by Charles Ross
When Edward achieved the throne, English trade had been in the grip of a severe depression for more than a decade. Anglo-French commerce, like the French economy generally, was still suffering from the period of prolonged war (renewed from 1450 to 1453), and although hostilities had now ceased, the two countries remained technically at war, with trade subject to a series of restrictions. English trade with Brittany, which had followed the hostile line of the French, was similarly affected. Commerce with both suffered from largely unrestricted piracy. Of greater importance were the unsettled relations between England and the Hanseatic League and England and the Burgundian Low Countries. In spite of a favourable treaty with the Hanse in 1437, the German towns had failed to make good their promises to provide trading privileges for the English in the Baltic and North Germany comparable with those long enjoyed by the Hansards in England. This in turn led to the rise of a powerful anti-Hansard movement in England, and major acts of piracy permitted by Henry VI’s government against the Hanseatic Bay Fleet (carrying salt from Biscay for the fish-curing industry) had done little to improve matters. Relations with Burgundy were bedevilled by the competing bullionist policies of the English and Burgundian governments, as well as by shifts in ducal policy, for, like the king of England, the duke had to balance the demands of conflicting commercial interests amongst his own subjects. The result was a series of bans on the import of English cloth into the duke’s dominions, but with exemptions for certain major markets like Antwerp and Bergen-op-Zoom. Nor was Duke Philip indifferent to the chance of capturing the Hanse market from English merchants in the interests of his own people.1
It could scarcely be claimed that, on balance, the new king’s commercial policies in his first decade did much to remedy the ill-fortunes of English trade. Part of the blame may be laid on the subordination of economic to political interests, part on a certain impulsive inconsistency. It is true, however, that trade with some of the less important southern European markets, especially the denizen share in it, benefited from Edward’s support and encouragement. The 1463 ban on alien wool exports was amongst the factors which frightened the Florentines into opening their port of Pisa to foreign shipping on equal terms, thus inaugurating a growing English trade with that port, culminating with the establishment of the English wool staple there in 1491. The cloth trade with Pisa was further encouraged by the lifting of an earlier ban on the import of certain types of cloth in 1466.2 But at the same time Edward’s generosity with licences to Italians to export English goods (many of them in his own name) helped to stimulate the flagging trade of the Florentines and the Venetians with England. In contrast, Genoese trade declined sharply. This was partly due to Genoa’s losing to the Florentines her former monopoly of the supply of alum (a commodity vital to the English cloth-manufacturer), but it also reflects Edward’s personal coolness towards the Genoese, which in turn was prompted by his good relations with the city of London, and by Genoese negotiations with the restored government of Henry VI in 1470–71.3 But any improvement in Italian trade in general owed more to his financial dependence on Florence and (to a lesser extent) Venice than to any direct encouragement of Italian trade, and it certainly did not prevent a steady decline in its volume towards the end of the reign. A treaty concluded in 1468 with another Italian state, the kingdom of Naples, led to the appearance of Neapolitan galleys in the port of Southampton, but it is doubtful whether the trade was ever of significant proportions. With Castile, Edward, anxious for a political alliance, concluded a mercantile treaty in 1466 which gave Spanish merchants exceptional privileges, placing them on the same footing for customs purposes as denizen merchants; and this in turn led to a noticeable increase in Spanish participation in trade with England, especially with the western ports.1
All this, however, did little to offset the continuing difficulties with England’s more important commercial neighbours. The volume of cloth export in the hands of native merchants continued up to 1465 to run at no more than half what it had been in 1446–8, and their trade in miscellaneous merchandise fell by a similar proportion.2 With France, the valuable wine trade failed to recover, and between 1456 and 1462 was running at a rate of little more than 3,000 tuns, as compared with an average of 10,000 tuns imported into England in the years before 1449. English cloth exports to France as reflected in the trade figures of the southern and western ports show a fall from about 15,000 cloths a year in 1446–8 to 5,300 in 1459–62, and they sank even further to an average of only 3,565 in the troubled years 1469–71. Bristol’s cloth exports had fallen by some 60 per cent in the 1460s as compared with the averages of the period 1440–50. The advent of Edward IV made little difference to this depressed branch of commerce. Continuing political differences brought interruptions and restrictions on trade, as in 1462 when Louis XI, then backing Margaret of Anjou, forbade the export of any merchandise to England, and Edward banned the import of all Gascon wines, even under safe-conduct. The strained relations of the two kings meant that there was little hope of substantial improvement here until the definitive treaty of 1475. Nor did the duke of Brittany’s change of policy towards England, and the Anglo-Breton commercial treaty of 1468, do much to revive Anglo-Breton trade in the 1460s.3
