Age of Invention: Tudor Trade War

The true effects of Henry VII's "industrial policy"

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Where we last left off, I argued that England’s labour laws following the Black Death — maximum wage rates, compulsory employment, minimum contract lengths, restrictions on apprenticing outside of agriculture, and strict limits on everyone’s movement — were much better enforced than has commonly been assumed, and even that they prevented the English population recovering as quickly as the rest of Europe’s over the course of the fifteenth century.

(It’s also thanks to demographic change that this post, which follows the labour laws into the sixteenth century, has been so delayed. Life, quite literally, intruded, because I became a father.)

As I hinted last time, the labour laws — having already been downright dystopian — were soon to become especially biting. Some historians have assumed they were resurrected, rather than continued, after England had descended into on-and-off strife — a period usually known as the Wars of the Roses, but better termed the Cousins’ Wars.

For those who don’t know this not-at-all complicated or convoluted history, King Henry VI became mentally incapacitated in the 1450s, just as England lost much of its territory in France, leading to violent clashes between rival court factions until he was deposed by his third cousin, Edward IV, in 1461, before being re-installed as king in 1470, and then re-deposed (and killed) by Edward in 1471.

Then, a few months after Edward IV’s death in 1483, his two sons and heirs were pronounced illegitimate and mysteriously disappeared into the Tower of London, so that he was succeeded instead by his brother, Richard III, who in turn was deposed just a couple of years later by the French king’s second cousin, who killed Richard in battle during a second invasion attempt launched from France. This spurious pretender to the English throne — the grandson of a Welsh knight who had married Henry VI’s French mother, and the great-grandson, on his mother’s side, of Henry VI’s grandfather’s illegitimate half-brother, whose line had been explicitly barred from the succession by Parliament — became Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs.

But Henry VII then had to spend much of the 1480s and 90s seeing off the foreign-backed invasion attempts of a boy claiming to be Edward IV’s nephew, the earl of Warwick (a boy of that description was also held by Henry in the Tower of London), and another young man claiming to be Edward IV’s mysteriously missing younger son, Richard, allegedly emerging out of hiding — a would-be Richard IV.

We can see, given this on-and-off chaos, why many historians have assumed that the labour laws ceased to be enforced. Yet one of the first things on the agenda of every new regime was to remind everyone that they were still in place.

This was least urgent in 1461, when Edward IV first usurped the throne, as England was in the midst of a severe slump and falling prices, when wages would have in any case been stagnant or falling even without being capped. But in 1472, when Parliament met to confirm his return to power the previous year, its first act was to ask him to see that the labour laws were put in execution as part of a wider push to restore general order.¹ He soon issued a proclamation reminding local officials of their duty to crack down on unlicensed, unemployed travellers — so-called vagabonds and idlers, who were often just people wandering and often begging while in search of work or higher wages. In London, where some of the relevant records of actual enforcement survive, the crackdowns most certainly commenced.²

Likewise, within just months of killing Richard III in battle and usurping the throne, one of the very first acts of Henry VII in 1485 was to give “straight commandment to see the statute and ordinance made and provided heretofore for the punishment of vagabonds, beggars, and other suspect persons to be put in effectual execution”, by which he meant the fundamental, by now ancient labour laws of 1349, 1351, 1383, and 1388. The order to stick to the law — which was soon to be extended and augmented — was not some wholesale resurrection, but a mere continuation. It was business as usual, restored again after only a brief interruption from the coup.

But there were soon to be changes. Henry’s order was so effectually executed, that after just five months the new regime was forced to relax the punishments: the gaols and prisons of the realm had so quickly become “repleted and filled with vagabonds, beggars, suspect persons, and other persons”, that the costs and risks of keeping them had become untenable, with many of the prisoners languishing there indefinitely and even dying. Prisoners, in order to be released, needed to find surety from some reputable person willing to put their own wealth on the line for their good behaviour, but this was not exactly easy when they were a stranger locked up far from home (if they even had any reputable friends or family at all). Many simply had no way out. So, out of practicality, Henry ordered the royal officials responsible for enforcing the labour laws — the Justices of the Peace — to visit the gaols and prisons each month and assign the vagabonds and idlers to nearby employers, for whom they would be forced to work for the term of at least a year.³ The punishment was relaxed in order to focus on the law’s intention, which was to force people into employment.

Yet despite further periodic roundups of the illegally unemployed, just eight years later the Tudor regime noted that “the due effect of them has not ensued for all of their due execution”.⁴ This was perhaps because convicted vagabonds, who by definition were already used to breaking the law, were simply running away from their enforced employers and going back to their wandering ways as soon as they were released. The worst that could happen was for them to be popped back in prison briefly and released all over again. But it may also have been difficult to find employers willing to take on the vagabonds at all, even when the vagabonds were willing to work, whether through fear of them committing other crimes — rootless wanderers were widely associated with theft, assault, and even murder — or simply because there were no opportunities in the area for employment.

So Henry proclaimed a sort of compromise, making the punishment for the unemployed more unpleasant, but also absolving the Justices of the laborious task of finding the vagabonds employers. In 1493 he ordered idlers and vagabonds to be put in the stocks for three days and three nights, “there to have none other sustenance but bread and water”, after which they were to be sworn to leave the area (with a double penalty if they were caught there again). This was to punish the wanderers and beggars considered able to work, whom the government referred to as being “sturdy”, “valiant”, “mighty”, or “strong”. But just in case these sturdy beggars were using the pretence of sickness or infirmity to avoid punishment, Henry also made life harder for all beggars who legitimately couldn’t work. He ordered the sick and infirm to comply with the letter of the law passed over a century earlier in 1388, and to hurriedly return to the places they had last permanently dwelled or been born, there to remain forever.

