Within four months of Parliament granting the poll tax, Edward III was dead. But there was no sign that the reign of his nine-year-old grandson was going to be anything less than turbulent. When Richard II was crowned in July 1377, the realm was already badly shaken. The first poll tax-met with widespread popular disgruntlement-was quickly swallowed up by the war effort. The government remained virtually bankrupt, reliant on massive loans from the City of London and pawning royal treasure to stay afloat. Peace negotiations with the French had collapsed in June, and by August the south coast was under attack. English military tactics were unsophisticated, based around the chevauchée – a rather glamorous term for what was essentially a travelling riot of looting, burning, rape and murder. Meanwhile, Frenchmen ‘looted and set fire to several places’ and took 1000 marks in ransom for the Isle of Wight. ‘Then they returned to the sea and sailed along the English coastline continuously until Michaelmas [29 September]. They burned many places and killed, especially in the southern areas, all the people they could find … They carried off animals and other goods as well as several prisoners.’9
The first two parliaments of Richard’s reign were noisy with complaint. Government ministers made frenzied attempts to wheedle money from the commons in any way they could. They were largely unsuccessful. With every fiscal failure, the threat of invasion grew more acute. By the spring of 1379 it had reached the point of crisis. Inspired perhaps by desperation, a radical new form of poll tax was agreed. Instead of a flat fee, a carefully graduated scale of payments according to class was developed. Earls were to pay £4, ‘each baron and banneret or knight who is able to spend as much as a baron’ was to pay 40s, judges and the richest lawyers were to pay 100s (£5). Laymen, once again, were to pay four pence, but there were fifty categories and a further eighteen subcategories of assessment. It was in essence a much fairer tax than the crude flat levy of 1377. But it was not enough.
Eight months after the second poll tax had been granted, Parliament was recalled. The government had expected to raise a bare minimum of £50,000. But £50,000 was the very least that could sustain the army, with its substantial mercenary element, on the rampage for a whole year. Yet following widespread evasion of the second poll tax, the proceeds amounted to less than £22,000. Abandoning the project, the parliament of January 1380 agreed a heavy tax on movable goods. That, too, was completely inadequate and the funds were immediately swallowed up by the duke of Buckingham’s chevauchée through northern France.
Reality began to bite: the country was broke; the king, at thirteen years old, was too young to fix it; Gaunt, governing as regent-elect, was considered by the general population and especially by the money-men of London to be an arrogant, bungling swine; there was acute tension in the countryside and rumours of plans for widespread violence; the south coast was burning; the French garrisons were mutinous; the armies were deserting; the Scots were fomenting plans to invade; and things were only going to get worse. Either a radical solution was required or, at the very least, a huge amount of cash was needed to save the Crown from calamity.
So, in November 1380, yet another parliament was called.
The lords and commons are agreed that to meet the necessities above mentioned three groats should be given from each lay person of the realm, within franchise or without, both male and female and of whatsoever estate or condition, who have reached the age of fifteen.
Parliament Rolls
Northampton, November 1380
Rain punished the thick walls of Northampton and turned the cold stone slick. The thin streets of the busy little town should have been full, but on a grey Thursday morning in early November 1380, it was wet, chilly and quiet.
Inside a small chamber adjoining the Priory of St Andrew, tucked away in the north-west corner of the town, the archbishop of Canterbury gave a signal, and above the clattering of the downpour outside, a long and familiar reading began. The text was Magna Carta, literally ‘the great charter’ of England’s liberties. As it filled the steaming room, the damp handful of lords, bishops and gentlemen gathered together were reminded of the rights, duties and responsibilities they held and exercised as England’s elite court and general council.
It was the first day of Parliament. Or rather, it was the second first day. Parliament had been due to begin on Monday, but bad weather had enforced a three-day delay. Still the numbers were thin. These occasions were by tradition sparsely attended, but even by recent standards, this was a poor turnout. In the heart of the country, Northampton should have been an easy destination for everyone whose presence was required at Parliament. But that autumn had seen dark black skies and unrelenting, torrential storms, which had turned the roads into thick and dangerous furrows. Travel, always burdensome over long distances, became treacherous as rivers burst their banks and flooded England’s well-trodden commercial thoroughfares.
Churchmen, laymen, nobles and their servants were all braving the elements to attend the realm’s fifth parliament in just four years. The Crown’s needs were so immediate and severe that even the thirteen-year-old king, Richard II, had struggled through the downpour to arrive a few miles away at the manor of Moulton. He was to lodge there for several months, surrounded by his household, his tutors and his boyhood companions, holding his court in unfamiliar surroundings while his countrymen attempted, on his behalf, to solve an impending national crisis.
The threat that faced the Crown and realm was clear and urgent. Peace with France-shaky throughout most of the century-had long since collapsed and the French, seeing a power vacuum at the head of English government, knew they had the upper hand. England’s enemies scorned the notion that that the young king’s government might be capable of reaching a fair and balanced settlement to the Hundred Years War. French and Spanish fleets terrorised the Channel, the Scots were raiding the northern borders, Ireland was turbulent, English garrisons on the Continent were impoverished and the nation had been on a defensive footing as it anticipated invasion from both land and sea for the last three and a half years. The south coast and the whole of southern England was in a state of heightened peril, and even Oxford-a couple of hundred miles inland-was planning for the worst, and nervously considering making improvements to its crumbling fortifications.
It was a measure of the severity of the crisis that Parliament had been called at all. January’s tax, granted in a similarly thunderous Westminster, had been hard, and the commons protested fiercely against what they saw as aristocratic financial incompetence. The deal they had brokered then was that the king could take his money, but had then to hold off for at least eighteen months before coming cap in hand again.1 But the tax that had been granted there proved quite inadequate to the government’s demands, and just months after Westminster had emptied of parliamentary attendees, an embarrassing repeat summons had been sent across the country to this new gathering in Northampton. Now the mood was one of marked reluctance to allow the cycle of waste and squander to continue.
With the best and most imposing noble lords from the January parliament all absent on campaign, Northampton was achingly short of good worshipful noblemen with the necessary grandeur to overawe and bully the commons into giving up their gold. Chief among them, the government missed John of Gaunt, the king’s bullish, prickly uncle, the most powerful nobleman in all of England, and a man recognised as a major force in European politics by most of the western half of the Continent. Gaunt, out of necessity, was absent in the northern reaches of the realm, negotiating a peace treaty with Scotland. He was not expected in the Midlands until the end of the month.
But Parliament could not wait for him. So here sat the realm, on Thursday morning, in the refectory