With Burgundy relations were marred by the ill-advised Staple-bullion regulations of 1463, and by the embargoes on commerce which followed. These forced the English Merchant Adventurers to remove their Low Countries base from its natural centre in the great mart of Antwerp to Utrecht, and this most important sector of overseas commerce was severely depressed until 1467. Yet the renewal of good commercial relations with Burgundy was obviously essential to Edward’s plans for a political and matrimonial alliance with the ducal house. In September 1467, therefore, Edward exercised his prerogative and unilaterally lifted the ban on Burgundian imports into England. This opened the way to a commercial treaty, concluded on 24 November, which restored free trade in general, whilst reserving certain unresolved differences for discussion at a diet to be held at Bruges on 15 January 1468.1 Scofield believed that Edward did not succeed in persuading the duke to remove his ban on the import of English cloth into the Low Countries, and that, in spite of repeated diets, it was in fact maintained until 1478; but her argument does not seem to be supported by the evidence.2 The treaty seems to have given a substantial boost to England’s export trade. Cloth exports to the Low Countries, as reflected in the denizen export from London, almost doubled in the last three years of the decade, and there was a substantial increase in the volume of trade in miscellaneous merchandise. A further incentive to the cloth export trade had been given by the devaluation of the pound sterling during the re-coinage of 1464–5 (English goods were now 25 per cent cheaper), and it was helped too by the reorganization of the Netherlandish market.1
Meanwhile, in response to the demands of the Londoners, Edward had been subjecting the Hansards to heavy pressure in an effort to compel them to make good their promises of reciprocal privileges for English merchants in their territories. His weapons were repeated threats to suspend their privileges or to impose poll-taxes on them. These were effective, for by 1467 a majority of the member-cities of the League was ready to come to terms and even the most obdurate opponent of England, Lubeck, was preparing to give way. Against this background the disastrous decision of 1468, the so-called ‘verdict of the council’, whereby all Hanseatic merchants in England were to be arrested and imprisoned and held to ransom in retaliation for the alleged share of the League in the seizure of four English ships by the king of Denmark, is altogether inexplicable. It may be that having recently reopened his trade with Burgundy Edward now felt he could proceed to extremes against the League, but the English action was universally condemned, even in England, and by the Merchant Adventurers in the Low Countries, as unjust and arbitrary, and was no way to bring the Hansards to terms. It succeeded only in alienating England’s friends in the League, with the exception of the merchants of Cologne, who were so dependent on the English trade that they
were now prepared to break with the League. It is not unlikely, as the Hansards themselves alleged, that Edward was altogether too willing to listen to certain influential members of the council, among them Warwick and his brothers, Sir John Fogge, and perhaps Sir John Howard, who had suffered directly from the Danish capture.2 1468 was a tense and nervous year, when the king showed a tendency to behave arbitrarily and was susceptible to undue influence, as the affair of Sir Thomas Cook demonstrates. By the end of the year there are signs that Edward was already beginning to regret his impulsive action. The imprisoned merchants were released; the fine demanded of them was largely remitted; English envoys would be sent to meet envoys from the Hansards and treat for peace. But by now it was too late. The League’s attitude had hardened, and the negotiations in Bruges in the summer of 1469 broke down on the obstreperous and extravagant demands by the Hansards for reparations for their injuries, both new and long-standing. Even before the League officially closed the doors on England in August 1470, Anglo-Hanseatic trade had come to a virtual standstill, and there was open war at sea. If the principal sufferers from this breakdown were the Hansards themselves – their trade with England now fell to the lowest level of the entire fifteenth century, whilst the English found alternative outlets for their cloth to a certain degree – England suffered also. The loss of the substantial Hanse export trade may explain the dissatisfaction expressed by cloth producers with this new development, and it may have been especially the breach with the Hanse which the chronicler, John Warkworth, had in mind when he reported that ‘many men said that King Edward had much blame for hurting merchandise’.1
In one sphere of governmental action affecting the prosperity of commerce, Edward did, however, achieve considerable success. In the last decade of Henry VI’s reign, English piracy had reached extravagant proportions, and the Crown had done little to curb it, indeed had often condoned it, with unfortunate consequences for England’s relations with her trading partners. In contrast, Edward’s government showed far more vigour in its efforts to deal with the threat. If few pirates were indicted on criminal charges, the government was at pains to provide a speedy machinery for investigating complaints and petitions for restitution or compensation, although, unfortunately, the surviving evidence does not permit us to say confidently that the victims were generally successful in obtaining restitution.2 At the same time the number of recorded acts of piracy by Englishmen drops away sharply under Edward’s rule. Excluding official arrests at sea, 120 piracies are known from the period 1450–61, as compared with only 58 between 1461 and 1483. The political upheavals of the years 1469–1471 saw a brief but dramatic revival of piracy, thanks largely to the activities of the fleets of Warwick and the Bastard of Fauconberg in the Narrow Seas, but Edward’s restoration brought about a further reduction. Only four piracies a year are recorded between 1471 and 1475, and thereafter they are fewer still. By 1483 English piratical attacks had become very rare events. This achievement probably owed a good deal to more efficient keeping of the seas, both in the early years of the reign, and still more with the organization of the navy after Edward’s recovery of the throne, and partly of the known willingness of the government to control piracy. As early as 1467 the king had attempted to regulate piracy by means of international agreement: his treaty of that year with Burgundy showed a more positive approach to the whole problem, and the clauses of the treaty dealing with piracy reflect an effort to tackle the problem in detail. They provided both a model and a starting-point for similar later treaties with other commercial powers.