This was the state of play in early 1493, with the laws being adjusted by proclamation so as to see them better enforced. It was business as usual, with a bit of tinkering to make it work. Yet the labour laws were almost immediately forced to be more radically overhauled, because one of the main, underlying causes of vagabondage was to get significantly worse. There was, quite suddenly, a straightforward lack of opportunities for employment. And it was Henry VII himself who was to blame.

The Spectre of Prince Richard

Having usurped the crown by invading England and taking it by force, Henry VII was willing to sacrifice everything, including the wellbeing of his new subjects, to prevent someone else from doing the same to him. In late 1492, the young man claiming to be the rightful king Richard IV arrived in the Low Countries (more or less modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands), and was there publicly recognised by one of its de facto governors, the dowager duchess of Burgundy, Margaret of York — Edward IV’s sister, and thus the real Richard’s aunt.

Henry’s government responded quickly, claiming that the young man was actually a Flemish merchant’s son named Pierrechon de Werbecque, anglicised as Perkin Warbeck, who was employed as a sort of male model for a cloth merchant, showing off his silks in various trading towns. But the effect of Margaret’s recognition, coming from a member of Richard’s own close family — he allegedly had all three of the true prince’s one-in-a-million distinguishing marks, on his eye, mouth, and thigh — had a dramatic effect on public opinion. It gave many in England a focus for their discontent at the usurper’s regime — including among some of Henry’s own household — and it isolated him abroad. The courts of Scotland, Denmark-Norway, and Germany’s Holy Roman Empire began to act as though this Richard was the rightful king. The old enemy France refrained, but only because Henry had invaded it just the year before, being persuaded to leave before battle commenced by a bribe and a promise to give up his enemies — which was what, ironically, had prompted the supposed Richard to flee the French court for the Low Countries in the first place. To Henry VII, Margaret’s recognition of Richard was an urgent threat.

But Henry’s options for responding were limited. He could claim all he liked about the boy, but this was unlikely to convince. And open war with the Low Countries was a non-starter. The Low Countries were significantly wealthier than England, and ruled by the teenage son of the Habsburg emperor of Germany, Maximilian, who now gave the supposed Richard his full backing, lending him money and men, and presenting his case to the Pope.⁵ Open war between England and the Low Countries risked opening a whole other can of worms as well, because Maximilian had a far stronger dynastic claim to the throne than Henry did — via a legitimate line of succession, the Habsburg was both a second cousin once removed of Henry VI and a third cousin once removed of Edward IV. Maximilian’s son, Philip, could even claim the English throne twice over, because he had a claim via his mother’ as well.⁶ When Maximilian supported the supposed Richard IV, he believed that he was restoring his own fourth cousin’s rightful place on England’s throne, after which both he and his son were the next in line — something that Richard made explicit, naming them as his heirs until he could have some children of his own.

Henry spent the summer of 1493 hunkering down for defence, expecting to be accosted at any moment by an invasion force sent by Margaret and the Habsburgs, to be joined by a fomented rebellion in England too — the kind of invasion forces that had successfully overthrown reigning English kings three times in just the past thirty years, and the last of which he had himself led. And when the invasion failed to materialise that year, in September of 1493 he took one of the only options available to him, which was to try to hit the Habsburgs economically, by banning all direct trade with the Low Countries.

England’s exports were overwhelmingly of woollen broadcloth, which was usually sent over to the Low Countries unfinished. Strictly speaking, exporting cloth unfinished had been banned early on in Henry’s reign in 1487, on the purported grounds of supporting native cloth-finishing industries — napping and shearing the cloth until it was silky smooth, as well as dyeing it. But in practice, the law simply enabled Henry to exert his control on the trade. Using his royal prerogative, he sold special dispensations from the law to only certain merchants — particularly the members of a sort of regulatory professional association for trading to the Low Countries, known as the Company of Merchant Adventurers — allowing him to threaten to amend or revoke their dispensations whenever he so chose, and so periodically extort from them. In practice, then, English cloth was generally finished in the cities of Brabant, a region of the Low Countries — particularly Antwerp — before being sold further inland into Germany, France, central Europe, and even across the Alps into Italy.

So when Henry forbade the export of English cloth in 1493, its main target would have been the Brabantine urban artisans who did all the finishing, along with the merchants who sold the cloth inland. Urban artisans were unruly at the best of times, and all the more so when unemployed. Indeed, the Habsburgs had only just finished putting down a major French-backed rebellion by the cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres, joined by Brussels, Leuven, and Sluis. The rebels had taken Maximilian’s son hostage, and at one point even captured Maximilian himself. He had been helpless as they proceeded to torture and execute many of his closest advisers. If the disruption to trade were to tip the cities of the Low Countries back into rebellion, it would hit Maximilian where it really hurt. Given Henry had not long ago sent ships to help the Habsburgs put the rebellion down, he no doubt hoped to show that what his friendship could help them win, his enmity could just as easily take away.

Henry had good reason to believe that a trade ban would work, because it was a tactic sometimes used by his predecessors, and he had even it before himself, apparently with success. In late 1487, when on the cusp of agreeing a new commercial treaty with the Low Countries, the revolt of the cities against Maximilian had prompted Henry press his advantage by hardening his stance. By suspending trade on the grounds that Maximilian and Margaret had supported the invasion of England by the other pretender — the boy who had claimed to be Edward IV’s nephew, the Earl of Warwick, now known to history as the imposter Lambert Simnel — he had forced them to return to the negotiating table with more concessions. Maximilian, then at his weakest, had been especially spooked by Henry opening parallel negotiations with the rebel cities, and was quick to sound accommodating (though Henry took too long to press his advantage to the full, as by the time a new commercial agreement was reached in early 1489, he urgently wanted Maximilian’s help against an expansionist France).⁷

Back in 1487, however, the trade with the Low Countries had been much smaller and more uncertain, regularly disrupted by piracy, rebellion, and on-and-off war between the Low Countries and France. But by the time Henry tried the tactic again in 1493, the circumstances had changed. This time the trade — and England’s reliance upon it — had had a good few years to grow, with the Habsburgs now able to respond from a position of stability and strength. The Low Countries had become by far and away England’s most important trading partner, while England was just one of many trading partners for the Low Countries. And, unlike the last time, in 1494 the Habsburgs retaliated, banning the entry of English cloth to the Low Countries outright.⁸ They closed off England’s single most important market, and made it extremely difficult for the cloth to get through to its final consumers more inland.

