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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
In the 1430s the continuing war with France saw England put under intense financial pressure, whether in the form of national taxation or the loans demanded of individuals. A major loan had been sought for the campaign of 1430 and in October that year the royal council recommended yet more borrowing, with a commission launched in the following March. Another commission, to treat for a ‘considerable loan’, was named on 26 February 1434, but on 5 May the royal council heard that the outcome had been disappointing. The surety, the royal jewels, was not considered good enough: ‘men eschew to lene therupon as may also clerely appere by the report of your forseide commissioners’. The next nationwide commission for loans was not to be named until March 1439, and in the interim the government fell back on targeted requests for specified sums. There was a flurry of such activity in May 1435, after the announcement of the proposed Congress of Arras, due to convene on 1 July. On 13 May the council pressed the feoffees of the duchy of Lancaster for a loan, and on 28 May letters went out to towns seeking help with the costs not just of the embassy itself but of ‘a grete armee to holde the felde’. This was evidently the medieval equivalent of a bulk mailing. One of the letters, sent to Coventry, was enrolled in the city's Leet Book and has been in print since 1907. Another copy survives in the Beverley archives and the wording, apart from the sum requested (Beverley was asked for 200 marks, Coventry for 500), is virtually identical. More revealing, no attempt seems to have been made to personalise the address clause beyond changing the name of the town. The twelve governors (or keepers) who ruled Beverley thus found themselves addressed as the mayor and bailiffs, a solecism that probably did not impress them.
Coventry resolved to give £100 and the surviving list of contributors confirms that this was raised and duly despatched. It seems probable that this was the £100 granted by ‘the mayor and men’ of Coventry, which appears in letters patent of 9 July 1435 promising named lenders repayment from the revenues to be received in the year beginning Martinmas (11 November) 1435.
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