How Did the War Affect Trade? | The Hundred Years' War

The Hundred Years’ War reshaped the commercial geography of northern Europe. Wool, wine, and cloth — the three trade flows that had anchored the Anglo-Flemish and Anglo-Gascon economy since the twelfth century — were repeatedly disrupted and rerouted. The Italian banking houses that had financed Edward III’s early campaigns went bankrupt in 1343–1346. The Hanseatic League quietly absorbed trade that the war had displaced from the English and French. By 1453 the centre of gravity of European commerce had shifted away from the south and toward the Atlantic seaboard. M. M. Postan’s The Medieval Economy and Society (1972) and the essays collected in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe remain the standard economic treatments; Anne Curry’s work on the wool trade in particular has shown how completely the war effort depended on the customs of the staple.

The English wool trade

The English economy of the early fourteenth century was structurally dependent on the export of raw wool, most of it from the great Cistercian and lay estates of the north and the midlands, and most of it destined for the cloth towns of Flanders — Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres. By the 1330s wool exports were running at perhaps 30,000–40,000 sacks a year, and the royal customs on that wool provided the English crown with the principal source of liquid revenue. The Statute of the Staple of 1353 formalised the system: all English wool for export had to pass through designated staple ports, initially in England and, after 1363, at Calais.

The war was ruinous for this trade in the short term. The English Channel became a war zone, and English shipping was subject to attack by French and Genoese privateers based in La Rochelle, Brest, and the Breton ports. The Franco-Castilian fleet destroyed a major English wool convoy at the Battle of La Rochelle in 1372. The collapse of the Bardi and Peruzzi in 1343–1346, after Edward III defaulted on his Italian loans, dried up the credit on which the great wool-merchant companies of Florence depended. The Flemish cloth towns, deprived of consistent English wool supplies, suffered recurrent unemployment and unrest; the famous revolts of Bruges and Ghent in the 1370s and 1380s were partly a product of the disruption.

The French wine trade

The duchy of Aquitaine — the Bordelais, the Saintonge, the Périgord — was the principal wine-producing region of medieval Europe, and Bordeaux was its export port. The English kings had held the duchy since the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. The Bordeaux wine trade, the claret that became a fixture of the English aristocracy, was the second pillar of the English continental economy. The English customs of the 1340s and 1350s raised the duchy to a position of unusual prosperity. The Black Prince’s harsh fiscal regime as Prince of Aquitaine, 1362–1372, helped to alienate the local nobility, and Charles V’s reconquest of the duchy in the 1370s, accompanied by French protectionist measures against English shipping, broke the trade.

The war’s most important wine consequence, however, was the geographic one. The interruption of the Bordeaux–English trade allowed Iberian, Italian, and eventually Atlantic island wines to enter the English market for the first time on a significant scale. By 1450 the great London vintner companies were as likely to be selling Spanish and Portuguese wine as Gascon. The shift in European taste, away from Bordeaux and toward the Iberian peninsula, was a direct consequence of the war.

The Flemish cloth towns

Flanders was the great textile centre of northern Europe. The English wool that fed its looms, and the English market that bought its finished cloth, made the count of Flanders the most powerful of the French vassals and gave the cloth towns a structural interest in the English alliance. The war forced the Flemish into a permanent double game: their feudal lord was the French king, their economic lord was the English. The most striking single consequence of the war for Flanders was the French annexation of the duchy under Philip the Bold of Burgundy in 1384–1385, which brought the Flemish economy into closer political alignment with France but did not break its commercial dependence on English wool. The cloth industry of Ghent and Bruges contracted in the 1370s and recovered only slowly, and on a permanently reduced scale, into the fifteenth century.

The Italian banking collapse

The Italian banking houses — the Bardi, the Peruzzi, the Acciaioli — financed much of Edward III’s early war effort. The king owed the Bardi alone perhaps 900,000 gold florins, an enormous sum, and the failure of the wool tax and the king’s standing credit after 1340 forced both the Bardi and the Peruzzi into bankruptcy in 1343 and 1346 respectively. The collapse of the two largest banking houses in Europe is one of the underappreciated structural reasons the Edwardian phase ended where it did: Edward, deprived of credit, could not finance the kind of long campaign that would have made the Treaty of Brétigny (1360) enforceable. The financial centre of European capitalism, which had been in Florence, began to migrate to Genoa, to Augsburg, and to the Hanseatic north.

The Hanseatic League

The Hanseatic League, the confederation of north German cities that dominated Baltic and North Sea commerce, expanded rapidly during the Hundred Years’ War. The English and French, preoccupied with each other, ceded commercial ground in the Baltic and the North Sea without contest. Hanseatic merchants acquired commercial privileges in England (confirmed in the Charter of 1409 and again in 1437), challenged the Scandinavian and Flemish competitors, and absorbed the wool-export trade that had been the Bardi’s and Peruzzi’s preserve. By 1450 the League was the principal commercial broker of northern Europe, a position it would hold for another century.

The long-term shift

The aggregate effect of the war, by 1453, was a long-term shift in the centre of gravity of European commerce from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic seaboard. The Italian city-states, which had been the financial pivot of the thirteenth century, were in relative decline; the French and English economies, both war-exhausted, were ceding ground to the Iberian kingdoms and the Hanseatic north. The trade routes of the late fifteenth century — the Portuguese down the African coast, the Spanish across the Atlantic, the Hanseatic across the Baltic — were already taking shape in the 1440s, and the Hundred Years’ War had helped to clear the political ground on which they were laid.

Significance

The economic history of the war is too often treated as a footnote to its political and military history. The truth is the other way round. The war could not have been fought for as long as it was, or on the scale on which it was fought, without the fiscal and commercial machinery that the English and French monarchies had built up in the thirteenth century. The wool customs, the taille, the salt tax, the parliamentary grants, the décime, the Italian credit — these were the material foundations of the conflict. When the financial machinery failed, as it did for the English in the 1370s and the 1440s, the war effort collapsed with it. The trade consequences were the lasting ones.