Henry had grossly miscalculated. Not only did the cities of the Low Countries fail to revolt, but he actually ended up inadvertently consolidating the Habsburgs’ control. This was because Henry had made an exception from the embargo, to allow the export of raw wool. The reason for this was probably because the export of wool was a major source of revenue for him. Wool had long been more heavily taxed, per weight, than when it was manufactured into woollen cloth. So although he would lose customs duties from the declining export of cloth, this would be at least partially offset by exporting more of it as wool. Indeed, the ban caused the volume of English raw wool exports to more or less triple after just a couple of years — much of it sold to the clothmaking industry of Flanders, a region in the southern Low Countries.

Although the cloth-finishers of Brabant suffered, then, the cloth-makers of Flanders rejoiced. Henry’s policy of allowing wool exports created an abundance of raw material for them to use, while the Habsburgs’ outright ban on English cloth in 1494 was to grant the Flemish a captive domestic market (English cloth had already been banned from entering Flanders itself for well over a century, but not to the Low Countries as a whole).⁹ The Flemish could not have asked for a better policy of protectionism, while Maximilian could not have asked for a more advantageous situation. The Flemish were by far the most rebellious of his subjects, and Henry had inadvertently placed their economic fortunes within his gift.

Maximilian initially sought to profit from the embargo by selling a few special cloth import licences in spite of it, but the Flemish cities soon came cap in hand to him, begging him to make the ban more absolute.¹⁰ Although Maximilian accepted their petition, he soon landed upon a way to balance the interests of both Brabant and Flanders, while principally benefiting himself. In September 1495 he quietly dropped the ban on English cloth entering the Low Countries, but insisted that from henceforth it was all to enter the country via the Brabantine port of Bergen op Zoom, where it would pay a hefty new tariff.¹¹ The cities of the Low Countries jealously guarded their privileges, and the imposition of such a tax would ordinarily have provoked outrage or even rebellion. But Henry had done Maximilian a favour by resetting the starting point for any negotiations. When the alternative was that there was to be no import of cloth at all, imposing a major new tax on it instead now looked like Maximilian was doing the Brabantines a favour. And the tariff was high enough to dissuade all but a trickle of English cloth into the Low Countries, so that it still served to keep out competition for the Flemish as well. By starting the trade war, Henry had given Maximilian a golden opportunity to consolidate his control over the Low Countries. And to profit from it too.

Sacrificial Lambs

At the same time, the costs to Henry’s own subjects were severe. The English Merchant Adventurers, being barred from trading with the Low Countries directly, tried to adapt by taking their cloth across the Channel to the English continental outpost at Calais, from whence it might then be sold on to foreign merchants to take to the Low Countries. This alone was costly, and when it was rumoured that German merchants were being permitted to circumvent the ban, Germans in London were attacked by rioters until their permissions were revoked as well.¹² Yet when the Habsburgs retaliated with their outright ban on English cloth, the Merchant Adventurers were almost entirely deprived of their trade, and even the German merchants were forced to use more expensive routes instead. Foreign merchants who hoped to transport English cloth to its final consumers in inland Europe were soon landing it hundreds of kilometres further north and east at Hamburg, or else using the Dutch port of Kampen, whose harbour was wholly inadequate, but which at least was ruled by the neutral prince-bishop of Utrecht — something that many of them continued to try, even after Maximilian replaced the ban with a tax, because the tax was so high.¹³ Either way, the final cost to consumers abroad was greatly raised, and the demand for English cloth significantly reduced.

With English cloth so hindered from being sold abroad, pretty much all imports to England became more difficult to afford. The Low Countries, for a start, were where England sourced its linen, copper, and all sorts of metalwares, including weapons, armour, and anything one could think to make of brass, bronze, iron, or steel. All of this was banned under the terms of Henry’s embargo. But the cloth sold in the Low Countries was also used to fund the importation of essentials from other markets too — iron from Spain, used for ploughs, harrows, carts, and various other tools; salt from France, essential for preserving food; grain from the Baltic, which helped keep the country alive whenever it suffered a bad harvest. Food, in the event, at least stayed cheap, presumably due to a run of decent harvests. Cloth made for export would have also been temporarily plentiful and cheap, lying unsold for the lack of foreign demand. But the disruption to trade meant that almost everything else rose in price.¹⁴

And just as the costs of living rose, many of the poor English clothworkers were thrown out of work. We do not know exactly how badly English cloth exports were affected, because the records for the years of the disruption have not survived. But we can make a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate from the records that have, because we know by how much exports of raw wool suddenly surged. Assuming that this increase represented the very same wool that would otherwise have been made into and exported as cloth, then England’s cloth exports declined by about two thirds,¹⁵ and its entire cloth industry shrank by about a sixth — an estimate that is strikingly corroborated by the number of cloths that entered via Bergen op Zoom when the ban was relaxed.¹⁶

If my estimate is at all close, then at least 29,000 people were thrown out of full-time unemployment — about 2.4% of the entire country’s workforce. And even this is an underestimate of how many in England would actually have been harmed, because clothmaking was often done as a side gig, part-time. Tens of thousands of England’s poorest families, who relied on clothmaking as a means to supplement their meagre incomes, would thus have been among the hardest hit: children who used wooden paddles fixed with small hooks, called cards, to disentangle and align the wool fibres; women who sat at their wheels or wandered with their drop-spindles, spinning the fibres into yarn; men who stood at looms, weaving that yarn into cloth; and hundreds more who de-greased the woven cloth and then fulled it, soaking it in warm water and pounding it with their feet or with wooden hammers powered by a watermill, forcing the fibres of the cloth to mesh together to be felt-like, thick, and strong. All now saw their opportunities for employment disappear, while the wool they had once worked on was used instead by the spinners and weavers of Flanders.

