The History of Parliamentary Taxation in England

by Shepard Ashman Morgan

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.