But so far as the State was concerned all this elaborate system for the protection of the wool-trade had simply grown out of the fundamental conception of the Staple as a fruitful source of supply for the royal treasury; and this theory was carried out to its logical issues. A fixed sum was demanded from the merchants year by year which they had to pay whether their trade was good or bad; while in their mercantile dealings they were terribly hampered by a host of regulations issued as to the mint in Calais, and invented by financiers who from the middle of the fourteenth century were haunted by alarms as to a possible dearth of gold and silver, and arbitrarily used the Staple as a means of forcing the flow of precious metal into England.[57] Nor was the drain of taxation at all times legal and regular. Merchants paid money down for the protection and favour of the king in reiterated loans or gifts, whether free or forced. The Captain of Calais, as head of the only standing army which the English kings then possessed, advanced a kind of public claim on the Staplers’ wealth for the security of his soldiers’ pay; and the merchants had many a time good reason to tremble for their wool, and might cry in vain for redress if their whole store was confiscated to pay the soldiers’ arrears of two or three years, or if militant lords “shifted with the Staple of Calais” for £18,000 or so for costs of war.[58]
All these burdens however could be borne so long as business prospered in their hands. If a Parliament like that of 1258, or a great statesman like Simon de Montfort, urged that England should herself become an independent and self-supporting centre of manufactures, these seemed as idle words to monopolists dealing in wool with command of the world’s market, who saw no need to forsake their easy path to wealth at a moment when the growth of manufactures in the Netherlands opened a vast market for English produce. In the time of Edward the Third it is said that 30,000 sacks of wool were shipped every year from English ports.[59]
But before the reign of Edward had closed, the exporters of wool knew that they had fallen on evil days. Trade began to slip from their grasp. The revenue they paid from their profits to the King’s Exchequer fell in the few years from 1391 to 1411 to one-fifth of its former value,[60] and was still calculated at this melancholy fifth in 1449. Instead of the thirty thousand sacks which they yearly counted in the fourteenth century, they could not at the close of the fifteenth century collect more than 8,624 sacks, and in the last year of Henry the Eighth even this number had shrunk to under 5,000.[61] Taxes which lay comparatively lightly on them in happy days, fell as an intolerable burden when their warehouses lay empty, and their ranks were thinned by bankruptcy and desertion.[62] At the very moment when all England was being rapidly turned into a land of sheep pastures for the endless production of wool, the great company of the wool traders was finally and irrevocably ruined.