Edward I

by Michael Prestwich

  For the first part of the reign Edward I relied almost exclusively on the firm of the Riccardi of Lucca as crown bankers. In the first seven years of the reign this company had paid out over £200,000 on the king’s behalf, and had been repaid all but £23,000.[748] The costs of the first Welsh war were almost exactly covered by a loan from the Riccardi.[749] The importance of the company is shown clearly by the fact that the head of the firm, Orlandino de Podio, was the one layman authorized in the Household Ordinance of 1279 to sleep in the Wardrobe.[750] The Riccardi did more than simply advance money to the crown. They played a prominent rôle in the collection of the fifteenth of 1275,[751] and acted as royal agents in obtaining loans from other Italian firms, being responsible in 1280 for the repayment of 17,250 marks to various merchants[752] and the negotiation of loans totalling almost £22,000 paid to the Wardrobe to finance the second Welsh war.[753] For the campaign of 1287 the Riccardi assumed the normal function of the Wardrobe, collecting funds and distributing them to paymasters in the field.[754] The crown’s aggregate debt to the Riccardi for the years from 1272 until 1294 amounted to some £392,000. Not all this sum was advanced by the one firm, for it included the loans raised by the Riccardi on behalf of the crown from other companies, and an element of interest. Had Edward’s credit with the Italian merchants in these years not been good, his successes in Wales would have been impossible.

  The crown did not lose financially as a result of its dealings with the Riccardi. By 1276 repayments to the firm were in arrears by over £13,000, and in 1294 they were owed £18,924, which they never received. Of the repayments that were made, over £190,000 came out of the customs receipts. The fifteenth of 1275 provided some £57,000 for the merchants, and the crusading tenth £8,000. Miscellaneous sources, such as the fines on merchants who disobeyed the embargo on trade with Flanders at the outset of the reign, and the fine of Adam Stratton, made up the rest of the Riccardi’s receipts.[755]

  The Riccardi had played a part of the greatest significance in the financing of the Welsh wars, but Edward made no use of their resources on the outbreak of the war with Philip IV in 1294. The seizure of wool was not an act calculated to appeal to the merchants, and it looks as if the king may have decided to try to finance the war by collecting together sufficient reserves of cash, making it unnecessary to raise loans. Edward had little alternative, for Philip IV made the logical move of arresting all members of the company of the Riccardi in France and confiscating their assets. This naturally caused a catastrophic decline in confidence in the firm. Deposits were withdrawn, and bankruptcy ensued. Edward I showed no sympathy to them, but followed the example of his cousin and appropriated their assets, on the grounds that they were unable to fulfil their obligations to him. Not surprisingly no other Italian firm was to be found ready and willing to take up the position of royal bankers that the Riccardi had been forced to vacate.

  Edward I’s need of cash by the autumn of 1294, faced as he was by the unexpected Welsh revolt as well as the French war, was such that when the merchants proved reluctant to advance him money, he found it necessary to compel them to do so. Representatives of eight companies appeared at the Exchequer, and promised to lend a total of £12,000. Presumably they were threatened with expulsion and the confiscation of assets, while their cooperation was rewarded with the grant of export licences for their wool.[756] This loan was followed by others of the same type, described by the Chancery as being made ‘for our most urgent affairs and for the advantage and defence of our realm’. Between 1294 and 1298 eleven companies yielded up £28,966 13s. 4d. in forced loans.[757] The precarious position of the companies in England was emphasized when in the autumn of 1295 arrangements were made for the seizure of the wool belonging to the Bardi, the Frescobaldi, and the companies of the Black and White Cerchi. In fact, it does not appear that their wool was appropriated by the crown.[758]