Woolly Thinking

Bizarrely, Henry VII’s control of export licences and trade bans are often described as a case of early home-biased industrial policy — an idea most recently popularised by the bestselling economics author Ha-Joon Chang.¹⁷ Henry’s policies have been presented as a purposeful stimulus to England’s export of cloth, allowing English industry to rise up through protectionism before it later “kicked away the ladder” for other countries by imposing trade rules free of tariffs and import bans. But Chang based his information almost entirely on a 1720s writer, Daniel Defoe, who was seeking precedents to justify protectionism in his own time, and who got some crucial details utterly garbled.

This is not just me being pedantic. Henry VII’s trade policies are frequently cited as an example of how protectionism works, and the misunderstandings have made their way into more general historical accounts — just look at the economic achievements listed on Henry VII’s Wikipedia entry. A few years ago I spoke on a panel at a conference where Lord Sainsbury, a former minister in the British Department of Trade and Industry, pooh-poohed what I had said about England having lacked much industry before the mid-sixteenth century on the grounds that Henry VII had favoured cloth over wool. I was not given the chance to reply back then, but better late than never.

What Defoe failed to realise — actually getting things completely back to front — was that the 1493 embargo mainly harmed the export of English manufactured goods. He failed to mention that Habsburg retaliation in 1494 made the damage significantly worse. And he failed to realise that a specific exception had been made to allow raw wool to be exported instead. Far from what Defoe set out, and has been uncritically echoed ever since, Henry’s trade ban was really the kind of policy you’d pursue if you were trying to destroy England’s manufacturing, not boost it.

And in any case, the embargo only lasted two and a half years — hardly an event to cause a major shift in England’s long-term economic trajectory. The supposed Richard IV’s invasion of England finally materialised in the summer of 1495, by which time Henry had had a chance to round up most of the pretender’s supporters at home. The invasion foundered as soon as it tried to land in Kent, and was forced to turn back. Rather than return to the Low Countries, Richard was invited to Scotland, from which he hoped to launch another attempt. But in the event, the Scottish king merely used his claim as an excuse to conduct an inconsequential border raid. Henry prepared for a large-scale retaliatory invasion of Scotland, for which he raised taxes. But this prompted major revolts in the southwest; it’s probably no coincidence that the southwest produced most of England’s exported broadcloth, and so would have been the region to have suffered most from the ban on trade.¹⁸ Richard joined up with the rebels, who proclaimed him king. Yet when Henry sent his army to meet him in battle, Richard lost his nerve before the fight and fled. He was captured, forced to say that he had been the imposter Perkin Warbeck all along, and eventually executed.

It was not long after Richard’s failed first invasion, however, trade relations between the Low Countries and England had already begun to normalise. In February 1496, while the pretender was off in Scotland, the two sides had signed a treaty to restore trade. Thanks to one of Henry’s biographers in the seventeenth century (none other than the godfather of empiricism, Francis Bacon), the treaty is often described as a major achievement, and termed the Intercursus Magnus, or Great Commerce. But it would not have seemed so great to the English at the time.¹⁹ It simply restored general trading conditions to the way they had been for the last half a century, but with some serious omissions.

Although the treaty contained various clauses about the Low Countries ceasing to support English rebels and traitors, it was signed by Maximilian’s son, doing nothing to limit Maximilian’s own, open support for the claim of Richard IV. Indeed, in the very same week that the treaty was was signed, Maximilian was reluctant to admit Henry VII to a big anti-French coalition, on the grounds that Richard’s victory over him might still be imminent.²⁰ Even more significantly for England itself, the Habsburgs continued to direct all English cloth via Bergen op Zoom, where they continued to levy their hefty new tariff. Within a month of the treaty being signed, the Merchant Adventurers were complaining to Henry about these conditions, arguing that upon a strict reading of the agreement they should not be allowed. He agreed, ordering his merchants not to pay it.

But the Habsburgs recognised their far stronger negotiating position. They levied the tax anyway, adding insult to injury by adding on various tolls, and seizing the merchants’ goods if they refused. By September 1496 — just six months after the supposedly “great” treaty had been signed — Henry was forced to take the costly step of once again suspending direct trade, ordering all merchants in England to send their cloth to Calais again instead. This seems to have at least served to re-open negotiations, during which the Habsburgs offered a partial and temporary reprieve from the tariff on cloth.²¹ But the moment Henry once again permitted the Merchant Adventurers to return to the Low Countries, the Habsburgs turned up the pressure again, banning their subjects from wearing any garments made from English cloth, and so effectively banning its retail — the idea was that the Flemish clothmakers would continue to get their captive domestic market, while the Brabantine cloth-finishers would continue to buy English cloth wholesale so that they could dye and finish it, solely exporting the finished product into inland Europe.

Eventually, in 1499, Henry was able to reach a new agreement with the Low Countries. English merchants were no longer forced to use Bergen op Zoom, and the Habsburgs completely dropped the new tariffs and tolls. The 1499 treaty, if anything, is more deserving of the title of Intercursus Magnus. But it really only partially turned back the clock, because Henry failed to get the Habsburgs to remove the new ban on retailing English cloth in the Low Countries. And even a partial reset came at a price: in order to secure the abolition of the new tariff, Henry was forced to reduce the fixed prices that the English charged for raw wool.²²

We should be clear on what really happened then, when in 1493 Henry decided to suspend trade. This was no enlightened industrial policy to serve as a model for today. Instead, an insecure usurper, fearful of a rival being supported by a more powerful foreign ruler, readily sacrificed the livelihoods of tens of thousands of his poorest subjects in an attempt to change that ruler’s mind. Not only was that sacrifice futile, but the end result — after six years of costly negotiation — was that English trade with the Low Countries was restored on worse terms than before.

