A Scottish knight- Sir John Mercer- was imprisoned in England .sx His son , in revenge , was harrying English shipping as far away as Cherbourg , and doing it to some purpose .sx John Philpot , one of that new class of merchant financiers which the city of London was now producing , fitted , equipped and manned a fleet from his own resources , and captured the young Mercer in a brilliant Channel fight .sx It was naturally a highly popular victory with the Londoners , but it brought heavy censure from nobles who still believed that they had a monopoly of leadership .sx But , at last , Gaunt sailed .sx Opposing him was the French Admiral , Jean de Vienne- a great sailor and an able strategist .sx Obedient to the policy of his King , de Vienne avoided trouble at sea as cleverly as Du Guesclin avoided it on land .sx Gaunt was compelled to give up his search for an elusive foe , and , afraid to return home without something to show , he foolishly attempted to besiege the well-protected fortress of St Malo .sx This involved the dreary method of mining operations in which Gaunt , under the Black Prince , had shown considerable skill at the siege of Limoges .sx When all seemed to be going well , a sortie surprised the Earl of Arundel , who at that moment had charge of the mine ; the mine collapsed , and with it Gaunt's hopes of fame and glory .sx Gaunt was compelled to return to England a disappointed and now even despised failure .sx The 'ribald' Londoners , who cursed Gaunt as the murderer of Hawley , were also expressing their disappointment at the non-arrival of booty , and comparing the failure of a subsidized duke with the independent success of a London citizen .sx These dreary years of ineffective fighting provide obvious morals for those who are judges long after the event .sx It seems obvious that , though the longbows of yeomen could pierce the plate and mail of French knights , a brilliant battle was no substitute for a sound policy , and that , if archers had no target , campaigns became mere marauding route marches .sx It seems obvious that if an expedition to Brittany was compelled to attack via Calais , then the primary essential to the success of the French war was a navy in unquestioned command of the Channel .sx It seems obvious that divided forces were dissipating the advantages of a ring of bridge-heads which included Calais , Cherbourg , Brest , Bordeaux and Bayonne , and that there was no hope of final victory without a large-scale and concentrated invasion .sx But none of these deductions were drawn at the time , because large-scale war required money , and the citizens who had the money were not yet sufficiently at one with nobles and King to think their money well spent in financing a ruling class which despised them .sx The Commons were glad enough to enjoy the fruits of victory , they were not so eager to advance the needs of dynastic or baronial wars or even to provide the means for economic war , largely because it was not yet established that those who supplied means should also have control of ends .sx In this cruel process which was hammering out nations on the anvils of war , there was a constant stirring of those in authority to find some simple way out of the complicated financial impasse which always resulted , and in the story of the experiments and expedients to which the Exchequer resorted is the story of the prelude to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 .sx In appreciating this story , modern conceptions of governmental duties must be set aside .sx A modern government needs taxation not merely for defence and offence but for a very wide range of social services .sx A mediaeval oligarchy needed taxation in order to supplement the private wealth of the monarchy ( the royal income from the revenues of crown lands , the fees of feudalism and the fines of justice ) and to provide enough cash to meet royal expenses , and especially the expenses of waging war .sx Social service as a function of government was quite alien to mediaeval thought- its substitute was the mutual self-help of communities , whether those communities were monasteries , manors , townships , or wards and guilds of a city .sx A mediaeval tax was therefore in essence a forced payment whose return was the uncertain bounty of booty and the vague advantages of military glory ; it was therefore always granted grudgingly and coupled with the vain hope that , in the words of Parliament after Parliament , the King might 'live of his own resources and carry on his war' .sx When 'his' war did not bring victory and booty , a new group of Lords might oust the unsuccessful leaders , and the Commons , who usually supplied the hard cash , might be bold enough to demand the production of accounts , and even at times the impeachment of the unsuccessful .sx But the Commons were not the people , and even a full Parliament was not yet a true mirror of the nation .sx The people- Langland's 'folk' and Gaunt's 'knaves'- were villeins still tied to the feudal obligations of work or villeins who had bought their release , free labourers who worked for the highest bidders , free yeomen who had prospered enough to become successful farmers , the artisans , craftsmen , journeymen and small tradesmen of the towns , and the retainers and men-at-arms in the pay of landed Lords .sx None of these classes , except the yeomen , paid or expected to pay direct taxes .sx During the fourteenth century , the traditional methods of financing the Exchequer had become stabilized .sx When the King and his Council required additional funds , they were usually granted an export tax on the wool trade , collected by means of that 'staple' system which ensured that prices , quality and tax could be efficiently supervised and controlled , together with a subsidy or tax on all movable property .sx There were two other sources of public revenue- first , the Church , which wisely followed the lead of the Commons and in its own Convocations granted equivalent contributions , and second , the foreign merchants , with whom the King's officials had formerly made private bargains at 'colloquies of merchants' , and whose payments were now