  Acute as was Edward I’s financial position in England between 1294 and 1298, it was much more severe abroad. Efforts had to be made to raise loans in the Low Countries and in Gascony. One obvious source was the English traders on the continent, but, faced as they were with having to pay the heavy customs duties, these men cannot have been very flush with funds. The accounts of Elias Russel, Gilbert Chesterton and the other English agents in the Low Countries suggest that at the outside perhaps £4,000 was raised from English merchants.[759] The documentation is even less complete for Gascony, although a few receipts do survive to show that English merchants did advance some small sums to the paymasters there.[760] Foreigners were a far more productive source of finance. In the Low Countries £1,200 came from Flemish traders, at least £510 from Germans, and from the Frescobaldi of Florence roughly £7,200. Other loans from Italians came to at least £1,100.[761] These loans were important, although modest in relation to the total expenditure on the war. Clearly Edward’s credit worthiness had not yet recovered from the blow dealt it by the fall of the Riccardi, and it is interesting to note that the total of loans raised by him in the Low Countries was less than four per cent of those obtained there by his grandson Edward III in similar circumstances.[762] The English were more successful in Gascony. A consortium from Bayonne provided loans totalling £45,763, and there are references to at least £2,400 from other Gascon merchants, while almost £2,000 was borrowed by Henry Lacy from Spanish traders.[763] Loans probably made up about a quarter of the receipts in Gascony.

  After Edward I’s return to England from Flanders in 1298 the Italian firm of the Frescobaldi gradually assumed a similar position to that held by the Riccardi in the first half of the reign. It was in Flanders that this company first came to the rescue of the English king. They had not played a significant rôle in royal finance in the years of Riccardi dominance, although they were one of the major firms operating in England: their contribution of £4,666 13s. 4d. to the forced loans was the largest from the companies involved.[764] It may have been in order to win royal favour and so obtain speedy repayment of this sum that they advanced £7,200 in Flanders, but the decision was certainly a strange one. They later regarded the decision to lend to Edward as a miscalculation, and claimed that when their connection with the English government became known in 1297 many of their depositors lost confidence and withdrew their funds. In 1302 such losses were put at 200,000 florins, roughly £30,000,[765] and in 1307 the estimate was £50,000.[766] After this, the Frescobaldi could hardly withdraw: their best chance of recouping the losses of 1297 was to make substantial profits out of lending to Edward, and to benefit from the royal favour.

  How much did the Frescobaldi lend to Edward I? In 1302 they petitioned the king for payment of their debts, calculating that they had advanced a total of £32,886 9s. 4d. Most of this had been lent during the war years, for accounts show that between 1297 and 1302 they paid out roughly £13,250 on Edward I’s behalf. Some repayments were made to them out of the customs, while they also had the custody of the mints of Newcastle, Hull, Exeter and Dublin. The crown debt to the firm in 1302 was probably about £20,000.[767] Unfortunately there are no fully detailed accounts for the years after 1302. Control over credit finance was gradually taken over from the Wardrobe by the Exchequer, and the best source for the later loans made by the Frescobaldi is provided by the final accounts made with the company at the Exchequer in 1310. These were not intended to provide a record of the total lent by the firm to the crown, but were primarily concerned with the money handed over to them in repayment. Not all of their receipts were included: they were not charged with their profits from the mints, nor with the money they received from the fifteenth of 1301. What the accounts do show is that the firm had lent at least £120,000 by 1310, and that at that date they were still owed £21,635, of which nearly £12,000 was money granted to them in recompense for the losses incurred in Edward’s service. It seems probable, given the omissions in the accounts, that in all the Frescobaldi had lent some £150,000 over a period of sixteen years to Edward I and his son, of which they were repaid about £125,000.[768
] But perhaps more important than discovering the totals lent and repaid is to ascertain at what level the debt to the Frescobaldi was running. As already shown, in 1302 it was roughly £20,000. In October 1305 it was estimated that the firm should be satisfied out of the customs receipts by Easter 1307,[769] which implies that Edward was in effect anticipating the customs revenue by about eighteen months. As full repayment was never achieved, since the Frescobaldi were expelled from England by the Ordainers, in purely financial terms the crown can only be considered to have benefited from its association with the firm.

