Introductory

The nature and the scope of government action in relation to economic affairs are, generally speaking, problems of medieval history which still await detailed investigation. An attempt to clear the ground for such an investigation within the territorial limits roughly defined by the modern frontiers of France and England demands, first, that some brief notice should be taken of the broad political and economic context within which government economic action took place in the two countries. These modern states were being created in medieval times, but the work of creation was long and uneven. The retreat of Rome and the barbarian invasions left Britain much more deeply fragmented and with a far smaller direct legacy from the Roman order than Gaul; yet England achieved a measure of unity at a time when the dispersal of authority across the Channel was reaching its extreme point. The work of unification of the West-Saxon, Anglo-Danish and Anglo-Norman kings, moreover, proved substantially enduring: thenceforward there was no authority comparable to that of the Crown. In France, on the other hand, the legacies of Rome and of barbarian kingship were dissipated in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the reconstitution of authority was in the first instance as much the work of great feudatories (the prime beneficiaries of the dispersal of power) as of the monarchy. For many generations, therefore, ‘regalian powers’ (including powers of economic direction) were shared in varying proportions between the Crown and the great provincial magnates. There were also substantial areas of French territory which were for long periods appendages to foreign kingdoms: Normandy and Gascony to England, Provence to the Empire or the Angevin kingdom of Naples. Medieval France comprehended a number of 'states' of which the kingdom was only one, each pursuing policies to a greater or lesser degree independent though not necessarily dissimilar.