The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (124 page)

In assessing the urban crisis, historians have perhaps too often ignored the simple point that a declining population and consequent decline in the gross national product does not have to mean a decline in
per capita
wealth. As a result they have taken too gloomy a view of late medieval economic activity. But if the volume of economic activity undoubtedly had declined from the high levels of the thirteenth century, there are plenty of signs that England’s economic health was in good order, fuelled from the 1460s onwards by a buoyant foreign trade spearheaded
by a booming textile industry. In such a context it is difficult to believe in crisis. What may be true is that the decline in population had a disproportionately adverse effect on civic finances. Incomes from rents would have been directly affected, while the decline in the volume of trade would have meant less revenue from tolls. At the same time, many of a town’s financial commitments, for instance the payment of a fee-farm and parliamentary taxes, remained the same. Moreover, the decline in population had been accompanied by a tendency for people to move into suburbs, outside the jurisdiction and financial control of the town authorities. None of this has to mean that urban prosperity was declining, but it might well explain the numerous petitions to the Crown from the towns for tax relief, many of which were favourably received. It may also be true that some towns were facing particularly severe problems. Lincoln had suffered badly from the silting up of the River Witham. Hull’s export trade to the Baltic was destroyed by the Hanseatic League’s increasing stranglehold on all trade to that area; Boston’s export trade, too, seems to have considerably diminished, though in both cases the volume of coastal traffic may have increased.
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The long-term decline of Winchester as a result of the collapse of its cloth industry has already been mentioned. But it is Coventry that has been advanced as the main instance of urban crisis: a town, allegedly, not only suffering a chronic illness, but by 1525 in its death-throes. The cause was apparently a combination of difficulties in its own textile industry, a short-term but severe slump in cloth exports, high food prices and heavy taxation.
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Perhaps, but there must be serious doubts about a crisis whose chief symptom was a ‘conspiracy’ of no more than fifty people, and for which no one was executed. In fact, far from being Coventry’s death-throe, the conspiracy was no more than an enclosure riot, which at Coventry had, during the previous fifty years, traditionally taken place on Lammas day (1 August), as some of its citizens sought to ensure that the town-fields were made available for common pasturage, which by custom they should have been.
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The number of citizens who sought exemption from civic office on the grounds that they could not afford the expense or face up to the responsibility of handling a town’s shaky finances might seem to support the notion of an urban crisis. But there were a number reasons for declining office, including the reluctance of successful entrepreneurs to waste their time in local politics. It looks also as if some people were asked to stand for office against their own wishes, in order that they might be persuaded to buy an exemption – which at the very least complicates any interpretation of the figures of those seeking exemption, as does the fact that there was never any serious difficulty in filling civic offices.
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Moreover, that Wolsey showed no sign of believing in an urban crisis may in itself be a reason for not believing in one, for there has so far been nothing to suggest that he was one to duck a problem – rather the opposite.

The Tudor poor laws have been seen as important milestones on the way to the welfare state, and they have commanded a good deal of mostly sympathetic attention.
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Wolsey’s lack of involvement with any of them may, as a consequence, be held against him, especially as only a few years later Thomas Cromwell was able to grasp their importance – but then he was a very ‘modern’ man! The present writer’s scepticism of anything ‘whiggish’ will already be apparent, and the fact that these laws were largely the work of Elizabethan councillors, such as William Cecil, not otherwise noted for their modernity, does not encourage him to revise his views. Instead, the suggestion would be that the poor laws were in part a pragmatic response to a probably growing problem, and, as with enclosure and indeed with most social legislation, there was also a less rational side to them, in which the obsession with ‘order’ and ‘degree’ and an ingrained fear of those without fixed abode or employment, were the most obvious features. Again as with enclosure, the long incubation period and the way in which successive Acts built upon each other need to be stressed. Much of the theory, including that distinction between the ‘undeserving’ and ‘deserving’ poor, was around long before the 1530s, and not just in canon law. It appears in the statute of 1349 which forbade the giving of alms to able-bodied beggars, and in that of 1388, which not only provided for their punishment but also sought to control the movement of the ‘impotent poor’.
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Claims that the poor law Act of 1536, even in its draft form, was revolutionary seem a little excessive. Even the notion of some form of graduated income tax to finance schemes for setting the able-bodied poor to work may have had its origins in fifteenth-century canonists’ views that contributions to poor relief should be compulsory, and anyway this notion did not survive the passage of the bill through parliament.
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Still, in its draft form at least, it was an imaginative attempt to tackle a perennial problem, and certainly nothing like it was considered in Wolsey’s time.