  Although the Frescobaldi did not receive a proper financial return for their investment in the English government, they did benefit in many ways from royal favour. It was customary for privileged merchants to be allowed to recover their debts through the Exchequer Court, just like the crown itself, and the exchequer plea rolls are full of actions brought by the Frescobaldi against monasteries who failed to meet their obligations. In Edward I’s reign one of the heads of the firm, Coppuccio Cotenna, was described as a valettus of the Treasurer, a status whose precise implications are not clear, but which certainly allowed the firm to receive preferential treatment at the Exchequer.[770] In May 1306 the main companies in London, including the Frescobaldi, were summoned before the king’s council and informed that if they left the country, or exported any of their belongings, then all their assets would be confiscated. Security was demanded as a guarantee of their good behaviour. This was provided promptly for the Frescobaldi by William de Carleton, a baron of the Exchequer, but the other Italian firms refused to co-operate, and were only persuaded to comply with the request after a period of imprisonment in the Tower.[771]

  It was under Edward II that the Frescobaldi received their most spectacular favours from the crown. In 1309 Amerigo dei Frescobaldi was granted six manors for the nominal rent of one penny, and in the next year an order was issued that all nominees of the firm to ecclesiastical offices were to be preferred to any others until they were provided with benefices to a value of £300 a year. Elaborate exemptions from tallages, aids, and burdens such as jury service were issued, and the culmination of royal favour came with the appointment of Bertus dei Frescobaldi to the king’s council in 1310.[772] This generosity of Edward II’s was ill-calculated. His father had been able to obtain loans without such favours being granted, and the effect of the grants was to provoke widespread resentment against the company. The opposition was anxious to remove any means that Edward II might have of achieving financial independence, and there were in addition obvious reasons for suspecting that the Italians were exercising an undue political influence. The consequent expulsion of the Frescobaldi from England by the Ordainers led to the rapid collapse of the company.

  Some other Italian companies lent money to Edward I in the later years of the reign, though none on so substantial a scale as the Frescobaldi. Between 1294 and 1309 the Bardi lent £3,906 19s. 9d., of which £2,736 was taken by compulsion. By 1312 they had been repaid all but £431 5s. 4d.[773] An account of the Spini which survives in bad condition, and appears to date from the early years of Edward II, shows loans to Edward I and his son totalling almost £7,740.[774] The Ballardi of Lucca were the merchants regularly used by the Great Wardrobe, and they also lent money to the prince of Wales. Advances by this company between 1298 and 1307 totalled £7,493 12s. 7d.; in repayment they received only £4,021 15s. 8d.[775]

  As had been the case with the Riccardi, the customs receipts proved to be the most convenient source of revenue from which to repay the merchants who lent to the crown. During the years of the war with France the need for revenue was such that the government could not afford to pledge the customs to its creditors extensively, and most of the receipts were paid directly into the Exchequer: £11,183 out of a total of £14,088 in the case of Yarmouth, to give one example. But once the years of acute emergency were over, the pattern changed. Until Whitsun 1299 the customs revenues were used to repay the firms which had been forced to lend to the crown in the wartime period.[776] They were then handed over to the consortium of Bayonne merchants who had advanced so much in Gascony. They lent a further £4,333 6s. 8d. in England, and were granted £1,000 to cover their expenses while staying there. They were paid almost £51,700 in all, and ended with a deficit of only £56:[777] of all the merchants who lent to Edward I they did by far the best. Possibly the reason for this was political. The king would not wish to alienate his Gascon subjects, while it mattered far less if Italians went unpaid. Once the men of Bayonne were satisfied, the customs revenues, now enhanced by the introduction of the New Custom, were paid over to the Frescobaldi, who continued to receive by far the greater part of them until their expulsion from England. It should be stressed that in granting the customs to these various merchants the crown was not farming out an important source of revenue. Royal officials remained at the ports and the payment of receipts to the merchants was strictly supervised. In allocating resources in this way the government was not losing revenue as was all too possible when a system of farming such as that practised by the Tudors and Stuarts was adopted.

