[Sidenote:  Indirect Taxation]

But in addition to these two forms of direct taxation indirect taxation also was coming more and more to the front.  The right of the king to grant licences to bring goods into or to trade within the realm, a right springing from the need for his protection felt by the strangers who came there for purposes of traffic, laid the foundation of our taxes on imports.  Those on exports were only a part of the general system of taxing personal property which we have already noticed.  How tempting this source of revenue was proving we see from a provision of the Great Charter which forbids the levy of more than the ancient customs on merchants entering or leaving the realm.  Commerce was in fact growing with the growing wealth of the people.  The crowd of civil and ecclesiastical buildings which date from this period shows the prosperity of the country.  Christian architecture reached its highest beauty in the opening of Edward’s reign; a reign marked by the completion of the abbey church of Westminster and of the cathedral church at Salisbury.  An English noble was proud to be styled “an incomparable builder,” while some traces of the art which was rising into life across the Alps flowed in, it may be, with the Italian ecclesiastics whom the Papacy forced on the English Church.  The shrine of the Confessor at Westminster, the mosaic pavement beside the altar of the abbey, the paintings on the walls of its chapterhouse remind us of the schools which were springing up under Giotto and the Pisans.  But the wealth which this art progress shows drew trade to English shores.  England was as yet simply an agricultural country.  Gascony sent her wines; her linens were furnished by the looms of Ghent and Liege; Genoese vessels brought to her fairs the silks, the velvets, the glass of Italy.  In the barks of the Hanse merchants came fur and amber from the Baltic, herrings, pitch, timber, and naval stores from the countries of the north.  Spain sent us iron and war-horses.  Milan sent armour.  The great Venetian merchant-galleys touched the southern coasts and left in our ports the dates of Egypt, the figs and currants of Greece, the silk of Sicily, the sugar of Cyprus and Crete, the spices of the Eastern seas.  Capital too came from abroad.  The bankers of Florence and Lucca were busy with loans to the court or vast contracts with the wool-growers.  The bankers of Cahors had already dealt a death-blow to the usury of the Jew.  Against all this England had few exports to set.  The lead supplied by the mines of Derbyshire, the salt of the Worcestershire springs, the iron of the Weald, were almost wholly consumed at home.  The one metal export of any worth was that of tin from the tin-mines of Cornwall.  But the production of wool was fast becoming a main element of the nation’s wealth.  Flanders, the great manufacturing country of the time, lay fronting our eastern coast; and with this market close at hand the pastures of England found more and more profit