Rather than some major victory it showed the Habsburgs just how limited England’s economic leverage was, such that they had no hesitation in angering Henry even further. It was not long, for example, before they took in yet another potential pretender to the his throne — another of Edward IV’s nephews, Edmund de la Pole. The Habsburgs used him as a bargaining chip to extort gargantuan cash bribes — at one point Henry coughed up more than a full year’s worth of his ordinary revenue — just to stop them supporting de la Pole’s claim.²³ The only time Henry got the upper hand was through sheer chance in 1506, when Maximilian’s son and heir Philip, by now an adult ruling the Low Countries properly, was shipwrecked in England while on his way to Spain to claim its throne. As Henry’s “guest” for a few months — a prisoner of his hospitality — Philip finally extradited de la Pole and agreed to major trade concessions, including a promise to lift the protectionist ban on retailing or wearing English cloth. Henry insisted — prudently, it turns out — that the pretender be taken into his custody while Philip was still on English soil. But once Philip was gone, the trade concessions evaporated into a mist of excuses and denials.

The reality then was that Henry’s trade ban did more to hinder the English economy than help it — which is also very clearly borne out by the data on cloth exports. It was only when he stopped declaring on-and-off trade bans with the Low Countries that England’s cloth exports finally gained a secure basis for growth. With trade allowed to grow for the next fifty years, this time with relatively few further interruptions, the weight of English cloth exports more than doubled, and increased by even more in terms of value.²⁴ It was not by imposing embargoes, but by refraining from them, that England’s main manufacturing industry finally had the chance to expand.

Yet Henry’s trade ban did have one lasting legacy, because it prompted some major changes to the labour laws.

Juries Out

Two years into the stoppage of trade, and faced with rising import prices and rising unemployment, England’s Parliament was forced to act. With tens of thousands of people being forced out of work and having to wander and beg, Henry’s proclamation of 1493 — of three days in the stocks for able-bodied vagabonds and idlers, and the order for all the sick and infirm beggars to return to their home towns — was put into law. Yet this was no mere confirmation, because it also came with a powerful incentive to see it enforced: whenever a local official failed to immediately punish a vagabond who had come into their knowledge or sight, they were now to be punishable by a heavy fine. And that fine, rather than just disappearing into the justice system and eventually making its way to the king, was to be paid instead to the superior or colleague who dobbed the lax official in. The fines were explicitly to be awarded to the informers’ “own use and profit”. It suddenly became extremely profitable to crack down on officials who were being too lenient, and very risky to turn a blind eye.²⁵

And that was not all. Parliament did something similar to catch those avoiding the other labour restrictions too. Presenting juries — what we’d now call grand juries — were solemnly sworn by the Justices of the Peace to present all wrongdoers in their communities for punishment. But the government became worried that they were failing to do their duties in the face of local bribery, intimidation, or even straightforward bias — an especial problem when it came to dobbing in their neighbours and friends for infractions that they might have considered minor, or which they didn’t think should be punished at all, like taking wages above the caps. It will have been hard for juries not to be sympathetic about their neighbours’ demands for higher wages when the disruption to trade had caused the costs of many essential imported goods to rise as well.

The problem of overly sympathetic or corrupted presenting juries had been brought up before. As I mentioned last time, Justices of the Peace had long been empowered to circumvent juries when it came to enforcing the caps on wages. Since the 1420s they’d been able to examine suspects without first needing a formal presentment by a jury, and could even summarily convict them based only on their own opinion of the case. Again without a jury. Although the Justices were given such powers, however, the onus was still on them to follow up on informal complaints and hearsay, rooting out offenders themselves. The law empowered the magistrate who was diligent, but not every magistrate was, or even had the time if they were.

So in 1495 Parliament circumvented the presenting jury another way, by handing over its powers to the public. It enabled anyone and everyone to bring lawbreakers before the Justices, encouraging them with the prospect of winning a substantial portion of the fines that would be due if they were successfully convicted — an even more generalised version of what it had done to encourage officials to crack down on their too-lenient subordinates and colleagues. Encouraging the public to become informers had precedent already for the punishment of some laws, but the 1495 act was a more general and wide-ranging informers’ charter. The policing of essentially all minor offences — including, explicitly, those who broke the labour laws — was now put into the hands of mercenary litigators.²⁶

Merely tightening up the enforcement of the labour laws, however, did nothing to address what was causing them to be broken in the first place — something that Parliament seems to have at least partially recognised. It was all very well to reinforce the restrictions on people being unemployed or demanding higher wages, but wages did need to reflect rising costs if people were to survive. So in conjunction with these measures, Parliament in 1495 also slightly raised the levels at which wages were legally capped — the first time they had been updated in fifty years.

All Caps

When historians discuss the 1495 change to wage caps, they often describe it as a raise that merely reflected an already long-established reality, during which the old 1445 caps were merely a dead letter. The 1495 law is presented as a kind of resurgence of the labour laws after a long hiatus of non-enforcement, suddenly capping wages again anew.²⁷ Part of their reason for assuming this is that there were protests in 1496 shortly after it came into effect: two risings in coastal Kent, and difficulties among London’s journeymen carpenters — those who typically worked by the day, the week, or the task for the master carpenters, who in turn sold their labour to clients. It’s hard to imagine that they would have been protesting a raise, and so it’s assumed that the 1495 law must have effectively lowered their wages by imposing a new cap.

