According to Froissart, when the French King had been considering whether to receive the appeals of the Gascon lords one of the people whom he consulted was the Count of Saint-Pol, who had been a hostage in England for several years and was then in Paris on parole.
He said that England was only a little country by comparison with France, for he had ridden the length and breadth of it several times and had given much thought to its resources. Of the four or five regions into which one could divide the kingdom of France the poorest would offer more revenue, more towns and cities, more knights and squires than the whole of England.
He was amazed at how they had ever mustered the strength to achieve the conquests that they had. It was an exaggerated picture but recognisable. England did not have anything like the wealth or taxable capacity of France. For nearly a century these revenues had had to be supplemented by a number of permanent taxes. Miscellaneous duties on wine, cloth and other goods had been added over the years. The most recent of these was the wool tax, in effect a supplementary customs duty on wool exports.
The war Parliament of June regranted it at increased rates. The customs revenues were always the largest single source of revenue available to the English kings. But they were sensitive to economic conditions and the yield was correspondingly variable. The s and s were more difficult times for English trade. This meant that the English King was wholly dependent in the long run on Parliamentary taxes to finance the conduct of the war. Parliamentary taxes were traditionally levied as a proportion of the value of moveable property.
They were collected at standard rates, a tenth in the towns and a fifteenth in the country, according to an assessment originally made in which was now becoming out of date. They were granted for short periods, usually a year, occasionally two or even three years. In addition the Church granted clerical tenths which were voted by the convocations of the ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York, generally in conjunction with Parliamentary subsidies.
