Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [387]
Though his methods were different from his father’s, Edward Wilson never failed to take advantage of every opportunity. One of these was a joint venture with the Shockleys for making cloth.
“This will feed you and your children,” he told his young family as he proudly showed them the new cloth. “It’s better even than broadcloth. They called it ray.”
The new cloth was a speciality of Salisbury, and it was, as he predicted, to prove hugely popular. Salisbury ray was heavy, with a single background colour, like the broadcloth, but woven across it were patterns of coloured stripes giving an effect like a bright tweed.
Unlike the broadcloth, the different coloured threads had to be dyed before they were woven.
“See, it’s dyed in the wool,” Edward explained.
It was a sturdy cloth, often delivered rough to the customer who then gave it its final shearing, and it was not long before the Shockleys and Wilsons were turning it out in huge quantities.
Above all, as he looked at the changing world about him, the far-sighted Edward was able to tell his children:
“Stick to trade, and even the king will have to do what we want.”
This was true. For now at last the power that Peter Shockley had only dreamed of when he witnessed Montfort’s parliament the century before was starting to become a reality. All through the century the lesser men – the knights and burgesses – had been making their presence felt at the parliaments King Edward III had had to call. They had successfully imposed their wishes on the king back in 1353 over the Staple. In the 1360s, the hated maltote tax on wool had been almost abolished. But most dramatic of all had been the so-called Good Parliament of 1376, the year before King Edward died. The magnates and bishops had met in the White Chamber of the king’s palace; but the gentry and burgesses – the Commons – had held their own meeting in the octagonal chapter house of Westminster Abbey, that had been the model for Salisbury’s own.
Now for the first time they had come to the bar of the magnates’ house and made their demands – and those demands had been remarkable: namely that they would not vote taxes until the king had dismissed several of his ministers, who had embezzled the funds they had been voted before, and that the king should also send away his mistress who was in league with them. Demands like this had been made before by unruly feudal barons, but never with such bluntness by mere burgesses and minor gentlemen. Not only this: the Commons got their way.
Underlying this political progress was also a financial need. For all his successes in the French wars – whose ransoms alone had brought huge sums into the king’s coffers, Edward III had a growing financial embarrassment. By the 1340s he had, some said unscrupulously, bankrupted the Italian Peruzzi and Bardi bankers by refusing to pay his debts to them, and when the monopolist wool merchants of the Staple lent him money after that, a combination of his spending and the Black Death bankrupted many of them too. Edward was forced to look to wider sources of income: the city merchants of London, the church, the customs duties; as for Parliament, the principle of no taxation without representation was becoming established anyway, but now it was not just a case of the merchants – as Peter Shockley once had done – hoping that the king would hear their advice. “He’ll listen to the Commons’ demands,” Wilson stated flatly.
The Commons generally favoured local magistrates, chosen by men like themselves, to sit in local courts and maintain the peace – and so the system of amateur local justices slowly began. The Commons disliked the foreigners appointed to English benefices. “Those popes at Avignon send men to Sarum you never see and who can’t speak English if they do turn up,” men like Wilson and Shockley agreed. But this time they not only agreed, their burgesses in the Commons forced the king to do something about it and appoint more Englishmen instead. One other event, seldom remarked in histories, but significant nonetheless, had taken