Yet there are some big problems with these assumptions. For a start, there’s a smattering of evidence that the 1445 wage caps were being enforced in the early 1490s before the change.²⁸ And the update to them only makes sense in the economic context of Henry VII’s trade war if the government believed that the old caps mattered. The new caps were made law in late 1495, two years into the embargo but before there was any end to it in sight.²⁹ It came just as rising costs were beginning to really bite, when the fifty-year-old caps would have prevented wages from adjusting, where necessary, in response to rising costs. And it was a measure intended to last, because the higher prices of imports were beginning to look like a new normal.

In the event, however, trading relations were restored just a month before the new caps came into effect. And so after a bit of delay — no doubt because there was some uncertainty about whether the embargo might resume when the Habsburgs immediately refused to reduce their tolls and tariff, and because it took a while for imports to start flowing in again and for their prices to fall — the update was repealed. Historians have assumed that this repeal was at least in part a response to the disturbances by the London carpenters and in Kent: with the 1495 law assumed to have imposed the caps anew, it’s also assumed that they were protesting the law having lowered their wages by capping them, agitating for those caps to be removed.³⁰

But this is not what the evidence suggests. Legally, the revocation in 1497 instead lowered the wage caps back to the rates that had been set in 1445, and for some jobs even earlier still. The older cap had never been removed from the statute books and were still considered by the authorities to be in force. For example, when there was once again some mild inflation in 1511, a royal proclamation noted how poorer workers were now suffering because they were forced to accept “such convenient wages as have heretofore been to them taxed [i.e. set] by diverse statutes”, and that lawbreaking was becoming more frequent through “the enhancement of the said wages contrary to the statutes in such case ordained”.³¹ This can only be referring to the old statutes of 1445 and before. Indeed, the old caps were probably more widely publicised than ever, because of the advent of the printing press. A surviving guide for Justices of the Peace printed in 1510 — one of many editions, and probably not the first — sets out the 1445 law and its implications in detail.³²

When Parliament revoked the new caps in 1497 then, it did not lift a new restriction. It instead withdrew a raise. With trade restored, imports resumed, and with costs now falling, there must have been no need from the perspective of Parliament — the perspective of employers — for wages to be allowed to continue to be so high. Interestingly, we have evidence that London’s carpenters’ guild, whose journeymen had been so riotous, was among those who lobbied for the revocation (though we unfortunately don’t know the content of their lobbying, just the fact that they lobbied and seemed happy with the result). Historians have assumed that they had the same supposed motivation of their riotous journeymen, to get all wage caps repealed, and so obtain higher wages. But if the repeal actually lowered legally permissible wages, this interpretation must be entirely back to front.

How to make sense of it? Well, the guild was controlled by the master carpenters, not the journeymen — the employers, not the employees. With journeymen carpenters being so violently demanding, their masters would no doubt have been paying them nothing less than whatever the legal maximum was, if not being forced by their workers to illegally pay more. And so they would have been especially desperate to lower their wages again — in line with everyone else’s, so as not to lose out — once the costs of important imports, like the iron for journeymen’s tools and nails, had begun to fall again in price.

But if the 1495 change raised wages then, why exactly did the journeymen carpenters and many of the workers of coastal Kent revolt? It’s possible that it was not the change to the caps themselves, but some of the other aspects of the law that angered them — it was the first time, for example, that the law set out precise working hours, with a provision for employers to dock pay accordingly. But I think the most likely explanation is simply that the raise was, for certain occupations and in certain parts of the country, simply not sufficient. It’s not that they were angry because Parliament had lowered their wages; they were angry because Parliament had not raised their wages by enough.

In much of the country this would not have been an issue. Although we don’t have much to go on, it appears as though wages for much of the fifteenth century often lagged below the ancient, 1445 caps, which perhaps explains why there was no disorder elsewhere. In most of the country then, the raise in 1495 would have been a welcome change that perhaps even more than made up for rising costs. But London and the Kentish coast were some of the wealthiest regions in England, where wages would already have been the highest, right up to if not illegally exceeding the old caps. And — as the closest regions geographically to the Low Countries — they were the places most reliant on imports, where the costs of Henry VII’s embargo would have been most keenly felt. The professions of the Kentish rioters, for example, were not just agricultural workers, but included carpenters, shearmen, and blacksmiths, who like the carpenters of London would have been dismayed at the rise in the cost of imported metals for their materials and tools, and probably much more besides.

The places that protested, in other words, were where the raising of the wage caps would have felt the most out of step with their rising costs; but also where their costs would have fallen furthest and fastest upon the resumption of trade, which would explain why there was no further complaint upon the wage caps being lowered again the following year.

In any case, regardless of what really happened in 1495-7 to the wage caps, the effects were brief. But the labour laws were indisputably in force in again, and their enforcement had been significantly tightened. They were soon — as I’ll explain in the next instalment — to become more painful and restrictive than ever before. If the effects of Henry VII on England’s economy were severe, the son whose succession he readily sacrificed it for, Henry VIII, were to be downright devastating.

1. Rotuli Parliamentorum, Volume 6, p.8

2. Berry, Charlotte, The Margins of Late Medieval London, 1430-1540, New Historical Perspectives (University of London Press, 2022) pp.94, 112, 139

3. Mary Bateson, ed. Records of the borough of Leicester; being a series of extracts from the archives of the Corporation of Leicester, Volume II (C. J. Clay and Sons, 1901), pp.308-9. This reproduces an order of 31 January 1486, which references the earlier “straight commandment”. Henry VII had come to power at the Battle of Bosworth just over five months earlier, on 22 August 1485.

