Throughout the Middle Ages, while exchanges centred in North Italy, Great Britain hung on the outskirts of the commercial system of the world, and even at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. she could not compare, either in wealth, refinement, or organization, with such a kingdom as France.
The crown had not been the prize of the strongest in a struggle among equals, but had fallen to a soldier of a superior race, under whom no great nobility ever grew up. No baron in England corresponded with such princes as the dukes of Normandy and Burgundy, the counts of Champagne and Toulouse. Fortifications were on a puny scale; no strongholds like Pierrefonds or Vitré, Coucy or Carcassonne existed, and the Tower of London itself was insignificant beside the Château Gaillard, which Coeur-de-Lion planted on the Seine.
The population was scanty, and increased little. When Henry VIII. came to the throne in 1509, London may have had forty or fifty thousand inhabitants, York eleven thousand, Bristol nine or ten thousand, and Norwich six thousand.[203] Paris at that time probably contained between three and four hundred thousand, and Milan and Ghent two hundred and fifty thousand each.
But although England was not a monied centre during the Middle Ages, and perhaps for that very reason, she felt with acuteness the financial pressure of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She had little gold and silver, and gold and silver rose in relative value; she had few manufactures, and manufactures were comparatively prosperous; her wealth lay in her agricultural interests, and farm products were, for the most part, severely pinched.
Commenting on the prices between the end of the thirteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth, Mr. Rogers has observed:--
"Again, upon several articles of the first importance, there is a marked decline in the price from the average of 1261-1400 to that of 1401-1540. This would have been more conspicuous, if I had in my earlier volumes compared all prices from 1261 to 1350 with those of 1351-1400. But even over the whole range, every kind of grain, except wheat and peas, is dearer in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than it is in the first hundred and forty years of the present period [1401-1582]; and had I taken the average price of wheat during the last fifty years of the fourteenth century, it would have been (6s. 1 1/2d.) dearer than the average of 1401-1540 (5s. 11 3/4d.), heightened as this is by the dearness of the last thirteen years."[204]