1.1 Origins
The history of Europe is marked by cycles of political and economic integration followed by disintegration. Among these, few were as lasting or fruitful, whilst also as troubled, as that which unified the kingdom of England with a large swathe of the continent in the Middle Ages. Though this began with the Norman Conquest in 1066, it reached new heights when the duchy of Aquitaine was appended to the English crown after the accession of Henry of Anjou or Plantagenet (d.1189) as King Henry II of England on 25 October 1154. Two years earlier, he had married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the former wife of King Louis VII of France (r.1137–80), and the heiress to Guillém X, duke of Aquitaine (1099–1137).1 The duchy would remain in the hands of the Plantagenet dynasty (1154–1485) for nearly three centuries—almost without interruption—until 1453, when it fell under the direct rule of the French crown at the end of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).
Political union prefigured close commercial and financial ties between England and Aquitaine. A c.1465 memorandum penned by Régnault Girard, a French royal official, later explained this to his king, Louis XI (r.1461–83). Girard told of the hundreds of ships that had conducted a great trade route down the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. He listed the ‘great merchandise’ that came south: ‘fine English wool made into abundant cloth’, tin, lead, coal, and more. For this, wine returned north, as well as other products from across southern France: from the lands of the lords of Albret, the counts of Armagnac and Foix, and the viscounts of Béarn, as well as farther afield from the kingdoms of Castile, Navarre, and Aragon. Girard himself observed that with commerce would flow money, gold, and silver, and this would infuse and stimulate the economy.2 It was not until a convergence of political and military events in the thirteenth century that this strong link properly developed. The reign of Henry II’s son John (r.1199–1216) brought a series of disastrous defeats at the hands of Philip II Augustus of France (r.1180–1223), during which most of the Plantagenet lands in France, apart from southern and western Aquitaine, were lost.3 Finally, in August 1224, Philip’s son Louis VIII (r.1223–6) captured what remained of Poitou and La Rochelle from Henry III (r.1216–72).4 The residue was Gascony, stretching roughly from the Pyrenees mountains to the Garonne river. The region’s ports, particularly the cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne, thereafter rose to prominence through strategic necessity. Fortuitously enough, this development coincided with a period of Europe-wide demographic and economic expansion, coupled with growth in the scale and sophistication of trade, described since Raymond de Roover as a ‘commercial revolution’.5 Anglo-Gascon trade grew apace from this time, stimulated by a burgeoning English demand for wine. In order to meet this demand, there was a dramatic expansion of vineyard land that accompanied the establishment of bastides, new settled towns.6 Particularly significant was the growth of production in the Haut-Pays (the ‘high country’), the lands to the east of the diocese of Bordeaux along the upper Garonne, Lot, Tarn, and, to an extent, the Dordogne rivers. This became, in the words of Michael Postan, ‘the largest region of specialised viticulture ever known in European history’.7 Such profound specialisation created a strong demand for goods that were not produced domestically in sufficient quantities, and in meeting those needs, England gained reliable access to wider European markets unhindered by the political constraints often found trading through France and the Low Countries. With this commercial expansion, the financial value of the union to the English crown rose exponentially.
1.2 The Study of Anglo-Gascon Union
This book is a study of Anglo-Gascon trade and finance in the Late Middle Ages, with a focus on their relationship with the Plantagenet government of England and Aquitaine. The period covered (around 1300 to 1500) can be credited with the development of many of the key economic institutions of the modern unitary nation-state in Europe, the main catalyst of which was the fiscal needs of governments. Following the ‘commercial revolution’ in the thirteenth century, taxes on trade made an increasingly important contribution to their finances. Richard Unger has argued—in his comprehensive review—that though rulers rarely made efforts to encourage long-distance commerce directly, they would exploit it ‘to increase their fiscal scope’ and gain ‘a regular, continuing and growing stream of money’.8 Unger saw governments—large and small—becoming increasingly reliant on such exactions over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and that this process influenced the character of European polities as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.9 Yet, during the 200 years after 1300, rulers and merchants alike had to address growing threats to their prosperity as they left the last great period of economic growth of the High Middle Ages, and they entered, what is broadly defined as the late medieval, an era of—at best—great insecurity—at worst—outright decline. This brought increasingly regulated commodity and capital markets, and more centralised systems of taxation and public borrowing. Financial innovations of the former age, be they companies or credit instruments, became increasingly refined and applied more widely to deal with the great challenges of the latter.10
An examination of the union of England and Aquitaine offers a valuable perspective on such changes. Trade between two polities with one ruler generated subtly different financial challenges and political outcomes as their economies were buffeted by the effects of repeated exogenous shocks. Some of these were obviously more or less universal: Europe’s population began to fall with the great famines of 1315–22. The Black Death followed in 1348–50. During the first wave of plague (Yersinia pestis), somewhere between one-third and one-half of the continent’s inhabitants died; and further deadly outbreaks recurred thereafter. The population of England went from close to five million down to a little over two million by the end of the fourteenth century.11 One can estimate that the nucleus of Plantagenet Aquitaine contained 650,000 taxpayers in 1315–6, but not much more than 150,000 in 1414.12 Political strife and conflicts were increasingly frequent. The 1259 Treaty of Paris—agreed by Henry III and Louis IX (r.1226–70)—had confirmed the vassalage of the English king to the French for the tenure of Aquitaine, but the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries saw repeated quarrelling between the two crowns over the extent of the sovereignty of each.13 This book begins at the time of the 1294–1303 Anglo-French War between Edward I (r.1272–1307) and the Capetian King Philip IV, also known as Philip the Fair (r.1285–1314). The 1324 War of Saint-Sardos between Charles IV (r.1322–8) and Edward II (r.1307–27) lasted just six weeks and was a military disaster for the English. It led to the loss of much of the east of the duchy and contributed to Edward’s removal from power in 1326.14 Friction continued between Edward III (r.1327–77) and Philip VI of Valois (r.1328–50) until finally, in 1337, Philip ordered the confiscation of all remaining Plantagenet lands held of the French crown, beginning the Hundred Years’ War.15 English fortunes waxed in the 1340s and 1350s under Edward and his son Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince (1330–76), then waned in the 1370s and through the reign of Richard II (r.1377–9). The Lancastrian usurpation by Henry IV (r.1399–1413) brought a military resurgence under the leadership of Henry V (r.1413–22), and then another decline under his son Henry VI (r.1422–70, 1471). The final conquest of Aquitaine by the French King Charles VII (r.1422–61) in 1453 brought an ultimate threat to commercial and financial links between England and Aquitaine by suddenly removing their political basis.
As we approach the relevant historiography, some clarification of the correct nomenclature is necessary. The kingdom of England, often referred to here as ‘the kingdom’, more or less covered its mod...