However, the absence of a poor law Act should not be taken to indicate that Wolsey and his fellow councillors showed no concern for the poor. Their efforts to do something about enclosure are alone evidence to the contrary, as are the strenuous attempts to grapple with food shortages and high prices in 1527-9. Moreover, existing poor laws, admittedly having more to do with the control of ‘vagabonds’ and ‘sturdy’ beggars than the relief of the impotent poor, were very much in force, as the proclamations of 1517 and 1527 make clear.
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More interestingly, in early 1518, when, it will be remembered, there was much worry about the Sweat, the Council was actively involved with the City authorities in measures to combat poverty in the capital. A new official was appointed with the specific duty to seek out the able-bodied ‘vagabonds and beggars’, while the ‘impotent’ beggars were to be licensed. Those suffering from the ‘great pox’, or who were in any way ‘loathsome or abhorrent to be looked at’, were to be sent to hospital. Throughout the 1520s there were frequent ‘searches’ of the City to round up ‘idle, vagrant and suspicious persons’.
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These may have had more to do with a
concern for law and order than with a desire to relieve poverty, but then much the same can be said about all government intervention in social matters. What needs to be borne in mind is that there already existed elaborate, if what would now be called private or voluntary, provision for the poor. Parishes, monastic institutions, hospitals and guilds not only provided money, food, housing, medical attention and clothing, but also the means to administer these. They in turn were constantly provided with the wherewithal by the generosity of individuals, especially in their wills.
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It has been fashionable to play down the efforts of the medieval world to relieve its poor and sick. An estimate derived from the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 gives only 3 per cent of monastic income as being set aside for charitable purposes; a more realistic figure might be 6.25 per cent. But even the smaller 3 per cent would still put the annual figure at about £4,000. And, when all is said and done it is not at all clear that more recent government efforts to eradicate poverty have been any more successful.
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The point here, though, is not to mount an apology for the medieval world but to make a suggestion about the Tudor poor law. Much of medieval giving was tied up with the notion of ‘good works’ and the role these played in the process of salvation. The Reformation in England, however it is defined, attacked this notion and thereby undermined both people’s willingness to give to good causes and, perhaps more importantly in this context, the existing machinery for poor relief.
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It is, therefore, not altogether surprising that the secular state was increasingly drawn in. What may also be true is that this machinery was probably anyway proving inadequate for dealing with the ever-growing problems of poverty in the large cities. The first secular poor laws were drawn up in the large European cities such as Venice, but even in England it was in the towns rather than in the rural areas that secular measures for poor relief first appeared.
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And as the sixteenth century advanced, so the population increased and prices rose. It may be that there has been a tendency to exaggerate the harmful consequences of these trends, but it does seem likely that the poor became poorer and that there were more of them and thus the Tudor poor laws.
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But in Wolsey’s time not only were the medieval provisions for poor relief very much in place but the demographic and inflationary spirals were not yet under way, so that at the very least the need for more direct intervention by the state was not so obvious.

So far the emphasis in this chapter has been on the social rather than the economic. To some extent this reflects the government’s greater concern with social issues, because, however much it may have regulated trade and industry, its direct participation was limited. Regulation of the coinage was more obviously an
economic matter, though, as we shall see, the Crown did have other reasons for intervention. There were two aspects to this regulation, one to do with the denominations available, the gold and silver content and such like, and the other to do with the exchange rates. During the 1520s both were a preoccupation of government, and in 1526 so much action was taken that that year has been called ‘a remarkable one for English coinage’.
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The subject is highly technical, but the main point is that, compared with other European currencies, the English coinage was too pure for its own good: that is, its gold and silver content was virtually unalloyed. As European bullion prices rose, the English coinage was increasingly undervalued and, as a result, was allegedly being bought up and exported. At the same time the financing of military activity abroad, such as Suffolk’s expedition in late 1523, accelerated the flight of English money abroad. By April 1525 the Venetian ducat, which in 1522 had been given a nominal value of 4
s
. 6
d
., was fetching anything between 4
s
. 9
d
. and 5
s
. 2
d
., and in August the following year the government was forced to act.

What it did was technically an ‘enhancement’ – that is, it raised the exchange rate without altering the gold or silver content of the coinage. As a result the ducat was valued at 4
s
. 8
d
., while the crown of the sun, in 1522 valued at 4
s
. 4
d
., rose to 4
s
. 6
d
. At the same time the value of the sovereign and noble was raised, and new coins were introduced, including the George noble, worth 6
s
. 8
d
., and the crown and half-crown. When first issued in August, the crown had been worth 4
s
. 6
d
, to be the exact equivalent of the crown of the sun, but it quickly became apparent that, despite the August increases, the English coinage was still undervalued. So in November many values were raised, one consequence being that the new crown became 5
s
., and the half-crown, therefore, 2
s
. 6
d
., at which value it was to remain until the early 1970s, when decimalization broke this little known link with Wolsey.
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The coins mentioned so far were all gold. Silver ones, the most common of which was the groat, worth 4
d
., were also causing concern, and in 1522 there was some experimentation with a new silver coinage of less weight. Initially unsuccessful, in 1526 it was made even lighter, and this seems to have done the trick: during the next four years production significantly increased, while the unsatisfactory pre-1526 silver coinage soon dropped out of circulation.
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Modern experts have on the whole been favourably impressed by Wolsey’s scheme. ‘Wolsey’s coinage’ was to have a long history, and led to an increase in the volume of coin minted, gold as well as silver. Given the talk of scarcity in 1525, this must have been a good thing. The new exchange rates were to remain unaltered until 1538. In the light of the subsequent history of currency manipulation in Henry’s reign, it needs to be stressed that the motives behind the changes of 1526 were entirely proper. Their purpose was to create a coinage whose bullion content and resulting rate of exchange made it no longer so financially attractive to export. And though the stimulation of coin production did lead to increased revenue for the
royal mint, the intention was never, as it was to be later, to make a quick buck by coining debased money.

There remains the difficult question of the extent of Wolsey’s direct involvement in the reforms. That detailed instructions were drawn up in his name does not necessarily mean that he was personally responsible for them. Despite the tendency for most royal councillors to be jacks-of-all-trades, there were some who were financial experts. Sir John Heron, treasurer of the chamber from 1492 to 1521, is an obvious example, as is Sir John Daunce, who in the autumn of 1526 chaired an important committee on monetary reform.
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But if the expertise came from others, it seems fair to assume, given his personality and leading position, that the implementation of the currency reforms owed a good deal to his support.
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