of Lord Chamberlain.[21] This gave him
control over access to the King, certainly for anyone below the rank of a
prince of the blood. Due to the highly personal nature of medieval government,
access to the King was indispensible for anyone who wanted any kind of
political or legal favour, and people were more than willing to court Hastings’
favour in order to receive this facility. This was not always a matter of a
straightforward bribe. For example, Hastings was appointed as steward by about
a dozen lords, ladies and religious houses.[22] He certainly did not
go around collecting their rents; the appointments were profitable sinecures.
It’s highly unlikely they’d have waged him had he remained plain William
Hastings, a country esquire. His role at court was the deciding factor.
Ah, you may say, but what about the fact that in
straightened times the exchequer was empty? Would these salaries and fees still
be paid? Well, that was the whole point of being a big noise at court. If you
were a member of the King’s clique you were far more likely to find that the
exchequer was able to pay you in cash rather than tally sticks. Or you might be
able to get your income assigned directly to one of the customs ports, which
gave you the first chance of getting your hands on the cash, cutting out the
hungry exchequer altogether. When the ruling clique was deemed too narrowly
based by a significant portion of the nobility, trouble always followed, as in
the reigns of Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI and Edward IV. While political
issues (such as the war in France) were often waved about as a pretext, the
bottom line was that the opposition felt the ‘wrong people’ had their hands on
the patronage. In other words, it all came down to money.
Endnotes:
[1] Google is your friend for these
estimates. There is some variation, but little doubt that there was a serious
hit to the level of population in the mid 14th Century that took a
long time to recover.
[2] For York’s problems see R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of
King Henry VI (1981), p674. The debt owing to York for his French
service alone
was £38,667. In medieval terms an astronomical amount.
[3] There are at least 3000 such sites in
England, though not all as a direct result of the Black Death. See
http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/T/timeteam/snapshot_villages.html
[4] K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England
(1973) pp.213-14.
[5] R.R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr
(1995) p.72.
[6] Davies, ibid. p.73.
[7] Davies, ibid. p.319.
[8] Both Cecily, Duchess of York and Isabel,
Lady Montagu, are known to have run up huge bills on clothes.
[9] 7000 marks was the reputed cost of
building Hunsdon House, the home of Sir William Oldhall, one of York’s
advisers.
[10] P.W. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval
England, 1993, p.121.
[11] Francis Lovel’s father was a rare example
of a peer who proposed to divide his lands almost equally between his four
sons. As it turned out, only Francis survived to manhood so the decision was
irrelevant.
[12] McFarlane, op.cit. pp.144-145.
[13] William Marshal for example. He didn’t have
a bean. There is no way that in the 15th Century a man of his kind
would have been given an heiress like Isabel de Clare.
[14] See McFarlane, op.cit. p. 188 et seq.
[15] These came to the Despensers via the
marriage of Hugh the Younger to Edward II’s niece, Eleanor de Clare, the eldest
of three sisters and co-heiresses of the last de Clare Earl of Gloucester,
killed at Bannockburn.
[16] Principally to Margaret, Countess of
Shrewsbury, who spent years in a running battle with her cousins, the male
Berkeleys, over the inheritance.
[17] Not to be confused with her aunt, the
Duchess of York.
[18] For Lucia of Milan see Barron, C.M. and
Sutton, A.F., Medieval London Widows 1300-1500 pp. 77-84.
[19] McFarlane, op.cit., p.183.
[20] McFarlane, op.cit., p.221. I am sorry
to say that my own researches revealed that Constance of York attempted this
trick on at least one citizen of Reading. The only defence I can offer for her
is that the practice was widespread, even in the later part of the 15th
Century when serfdom was practically a dead duck.
[21] This office, known as Lord Chamberlain or
King’s Chamberlain was a working one and should not be confused with the
largely honorific office of Lord Great Chamberlain. The Lord Chamberlain was
usually a close friend of the sovereign.
[22] McFarlane, op.cit., p.216, note 2. His patrons
included Warwick, Clarence, Norfolk and the Duchess of Buckingham.