4. Hughes, Paul L., and James F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations (Yale University Press, 1964), I: The Early Tudors (1485-1553): see proclamation no.16, 23 December 1487 for a further crackdown; and no.30, 18 February 1493, for the new approach

5. Technically, Maximilian was not officially Holy Roman Emperor yet, having not been crowned by the Pope. But he was King of the Romans, making him emperor-elect after his father, the previous emperor, died in 1493. Maximilian didn’t officially adopt the title of emperor-elect until later, and in the end his status as emperor was only verbally confirmed by the Pope without an actual coronation - the first emperor for which this exception was made. Yet the reality of power was immediately recognised by all his contemporaries in 1493, who referred to him straightforwardly as the emperor.

6. Maximilian’s son, Philip, was both Henry VI’s second cousin twice removed and Edward IV’s third cousin twice removed, but both times twice over, via both his father’s and mother’s lines. Funnily enough, given Philip then married yet another cousin of both kinds, his son, the future emperor Charles V could claim the English throne thrice over — though Henry VII neutralised this threat by marrying Edward IV’s daughter, so that his successor Henry VIII, as a grandson of Edward IV, had a strong dynastic claim.

7. Currin, John Michael, ‘Henry VII and the Politics of Europe, 1485-1492: Diplomacy and War at the Accession of the Tudor Regime’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 1995), pp.104-111, 186-190, 264-270 summarises Maximilian’s predicament in the 1480s and how Henry took advantage of it.

8. The retaliatory ban, issued on 8 April 1494, affected English-made yarn as well as cloth, to ensure that even the intermediate stages of manufacture were punished. For the text of the proclamation, see: Georg Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende des Mittelalters, Volume 2 (Duncker & Humblot, 1881). pp.191-3. Note that Depreter, Michael, ‘Autour de l’Intercursus magnus (24 février 1496). Le rôle de la noblesse « bourguignonne » dans les négociations avec l’Angleterre’, Publications du Centre Européen d’Etudes Bourguignonnes (XIV-XVIe s.), 58.1 (2018) on p.276 says that that the ban also affected English raw wool, but this is not the case, seemingly having been misled by a secondary source that must have confused the ban on yarn with a ban on wool.

9. It’s unclear if the abundance of raw wool resulted in lower prices for the Flemish. English wool was all exported via Calais by the Company of Staplers, and sold on to foreigners at fixed prices. But those prices varied according to the quality or origin of the wool. So one of two things must have happened. Either the Flemish clothmakers benefited so much from a captive domestic market that they were able to use higher cloth prices in the Low Countries to pay for so much more wool. Or they were simply able to buy significantly higher quantities of the lower-priced varieties of English wool, thereby lowering the overall average price of English wools. I suspect it was a bit of both, though I lean towards the latter: this is because the higher-priced varieties were those that already tended to be exported raw rather than made up into England as cloth, especially as the customs levied on higher-priced varieties were proportionately much lower. As suggestive evidence for the former, however, in October 1494 the Flemish also took the opportunity to allow the use of non-English wools for the first time since 1459, thereby sourcing more and cheaper wools from Spain. For the sourcing from Spain, see Munro, John H., ‘Bruges and the Abortive Staple in English Cloth: An Incident in the Shift of Commerce from Bruges to Antwerp in the Late Fifteenth Century’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 1966, p.1149, footnote 7.

10. Lloyd, T. H. The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 1977, p.283; Munro 1966, p. 1152

11. Munro 1966, p.1153

12. Sutton, Anne F., The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods and People, 1130-1578 (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2005), p.326

13. For a summary see Fudge, J., ‘Tudor-Hapsburg Trade Wars and Northern Commercial Networks 1486-1506’, Journal of European Economic History (Rome, Italy), 24.3 (1995), pp. 573–86

14. The data on this is patchy and not especially reliable, but the years of the embargo 1493-6 show general industrial prices being appreciably higher than the years both before and after it (discounting the embargo years of 1487-9 and the early 1500s either side of it). See Doughty, Robert A, ‘Industrial Prices and Inflation in Southern England, 1401–1640’, Explorations in Economic History, 12.2 (1975), pp. 177–92. There is some qualitative evidence to back this up. In the early months of 1497, Parliament opportunistically attacked the monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers on the grounds that it was they — rather than Henry’s policies — that had caused a crash in the price of cloth and of clothmaking employment, as well as the spike in the prices of imports from the Low Countries, for which they blamed the “poverty, ruin, and decay” of all English cities and towns. See ‘Henry VII: January 1497’, in Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, Paul Brand, Seymour Phillips, Mark Ormrod, Geoffrey Martin, Anne Curry, Rosemary Horrox (Woodbridge, 2005)

15. Oldland, John, ‘Wool and Cloth Production in Late Medieval and Early Tudor England’, The Economic History Review, 67.1 (2014), p.29 estimates that in the 1490s 4.55 cloths could be made from a sack of wool. The number of sacks of wool being exported per year increased, per Lloyd p.283, from under 4,000 to almost 12,000 sacks per year by the end of the embargo period. Assuming that this increase was entirely driven by wool that would otherwise have been exported as cloth, for the reasons I’ve described above, it would correspond to roughly 36,400 cloths, or roughly two thirds of the pre-embargo cloth trade (on average about 55,000 broadcloths cloths were exported in 1490-3, before the embargo hit, though at first almost 60,000 cloths still managed to be exported in 1493-4, before the Habsburg retaliation). Each unfinished cloth would have each taken approximately 850 man-hours to produce (removing the hours for dyeing and finishing) as per Oldland, John, ‘The Economic Impact of Clothmaking on Rural Society, 1300–1550’, in Medieval Merchants and Money, ed. by Martin Allen and Matthew Davies, Essays in Honour of James L. Bolton (University of London Press, 2016), p.236. Adapting Oldland’s calculations for the number of clothworkers this would employ full-time, this means that the increase in raw wool exports of about 36,400 cloth-equivalents would correspond to employing over 29,000 people full-time (assuming they worked full-time, which few would have). From a total English population of approximately 2m, of whom about 60% (1.2m) would have been of working age, that corresponds to at least 2.42% of the entire working population being affected. Extrapolating from Oldland’s estimates for the total size of the cloth industry, assuming a population-adjusted domestic demand of about 150,000 cloths added to usual exports of 55,000 cloths, the cloth industry must have employed approximately 163,346 people, which corresponds to about 17.7% of the industry being affected.