authorized by parliamentary sanction at a rate roughly fifty per cent in excess of the rate for native merchants .sx In addition to these revenues , the King had the financial benefits of his position at the head of the feudal system , as its chief landowner and the recipient of the fines of royal justice .sx It was , therefore , a complicated and not very satisfactory financial system in which the borders between private and public purse were as ill-defined as the borders between private and national war , and in which the comparatively simple obligations of the feudal pyramid were becoming hopelessly involved with the complex bonds of trade and industry .sx Furthermore , it had ceased to provide sufficient revenue for the needs of continental war .sx It was a problem which had been worrying the servants of the royal household for some time- including those political clergy whom Wyclif had denounced- and , in the last year of Edward =3's reign , they had devised an experiment to overcome their difficulties .sx They had invented the poll-tax .sx Every adult- defined as over fourteen years of age- except the beggar , was to pay a groat ( 4d .sx ) to the royal Exchequer .sx From the point of view of its inventors , it was a simple method of bringing the whole nation within the obligation of contributing to the glory and stability of the realm as a whole- or , as later centuries put it , 'broadening the basis of taxation' .sx Its obvious injustice was that it assessed all men equally- the poor paid exactly the same as the rich ; but , as hitherto the poor had never paid anything , and as the rich still supplied the traditional revenues as well , there was a case for a tax which took a little from everybody .sx On the other hand , there was the more relevant objection that not everybody had consented to the tax- the poor were not represented in Parliament .sx In the event , the first poll-tax of 1377 ( also called the 'tallage of groats' ) while naturally rousing much resentment , produced but meagre returns- there was as yet no trained bureaucracy to make tax collecting either fair or productive .sx Two years later , the inventors of the first poll-tax tried again .sx In a Great Council held in February 1379 , the Lords had adopted the significant course of raising loans by compulsion on a large scale from many of the landowners , monasteries and towns- so desperate were the financial needs of the Exchequer .sx It was a drastic method of which much more was to be heard in later years , and it was followed by presenting the Parliament called to Westminster at Easter with the necessity of repaying the loans .sx The anger of the Commons was only appeased by the voluntary production of accounts which proved the desperate need for funds , and as a result the second poll-tax was agreed .sx 'Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur' was an accepted legal maxim , but it was not yet carried to its logical conclusion- the people were still to be taxed by the Commons .sx But this time there was a very interesting attempt to apply a sliding scale to the payments demanded .sx The definition of an adult was altered to read 'over sixteen' , and , where the poorest were to pay a groat , the Duke of Lancaster and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York were to pay ten marks , and between these two extremes a graduated scale of payments was fixed for the different classes of laymen and clerics .sx Again the resentment was widespread and the results disappointing- a tax estimated to yield +50,000 in fact raised only +27,000 .sx In the following year , 1380 , the last and most notorious third poll-tax was agreed by a Parliament which met at Northampton .sx There were dark reasons for a meeting so far away from the capital in a town with poor communications and not over supplied with hostelries and lodgings .sx London was again in turmoil ; but this time over a question of trade rivalry .sx A rich merchant from Genoa had been murdered , and John de Kyrkby , a Londoner , was one of those charged with the crime .sx It is clear from the chronicles that this was a sordid quarrel between monopolists and interlopers .sx The city merchants were jealous of foreign merchants who could tempt court and baronage with rarer luxuries than those within the scope of English traders , and whose prices could not be controlled in the interests of the city rings .sx The chronicler Walsingham remarks that the Genoese's chief crime was that he proposed to sell pepper at a mere 4d .sx the pound !sx At the same time , the news of the war was disheartening- a Breton expedition led by the Earl of Buckingham was not going well , and an expedition of Gaunt to Scotland was as unpopular as Gaunt himself .sx At Northampton , the Commons might be more amenable- they could be faced with the realities of the financial situation , and urged to provide the means for a solution .sx A sum of +160,000 was demanded- a staggering figure to mediaeval eyes .sx It was determined that +100,000 was a fairer target , and the Parliament agreed to find two-thirds of this sum providing the clergy supplied the remainder .sx The method of assessment to which the Commons agreed was that of the first poll-tax .sx The manifest injustice of this method had been to a certain degree corrected by the sliding scale of the second poll-tax , but this lesson was ignored , and the injustice trebled in weight by a flat-rate tax at treble the rate- every adult had to pay three groats , but this time an adult was re-defined as anyone over fifteen .sx Trebling the rate was arrived at by a simple arithmetic which argued that , as the first poll-tax had supplied +22,000 , a tax of three times the rate would produce +66,000 .sx The only concession made in view of the objections to the first two poll-taxes was the suggestion that the rich should help the poor- but this was only a pious hope because no machinery was provided for carrying it into effect , and a subordinate clause went far to nullify what small effects it had- no man and wife together were to pay more than twenty shillings , a restriction which applied to the generous rich as well as to the mean .sx