These policies were continued into the 1470s, with the added stimulus of Edward’s anxiety to achieve good relations with his potential allies or with neutrals as part of his preparations for the invasion of France. This led him to be generous in the matter of compensation to the victims of English attacks. The settlement of the Hanse involved a payment of £10,000 in reparations, part of it for losses due to piracy. In 1474 he granted the merchants of Guipuzcoa in northern Spain 5,000 crowns’ compensation for attacks on their shipping committed before 1472, and a further 6,000 for later attacks. In both cases he was paying compensation in part for piracies committed during the Readeption period. Relations with Brittany were especially bedevilled by piracies committed by ships of both sides, and Edward and Francis II tried hard to control them. The pirates of Fowey in Cornwall were so notorious that they were excluded from the Anglo-Breton truce of 1471 and from the Treaty of Ghateaugiron of 1472. Here again Edward was generous in providing compensation. Breton merchants were allowed to import goods into England without payment of customs, and against Portsmouth, whose ships had plundered two Breton merchants to the value of 10,000 marks, Edward issued letters of marque empowering the victims to recover the value from the townsmen. In 1474 the continuing misbehaviour of the Fowey pirates against Breton and Spanish commerce finally drove the king to drastic action. All masters, mariners, pirates and owners of ships in Fowey and its estuary were to be arrested, since they had not heeded royal orders and daily committed great depredations; all their ships, gear, goods and merchandise were seized and kept in safe-custody. This vigorous act of punishment had its effect, for little more is heard of Fowey piracy for the rest of the reign.1
One reason why Edward’s sensible, consistent and vigorous policy in the repression of piracy enjoyed a considerable success is that he did not have to worry about any conflict between diplomatic and commercial advantage. It was not always so. In 1473–4 his diplomatic preparations for war with France required him to clear up his relations with the Hanseatic League, and at the Treaty of Utrecht, though only after much stubborn bargaining, the English ambassadors finally agreed to terms which represented an almost total surrender to Hansard demands, with no effective corresponding privileges for English merchants. Yet the king should not be overly blamed for his final concessions, for the Hansards, as Henry VII in his turn was to discover, were a very tough nut to crack.1 There was rather less justification for his decision in February 1483 to prohibit English merchants from all trade with France. This reflects his deep chagrin at Louis’s success at Arras, and the temporary collapse of England’s most cherished policies, at a time when his own grasp and judgement were perhaps beginning to fail; but it does show how even at this late stage he was apparently prepared to sacrifice the manifold commercial advantages of the Picquigny treaty to assuage his injured dynastic pride.2
Yet in general Edward in his second reign was notably more successful in promoting favourable conditions for his country’s commerce, mainly to the benefit of native merchant interests. Even the Treaty of Utrecht, though bringing the English no more than vague promises of reciprocity which were never to be executed, achieved a great and immediate boom in Hanseatic trade with England, which by 1479–82 had surpassed its previous highest total.3 The commercial clauses of the Treaty of Picquigny in 1475 finally freed Anglo-French trade from the many tiresome restrictions which had saddled it during the previous two decades. Aided by the general economic recovery of France during a similar period, they made possible a vast expansion in commerce with England, from which the western ports benefited especially, as they did also from a considerable growth in Breton maritime activity. The cloth exports of the Devon ports jumped from an average of 1,000 cloths during the years of depression to 6,000 cloths a year in 1481–3; Bristol’s cloth exports more than doubled by the end of the reign; and a similar increase took place in Gascon wine imports and in the volume of trade in miscellaneous merchandise.4 The commercial treaty of 1478 with Burgundy eliminated some of the friction which had affected relations between the Staplers at Calais and their Netherlands customers, and saw the abandonment of the provocative monetary policies of the previous decade. With most of England’s other commercial neighbours – Castile, Portugal and Denmark – the treaties of the seventies and eighties helped to maintain or improve trading relations.1
Exports and Imports of Dutiable Commodities in the later fifteenth century*
Years
Exports of wool (sacks
Exports of broadcloths
Imports of wine (tuns)
Exports and imports of miscellaneous merchandise (in £)
1446–48
7,654
53,699
11,000
121,795
1448–50
8,412
35,078
9,432
91,456
1450–53
7,660
38,928
7,424
91,001
1453–56
9,290
37,738
6,826
82,533
1456–59
7,664
35,059
4,072
59,089
1459–62
4,976
31,933
4,190
