reason for instructing everyone from rich merchants to ordinary
workers to reduce their prices when he revalued the coinage, and not to
continue to sell at the old rates in ‘weak money’.^184 The growth of an
urban economy enormously widened the preoccupations of govern-
ment. From Philip IV’s time royal orders constantly adjusted the
currency, debasing the coinage in order to bring the crown a quick
return or revaluing it in accordance with ideas of national interest and
economic stability.^185 In England one of the Ordinances imposed on
Edward II in 1311 required the king to consult the baronage in parlia-
ment every time he wished to change the money, since the whole
populace was gravely affected in many ways. There were statutes
against the corruption of English money by counterfeit or inferior coin
from abroad: innkeepers at ports of passage must be sworn to search
their customers for illegal money coming in and for gold and silver plate
being illegally exported. Because the people of Scotland were believed to
draw good silver money out of the realm and return inferior coin, the
Scottish groat with a face value of four pence should be current at only
threepence in England.^186
By the 1350s the pressures of war and plague were binding together
more tightly various strands of economic legislation produced by a
longer-term commercial and governmental revolution. And the greater
towns housed not only merchants, craftsmen, and shopkeepers, but
people of many other ‘estates’: schoolmen, notaries, moneyers, and the
businessmen of the king and the magnates, both lay and ecclesiastical,
were based in them. Legislation forged a direct relationship between
government and these urban specialists as individuals. What the
merchants generally wanted were favourable trading conditions and
expeditious legal procedures for registering and recovering debts
wherever their business took them.^187 English merchants lobbied for
better provision of staple ports through which the wool trade was
required to pass; and asked that the companies of foreign traders which
kings were anxious to encourage should be held collectively responsible
for the debts of their members just as the home merchants were to
aliens, for the latter were inclined to decamp without paying.^188
228 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^184) Ordonnances des Roys de France, i. 324–5, 343, 479, 532, 548, 871–3, ii. 49, 58,
490–1.
(^185) Lot and Fawtier, Institutions royales, 209–16; Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, 235,
248, 280, 335–6, 365, 392, 395–6, 416; B. Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval
Europe, tr. J. Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 92–6, 179; P. Spufford, Money and its Use in
Medieval Europe(Cambridge UP, 1988), 98, 127–8, 162, 204–5, 234, 236, 238, 289–318,
340, 390.
(^186) RPi. 285 (no. 30), 444a (Le tierz), ii. 62b (no. 14), 138, 143, 253a (no. 38), 260a (nos.
32–3); SRi. 131–5, 200, 204–5, 219–20, 273–4, 299, 301, 320, 322–3, 395.
(^187) Ordonnances des Rois de France, ii. 84–8, 202–7, 377, 489–91, 563–6; iv. 171–5.
(^188) RPii. 143, 240, 253a, 260a, 287a (no. 22), 332; iv. 421–38; SRi. 53–4, 98–100, 280–1.