234 Chapter 13
III of England (reigned 1234–72), for example, the
royal budget hovered consistently in the range of
£12,500 per annum. His son, Edward I, managed to
spend more than £750,000 on war alone from 1297 to
1302, in part because he paid most of his fighting men
in cash. Such figures indicate why the military revolu-
tion of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries intensified
the process of state building begun by such monarchs
as Edward I and Philip the Fair. Faced with a massive in-
crease in the cost of war, sovereign states had to maxi-
mize their incomes from every conceivable source to
survive.
One way of achieving this was to expand the ruler’s
personal domain and to exploit it more efficiently. Do-
main revenues fell into two main categories. First, rents,
fees, and other income were taken from lands held di-
rectly by the prince. The size of the domain could be
increased by keeping property that reverted to the sov-
ereign through confiscation or in default of heirs. In the
feudal past such lands had often been given to other
subjects almost as soon as they were received. By 1450
most states were trying to reverse this practice, and
some were actively seeking new pretexts for confisca-
tion. Second, other domain revenues came from the ex-
ercise of traditional rights that might include anything
from the collection of customs duties to monopolies on
such vital commodities as salt. The yield from these
sources was regarded as the personal property of the
crown and, like profits from the land, could be in-
creased primarily through better administration.
Bureaucracies composed of “servants of the crown,”
paid in cash and serving at the pleasure of their ruler,
were a legacy of the thirteenth century. They grew
larger and more assertive with the passage of time. As
the careers of the bureaucrats depended upon produc-
ing new revenue, they sought not only to improve effi-
ciency but also to discover new rights for which few
precedents often existed. Their efforts brought the state
into conflict with privileges that had long been claimed
by towns, guilds, private individuals, and the church.
As such conflicts usually ended in the law courts, the
state found strengthening its control over the legal sys-
tem desirable. Manorial courts and other forms of pri-
vate jurisdiction were therefore attacked for their
independence as well as for the fines and court costs
they levied that might otherwise go to the state. From
the ruler’s point of view, establishing courts by his or
her own prerogative was far better, because a court in
which the judge was a servant of the crown might de-
liver more favorable verdicts and bring in money that
might otherwise be lost.
The expansion of prerogative courts, though con-
troversial, was eased by the growing acceptance of Ro-
man or civil law. The extensive development of canon
law by the church during the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies had sparked a revival of interest in Justinian’s code
among laymen. By the thirteenth century, Roman legal
principles had almost supplanted customary law in the
empire and in Castile, where they formed the basis of
the Siete Partidas,the great legal code adopted by Al-
fonso X (reigned 1252–84). In France and England, the
principles of civil law tended instead to modify com-
mon law practice, but Roman law gained ground
steadily through the fifteenth century. Everywhere,
rulers—and the prerogative courts they established—
preferred Roman procedures because the customary law,
with its reliance on precedent and the use of juries, pro-
vided a stronger basis for resisting the claims of sover-
eignty. But these same virtues ensured that court
proceedings would be long and therefore costly. People
often asked that their cases be transferred to prerogative
or civil law courts in the hope of a speedier judgment.
Though individuals might sometimes benefit from
the state’s activities, as a general rule, all attempts to in-
crease domain revenue carried a high political cost.
Only a strong, popular prince could overcome the en-
trenched resistance of powerful interests, which is why
the dynastic failures of the late fourteenth and early fif-
teenth centuries delayed the extension of sovereignty
even if they could not stop it completely.
The character of princes also affected their ability
to impose taxes, the second route by which the power
of the state might be increased. Taxes, unlike domain
revenues, could be raised only with the consent of rep-
resentative bodies. Late medieval assemblies generally
voted taxes for a specified period of time, thereby forc-
ing the princes to come back each year, hat in hand, to
hear the complaints of their subjects. If the prince was
popular, or if the taxes were needed to meet a genuine
crisis, the sums involved might vastly exceed those gen-
erated from domain revenues, yet parliamentary bodies
that held “the power of the purse” restricted the exer-
cise of sovereignty. Most rulers no doubt preferred to
“live of their own,” but this was rarely possible in time
of war.
The only solution to this dilemma was to convince
hard-headed representatives of the landholding and
merchant classes to grant at least some taxes on a per-
petual basis on the theory that threats to the kingdom’s
integrity would never end. This was not easy, even in
the interminable chaos of the Hundred Years’ War, but
the states that succeeded, notably France and Castile,