Editing John, King of England (section)

===Economy===
{{Main|Economy of England in the Middle Ages}}
[[File:Penny john.jpg|thumb|alt=A photograph of the front and back of a silver penny, the design dominated by a triangle in the centre of each coin. One side shows King John's head.|A silver King John [[penny]], amongst the first struck in [[Dublin]]]]

One of John's principal challenges was acquiring the large sums of money needed for his proposed campaigns to reclaim Normandy.<ref>Turner, p. 79.</ref> The Angevin kings had three main sources of income available to them, namely revenue from their personal lands, or ''[[demesne]]''; money raised through their rights as a feudal lord; and revenue from taxation. Revenue from the royal demesne was inflexible and had been diminishing slowly since the [[Norman Conquest]]. Matters were not helped by Richard's sale of many royal properties in 1189, and taxation played a much smaller role in royal income than in later centuries. English kings had widespread feudal rights which could be used to generate income, including the [[scutage]] system, in which feudal military service was avoided by a cash payment to the King. He derived income from fines, court fees and the sale of [[charter]]s and other privileges.<ref>Lawler and Lawler, p. 6.</ref> John intensified his efforts to maximise all possible sources of income, to the extent that he has been described as "avaricious, miserly, extortionate and moneyminded".<ref>McLynn, p. 288.</ref> He also used revenue generation as a way of exerting political control over the barons: debts owed to the crown by the King's favoured supporters might be forgiven; collection of those owed by enemies was more stringently enforced.

[[File:John penny.jpg|left|thumb|alt=A photograph of the "heads" side of a silver coin|A silver King John penny]]
The result was a sequence of innovative but unpopular financial measures.{{Refn|The degree to which John was a genuine innovator in financial matters, as opposed to simply embracing expediency, has been contested. Frank Barlow, for example, argues that he was exercising a policy of expediency rather than genuine reform.<ref>Barlow, p. 331.</ref>|group=nb}} John levied scutage payments eleven times in his seventeen years as king, as compared to eleven times in total during the reign of the preceding three monarchs.<ref name="TurnerP87">Turner, p. 87.</ref> In many cases these were levied in the absence of any actual military campaign, which ran counter to the original idea that scutage was an alternative to actual military service.<ref name=TurnerP87/> John maximised his right to demand relief payments when estates and castles were inherited, sometimes charging enormous sums, beyond barons' abilities to pay.<ref name=TurnerP87/> Building on the successful sale of sheriff appointments in 1194, the King initiated a new round of appointments, with the new incumbents making back their investment through increased fines and penalties, particularly in the forests.<ref name="CarpenterP272">Carpenter (2004), p. 272.</ref> Another innovation of Richard's, increased charges levied on widows who wished to remain single, was expanded under John.<ref name=CarpenterP272/> John continued to sell charters for new towns, including the planned town of [[Liverpool]], and charters were sold for markets across the kingdom and in [[Gascony]].<ref>Hodgett, p. 57; Johnson, p. 142.</ref>{{Refn|One consequence of this was an expansion of the wine trade with the Continent. In 1203, the citizens and merchants of [[Bordeaux]] were exempted from the [[Grande Coutume]], which was the principal tax on their exports. In exchange, the regions of Bordeaux, [[Bayonne]] and [[Dax, Landes|Dax]] pledged support against the French Crown. The unblocked ports gave Gascon merchants open access to the English wine market for the first time. The following year, John granted the same exemptions to [[La Rochelle]] and [[Poitou]].<ref>Johnson, p. 142.</ref>|group=nb}} The King introduced new taxes and extended existing ones. The Jews, who held a [[Economy of England in the Middle Ages#Jewish contribution to the English economy|vulnerable position]] in medieval England, protected only by the King, were subject to huge taxes; £44,000 was extracted from the community by the [[tallage]] of 1210; much of it was passed on to the Christian debtors of Jewish moneylenders.<ref name=CarpenterP272/>{{Refn|Medieval financial figures have no easy contemporary equivalent, due to the different role of money in the economy.|group=nb}} John created a new tax on income and movable goods in 1207—effectively a version of a modern income tax—that produced £60,000; he created a new set of import and export duties payable directly to the Crown.<ref>Turner, p. 95.</ref> He found that these measures enabled him to raise further resources through the confiscation of the lands of barons who could not pay or refused to pay.<ref>Turner, p. 148.</ref>

At the start of John's reign there was a [[Economy of England in the Middle Ages#Development of estate management|sudden change in prices]], as bad harvests and high demand for food resulted in much higher prices for grain and animals. This inflationary pressure was to continue for the rest of the 13th century and had long-term economic consequences for England.<ref>Danziger and Gillingham, p. 44.</ref> The resulting social pressures were complicated by bursts of [[deflation]] that resulted from John's military campaigns.<ref>Bolton pp. 32–33.</ref> It was usual at the time for the King to collect taxes in silver, which was then re-minted into new coins; these coins would then be put in barrels and sent to royal castles around the country, to be used to hire mercenaries or to meet other costs.<ref>Stenton, p. 163.</ref> At those times when John was preparing for campaigns in Normandy, for example, huge quantities of silver had to be withdrawn from the economy and stored for months, which unintentionally resulted in periods during which silver coins were simply hard to come by, commercial credit difficult to acquire and deflationary pressure placed on the economy. The result was political unrest across the country.<ref>Bolton, p. 40.</ref> John attempted to address some of the problems with the English currency in 1204 and 1205 by carrying out a radical overhaul of the coinage, improving its quality and consistency.<ref>Barlow, p. 329.</ref>