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By Root 1358 0

was also a significant source of income for poor women – the records of the parliamentary army in East Anglia are full of fairly small payments to people of humble means. Cleaning, clothing, repairs, laundry and food provision all provided employments associated with care for the wounded.53 It goes without saying that many of these people would surely have swapped these steady little earners for peace, but it is important to remember that the war brought benefits alongside the appalling costs. Taxes were raised and spent in the country, and the flow must have been a source of employment for many people. War was not simply a burden.

Some contractors in arms and clothing industries clearly did well, and the benefits of this business seem to have spread to craftsmen in those industries. There were also men of very modest means who signed up, whose pay was usually in arrears, but who were employed, fed and clothed; and there were other employments associated with servicing this massive military effort. But the real money lay in the world of public finance. There is some evidence from earlier in the century that men with liquid capital were particularly attractive as tax collectors, since they could advance sums to the government while recouping it in the localities (in return for a ‘poundage’ or cut of the proceeds). They could also transfer money using their own personal credit rather than hauling sacks of cash around. Certainly, later in the century, control of the flow of tax money was a source of profit – allowing men to use the balances to underwrite their own business, or even to act as bankers. More lucrative, potentially at least, was to contract for revenue collection – to farm taxes. Some men were able to build significant commercial careers because they were in a position to advance credit to the regime. Governments sold the right to collect customs, and, in the 1650s, the excise, to individual merchants who had the expertise to ensure collection. In return for a guaranteed income, paid on a particular date, the government gave up a slice of the pie. Men like Martin Noell and Thomas Povey grew rich in this way during the 1650s, diversifying into the emerging colonial trades.54

During the civil wars many of the services being paid for were secured locally, so that much of the money never left the county in which it was raised. In Worcester during the royalist occupation the monthly tax was about half as much as the entire subsidy of 1641. But the money was spent in the city, as it must have been in most fortified garrison towns. The ongoing work of building and maintaining the defences was paid at what appears to be a standard rate of 8d per day.55 Almost all of the New Model’s supplies, arms aside, came from the locality in which it found itself. In 1645 and 1646 the New Model resorted to free quarter, but this was the last year of the war. Thereafter, it depended on orderly supply and payment. John Cory, a Norwich merchant, both collected and disbursed tax revenue. Between 29 April and 20 November 1644 he paid out £480 to twenty local tradesmen for waistcoats, shirts, breeches, stockings and shoes, and another £313 for cloth.56 This was a good position to be in – both collecting and spending government money.

Although the roots of this kind of relationship to government go deeper than the 1640s, the opportunities were greatly increased by the massive contracts now required to support the war effort. In these ways the war effort fostered a connection between merchants and government around the public finances. Spending often preceded the receipt of the revenue, and the gap was bridged by borrowing not from the money markets, but from individual suppliers or those handling the revenues. The need for credit and supplies stimulated improvements in the provision of both. There is some evidence that the need to find cash for tax payments accelerated the monetization of local economies, and caused frictions between landlord and tenant over rent levels and tax liabilities, as in the case of the farmers in Surrey who complained