How do we know when the monarchies became “extensive”? In other words, when and how did kings start involving themselves in local affairs and extend their practical authority to the level of shire and village? The case of England is peculiar, because its system of royal courts developed exceptionally early. This was in part because of England's early exposure to sustained geopolitical competition, especially with the kingdom of France; as early as the 1100s, England had developed specialized organs of royal administration, finance, and justice (Chancery, Exchequer, and central law courts). But can we reconstruct the tangible consequences and chronology of this change?

One method is to discover the output of royal documents. We can get a general sense of how active the royal government was by counting up the amount of sealing wax the Royal Chancery used. This was the office that conducted the king's correpondence; every royal letter bore the king's seal; the more letters the Chancery sent, the more wax it needed to make the seals. (This is actually a more precise way of estimating Chancery traffic, since not all letters were dated. These data also have the advantage that they were compiled at the time by a royal official). During the thirteenth century, the amount of wax consumed for Chancery writs increases in geometrical progression, doubling every two or three decades. In the 1220s, the Chancery only consumed about thre and a half pounds of wax every week; by the 1260s, it was using up over 30 pounds of wax every week, a near ten-fold increase in fifty years.

Another way to gauge the extension of royal power is to look at the amount of money the royal government was able to collect. In the case of England, again, we have an unusually good and complete source of information on incomes, the records of the royal Exchequer, from the year 1155 on. The following chart tracks royal incomes from the reign of Henry II (1154-1189) through the first half of the reign of Henry VI (1422-1461, 1470-1471). The light green line shows the total volume of income in current account in thousands of Pounds, that is, without adjusting for inflation; the dark green line shows actual incomes as adjusted for inflation, which is indicated by the red line (a price index to in which 1271 = 100). In current money, royal incomes rose throughout the whole period, with the first big increase coming in the reign of King John (1199-1216), he of the Magna Carta (1215). In both current and “inflation-proof” figures, though, the real revolutionaries of royal finances were kings Edward I (1272-1307), Edward II (1307-1327), and Edward III (1327-1377); between them, these three quadrupled royal incomes, even in “inflation-proof” figures.

Taxation, with the help of Parliament, made all the difference: whereas 60% of Henry II's incomes came from rent on royal estates, these revenues only made up 18% of royal incomes under Edward III. By the time of his Edward III's reign, most royal incomes were “public” and came from customs (46%), taxed levied against the lay population (17%), and taxes granted by the English church (18%). The engine of this change was war, specifically the Hundred Years' War (1336-1453): Parliament always voted new taxes for military purposes, and according to one estimate, the English crown raised a grand total 8.25 million pounds in direct and indirect taxes to wage its struggle with France. So we see two trends: “the escalation of total revenues and the growing role of taxation, both linked to the costs of war” (Mann, 428).

Over the very long term, the trend is clear: despite a drop during the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485), royal incomes continue to climb rise throughout the early modern centuries, and that despite the “price revolution” of the sixteenth century -- until that time, the worst period of inflation in European history.

What, finally, did they spend it all on? We'll come back to this question time and again throughout the term. For the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the answer is pretty unambiguous: most expenditures were military in nature. Here are some data from early in the reign of King Henry VIII: