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By Root 4175 0

will. The greatest landowner was the Church and since each generation saw more lands given to the Church by a pious nobility – land which then passed forever out of the king’s control – the Church’s wealth could only increase at his expense. This was another situation which he had tried to correct by insisting, in his Statute of Mortmain, that only the king should license these land grants in future; but even so, the wealth of his kingdom that was controlled by the bishops and abbots was huge. And if this was not bad enough, in 1296, in the great Bull Clericis Laicos, the pope had now declared that no subsidies should be paid to the king without his permission. Not only the Church gave him trouble. The very next year, when Edward held a parliament of his magnates at Salisbury, they had even refused to go to Gascony unless the king went too. “By God, earl,” he was said to have cried in exasperation to the marshal, “You will either go or hang.” To which the magnate replied: “By God, king, I will neither go nor hang.” And so, once again, England’s king found himself confronted with exactly the same problem that had forced King John to agree to the Magna Carta and Henry III to give way to Montfort. The feudal king had neither the money nor the power to govern in troubled times.

The answer was wool. Roughly half the value of the kingdom now lay in its wool, and Edward made every effort to increase the wool exports from his own estates and to tax the trade of the merchants. Why, after all, should the king not profit from the greatest source of wealth in his kingdom?

It was Edward who first established the customs and excise. And in 1294 he began the tax on wool exports called the maltote.

In doing so he ruined John Wilson completely. It was Wilson’s fault.

The grant of the farm, small as it was, had given the merchant a new confidence. A subtle change came over him and his wife. He trimmed his cotte with fur around the collar; Cristina, who had persuaded the Scottish secretary to part with a golden chain, wore it proudly round her neck. When they went to hear the mass on Sundays, they almost strutted down the street.

And in 1291, John Wilson began to speculate in wool.

It had seemed safe enough. Under the system known as arra, a merchant would advance money to a farmer at a discounted price on the security of his next crop of wool. There was nothing new in this, and since the wool business was booming, the risks to the merchant were slight. In his first year, by driving a hard bargain with some of the smaller wool growers, many of them villeins from nearby estates, Wilson did well.

He grew more ambitious. The following year, he not only advanced small amounts of money of his own; he borrowed sums from larger merchants so that he could advance more, using the security of the farm. For two years he made handsome profits. He gambled more.

The effect of the maltote tax was simple. The wholesale wool exporters, unable to pass on all the tax as a price increase to their customers, made up for it by paying less for their wool. And so although at the end of the thirteenth century the wool market was booming, the prices paid to suppliers actually fell. John Wilson, now the owner of large quantities of wool he had bought two years ahead and paid for with borrowed money, was left with a huge shortfall. To meet it he had to sell the house and business in Wilton, all his livestock, and the tenancy of the farm. By the spring of 1296 the Wilson family, after only half a decade of prosperity, was completely ruined.

Though he was only a boy of five at the time, John’s son Walter remembered what happened next all his life.

On a cold spring day, when the little family were disconsolately huddled by the cottage, it was Mary Shockley who came striding down the path from the Shockley farmhouse towards them.

What a strange figure she had seemed: a big, bluff woman with her hair cut short and dressed like a man, as she came stomping through the mud in her heavy boots. When she reached the cottage she stood in front of them with her hands