INTRODUCTORY. 15 



for artisans, inclusive of provisions. But the pay and main- 

 tenance by which the English archers recovered their wonted 

 ascendancy over the French enemy was the least part of the 

 prospect put before the professional soldier. Many a man who 

 enlisted in the king's army as a soldier of fortune had risen 

 to knighthood and even to nobility. The king's service was 

 open to all, serf and free labourer, villain and yeoman. It is 

 true that by this time the degrading conditions of serfdom had 

 become obsolete, but there is no period in English history in 

 which the pride of birth was so general and so arrogant as in 

 the fifteenth century. But a successful soldier could carve out 

 his fortunes, and earn any rank. Not a few of the Plantagenet 

 nobles won their nobility in the long wars of the Edwards and 

 the Henries. An opulent merchant might achieve knighthood, 

 and, even as the Poles, rise to the aristocracy, but warfare was 

 the readiest road to wealth and rank. The Neviles had been 

 soldiers of fortune in the fourteenth century, the Talbots in the 

 fifteenth. The wealth of Cromwell and Fastolfe was enormous. 

 The value set on the former's estate after his decease was 

 ^"66,334. Besides, war was the natural profession of the 

 younger son, who was now becoming a serious domestic diffi- 

 culty, owing to the growing custom of entailing estates, and 

 who was to be provided for, if possible, in the only public 

 services of the time, the Church and the king's army. 



It must be remembered that with the exception of a few, and 

 those light export and import duties, which it would seem were 

 hardly worth the cost of collection \ the taxation of the people 

 was direct. It is true that Parliament frequently granted a tax 

 on exported wool, and this the more readily because they 

 believed that if the exportation of wool were discouraged, the 

 local manufacture of cloth would be secured or at least pro- 

 tected. But there were persons in Parliament who desired, as 

 might be expected in the country whose agriculture was for 

 the time particularly successful, that the foreign trade should be 



1 The need for protecting the fair dealer was probably the reason which made 

 Parliament so willing and even urgent to keep the staple of all exports at Calais. 



