The political economy of the Anglo-Gascon wine trade c.1348-c.1453

The trade in wine between Gascony, part of the Plantagenet-held duchy of Aquitaine (1152–1453),and the kingdom of England, emerged and evolved with a political union between the two. Thisthesis examines the political economy of this relationship from the Black Death (1348–9) to theend of Plantagenet rule, in order to increase our understanding of how politics interacted with thelate medieval economy to influence the distribution of wealth and power within society, and viceversa.To this end this thesis asks first what English crown policies were towards the trade.Secondly it questions what the effects of these policies might have been, particularly for thosepolitical elites with vested interests in the trade in England and Gascony. Finally this thesis askshow the wine trade impacted the political relationship between England and Gascony, particularlywith regards questions of loyalty to the crown.This study finds that the development of the wine market’s structure over the final centuryof Plantagenet rule was almost entirely dictated by the reactive requirements of contemporarypolitics. The crown decided the terms of merchant participation in the trade, granted commercialprivileges, imposed price, exchange or export controls; and manipulated currency. Suchintervention primarily resulted from pressure applied by the various interested parties: Englishmerchants and ship-owners; as well as that of an ever-narrowing group of lords, ecclesiastics andburgesses, based in and around Bordeaux. New quantitative evidence, principally from Bordeaux’scustoms books and constables’ accounts, indicates that commercial and economic benefit largelyfollowed the pattern of political influence. In so doing English policy generated both greed andgrievance, and these fed partisan conflict and rebellion in the duchy. Thus, the wine trade isdemonstrated to be a key facet of the relationship between Gascony and England, and vital to ourunderstanding its history