16. Munro 1966, p.1153: the Bergen op Zoom tax registers record 16,000 broadcloths imported in 1495-6. It’s a little lower than the English exports of 18,600 implied by my back-of-the-envelope calculations above, but some would of course have made its way to Hamburg and Kampen as well, with some perhaps also being smuggled. We just don’t know how much, but I think it allows us to ground an estimate until any further details come to light.

17. Chang, Ha-Joon, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (Anthem Press, 2002), pp.20-1, and Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity (Random House, 2008), p.41. Chang also mentions the legislation banning the export of unfinished cloths, but both times repeats Defoe’s misapprehension that there had been an export ban on raw wool (rather than a specific exception for it!)

18. Oldland, John, The English Woollen Industry, c.1200-c.1560 (Routledge, 2019), chapter “March of the Clothiers”, section on West Country whites: he estimates that by the end of the 15thC it accounted for 70% of English cloth exports. The rebellion began in Cornwall, which was a tin-mining region affected by another of Henry’s short-sighted economic policies. But it soon spread through the cloth-producing regions of the southwest, including Dorset, Somerset, and Wiltshire. For this geographical spread see Arthurson, Ian, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, 1491-1499 (The History Press, 2009), p.293

19. Sutton 2005, pp.327-8; Munro 1966, p.1153

20. Zacharia Contarini to the Doge and Senate of Venice, 19 February 1496, in Calendar of State Papers: Venice, 1202-1609, no.677; the Intercursus Magnus was signed on 24 February.

21. Fudge, p.581

22. Munro, J. H., ‘Wool-Price Schedules and the Qualities of English Wools in the Later Middle Ages c.1270–1499’, Textile History, 9.1 (1978), pp.152-5. The headline reduction in the Calais prices was of just half a mark per sack — approximately 2.5 to 3.5%, as sack prices ranged from about 14 to 20 marks — but in practice the reduction would have been much greater, as the agreement brought in much stricter controls on wool quality and allowed Low Countries merchants to pay for it using their own currency rather than being forced to use either bullion or English coin, which they’d first have to obtain by selling their own wares. Note that in the meantime, on 7 July 1497, there had already been an agreement reached for the Habsburgs to temporarily reduced their tax on cloth in exchange for the English dropping Calais wool prices by a full mark per sack (i.e. a price reduction of about 3.5 to 7%) until more detailed and protracted negotiations — culminating in the 1499 treaty — resumed. Depreter p.288 incorrectly says the tariff was removed entirely. John Munro, ‘Industrial Protectionism in Medieval Flanders: Urban or National?’, in The Medieval City, H. A. Miskimin, D. Herlihy, and A. L. Udovitch, Eds, Yale University Press, 1977, p.252, footnote 79, provides a possible explanation for the misunderstanding: the Habsburgs did initially promise to eliminate the tariff in the summer of 1497, but in the event they merely reduced it.

23. Penn, Thomas, Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England (Penguin UK, 2011), pp.200, 209. In 1505 alone, Henry paid the gargantuan sum of Philip £138,000.

24. Oldland 209, pp.264-5, pp.269-71; Henry VII imposed a further trade ban in 1504-6, and there were further disruptions up to 1520, but they were seemingly nowhere near as severe as those of the 1490s.

25. 11 Henry VII, c.2

26. 11 Henry VII, c.3

27. One of the few historians to consider the possibility that the labour laws were still in force is Cavill, P. R., ‘The Problem of Labour and the Parliament of 1495’, in The Fifteenth Century: Of Mice and Men: Image, Belief and Regulation in Late Medieval England, ed. by Linda Clark (The Boydell Press, 2005), v, pp. 143–56. But even then, he largely focuses on the contract clauses, believing that the wage caps were largely a dead letter. As I mentioned last time, I think this misleading impression comes from his reliance on sheriffs’ records, who did not have any responsibility for enforcing the caps. Indeed, as I pointed out in the previous post, when the sheriffs of Herefordshire tried to do so in the 1430s they were resolutely slapped down by Parliament as having exceeded their authority.

28. Cavill, p.145 for example notes the 1492 case of a yeoman in Suffolk being fined for paying wages in excess of the 1445 statute.

29. The treaty was signed in February 1496, and the raising of the cap was to come into effect from 12 March 1496.

30. For all detail and discussion of the disturbances, see Cavill.

31. Hughes & Larkin, p.92 - proclamation no.63, dated 1511. Crucially, this proclamation precedes by some years the restoration of the 1495-7 caps in early 1515.

32. See Boke of Justice of the Peace (1533). The first that I’ve found mentioning the 1515 update to the caps is The Boke for a Justice of Peace (1539), which merely adds the 1515 law right after explaining the 1445 one, without explaining that one should have affected the other. See pp.17-20. This lazy habit of just listing one after the other seems to have been repeated in the 1544 and 1546 editions too. Only in Anthony Fitzherbert, The new booke of justyces of peace (1543) is there a mention of how the 1445 caps “are changed by the statutes made in the time of Henry VII and Henry VIII”, apparently without having noticed that the Henry VII 1495 law had been revoked in 1497. Note also, however, that other aspects of the 1445 law, like additional powers granted to Justices of the Peace, six-month notice periods for leaving an annual employment contract, and the minimum landholdings required to be excused from being an agricultural servant, also continued to be in effect after the 1515 law raised the caps. This is made explicit throughout the extensive printed literature intended to guide magistrates.