a Scottish knight - Sir John Mercer - was imprisoned in England . his son , in revenge , was harrying English shipping as far away as Cherbourg , and doing it to some purpose . 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 . 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 . but , at last , Gaunt sailed . opposing him was the French Admiral , Jean de Vienne - a great sailor and an able strategist . obedient to the policy of his King , de Vienne avoided trouble at sea as cleverly as Du Guesclin avoided it on land . 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 . this involved the dreary method of mining operations in which Gaunt , under the black Prince , had shown considerable skill at the siege of Limoges . 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 &apos;s hopes of fame and glory . Gaunt was compelled to return to England a disappointed and now even despised failure . 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 . these dreary years of ineffective fighting provide obvious morals for those who are judges long after the event . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 &apos; revolt of 1381 . in appreciating this story , modern conceptions of governmental duties must be set aside . a modern government needs taxation not merely for defence and offence but for a very wide range of social services . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 . but the Commons were not the people , and even a full parliament was not yet a true mirror of the nation . the people - Langland &apos;s folk and Gaunt &apos;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 . none of these classes , except the yeomen , paid or expected to pay direct taxes . during the fourteenth century , the traditional methods of financing the exchequer had become stabilized . 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 . 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 &apos;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 . 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 . 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 . furthermore , it had ceased to provide sufficient revenue for the needs of continental war . 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&apos;s reign , they had devised an experiment to overcome their difficulties . they had invented the poll-tax . every adult - defined as over fourteen years of age - except the beggar , was to pay a groat ( 4 d ) to the royal exchequer . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 . two years later , the inventors of the first poll-tax tried again . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 . but this time there was a very interesting attempt to apply a sliding scale to the payments demanded . 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 . again the resentment was widespread and the results disappointing - a tax estimated to yield &amp;pound;50,000 in fact raised only &amp;pound;27,000 . in the following year , 1380 , the last and most notorious third poll-tax was agreed by a parliament which met at Northampton . 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 . London was again in turmoil ; but this time over a question of trade rivalry . a rich merchant from Genoa had been murdered , and John de Kyrkby , a Londoner , was one of those charged with the crime . it is clear from the chronicles that this was a sordid quarrel between monopolists and interlopers . 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 . the chronicler Walsingham remarks that the Genoese &apos;s chief crime was that he proposed to sell pepper at a mere 4 d the pound ! 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 . 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 . a sum of &amp;pound;160,000 was demanded - a staggering figure to mediaeval eyes . it was determined that &amp;pound;100,000 was a fairer target , and the parliament agreed to find two-thirds of this sum providing the clergy supplied the remainder . the method of assessment to which the Commons agreed was that of the first poll-tax . 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 . trebling the rate was arrived at by a simple arithmetic which argued that , as the first poll-tax had supplied &amp;pound;22,000 , a tax of three times the rate would produce &amp;pound;66,000 . 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 . 