  It was hard to raise loans outside the merchant community. Some magnates and officials advanced money on the Welsh campaign of 1282-3, Burnell producing 1,000 marks, John Kirkby £548, John de Bohun £980 and Robert Tiptoft 290 marks.[778] In 1284-5 Burnell lent Edward 2,300 marks.[779] But in the later years of the reign Edward’s ministers and councillors, well aware of the financial situation, were too wary to lend in circumstances that, at best, meant that payment would be dilatory. In 1299 Edmund of Cornwall was promised repayment of a loan of 2,000 marks out of the proceeds of the first episcopal vacancy to come up.[780] Two years later his executors advanced 1,300 marks,[781] but otherwise no major loans from such sources appear on the records for this period. During campaigns it was common for small sums to be entered on the wardrobe accounts as loans, but these transactions appear to have been more in the nature of book-keeping formalities than true loans.

  On one occasion the government resorted to a forced loan from its English subjects. At the very beginning of the war with France, early in July 1294,[782] royal commissioners were sent round the country to seize all the private deposits of money in churches: £10,795 was sent in to the Exchequer.[783] Powicke has attempted to justify this action on the grounds that it was intended to preserve the purity of the coinage, but no chronicle or official source contains anything to support this assertion.[784] The king denied responsibility for the measure, which was extremely unpopular, blaming William March, the Treasurer. This, together with complaints brought against him by the Londoners, led to his dismissal in the following year.[785] Demand for repayment of the money seized in 1294 was made in parliament in 1305,[786] and one issue roll of the Exchequer shows that at least £2,003 was restored.[787] Not surprisingly, the expedient was not repeated.

  There is no doubt that the advances made by the Riccardi were of the very greatest value to Edward I. In a situation where heavy expenditure for a short period was envisaged, as was the case with the Welsh campaigns, it made very good sense to borrow money and then repay it over a longer period. But in the years after 1294 warfare was more or less continuous. Even though the prospects of a long war with France were perhaps remote, it must have been clear that the situation in Scotland was bound to absorb royal revenue for many years, either in the form of constant campaigns, or in the construction of castles and the upkeep of an occupation force. The prospect was not an attractive one for the potential lender, since future demands on revenue would inevitably diminish the chances of repayment. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that while the Riccardi were owed £392,000 for the loans they made before 1294, on a generous calculation Edward probably borrowed no more than £250,000 from all sources in England, Gascony and the Low Countries between 1294 and 1307, despite the fact that his financial needs were very much greater in these years.

  It is clear that the surprisingly low level of borrowing in Edward I’s later years w
as not the result of a government decision, but was rather the consequence of reluctance on the part of the merchants. In January 1297 Walter Langton and several others were authorized to raise a loan of £7,500,[788] but in fact less than £4,000 was collected.[789] In August 1301 letters of credence were issued for John Droxford to approach five Italian firms, presumably about loans.[790] None were forthcoming. In that year only the Bayonne merchants and the Frescobaldi were co-operative, the former with an advance of £2,000,[791] the latter with one of 400 marks.[792] The low state of royal credit at this time is demonstrated by the handing of jewels to the Bayonne merchants as security. In Ireland the Justiciar and Treasurer were ordered to ask for loans to pay for the war in Scotland, but it was only possible to obtain money from the merchants there by seizing it.[793] Similar problems were encountered in 1303. Once again Droxford was sent south to negotiate a loan, with a credence directed to all foreign merchants, to the City authorities and to the collectors of the papal tenths.[794] Of all the merchants, the Frescobaldi alone responded to the appeal, and even they only paid out rather less than £2,000 in the period from August 1303 to January 1304.[795] The papal tax collectors produced £4,500, but this was hardly a loan, as it went to make up the king’s share of the tax.[796] In Ireland royal envoys approached the company of the Spini. The merchants refused to lend any money until they had full authority from their London branch, together with guarantees of repayment, and they were clearly content when these delaying tactics proved successful.[797]