From the thirteenth century onwards most towns financed their building operations by being granted the right to levy a toll on goods coming into the town for sale. This toll was known as murage. In the fifteenth century several new sources of financial aid were found, the most popular being the receipt of a grant from customs duties to meet the cost of a sea-port’s fortification. As a crude barometer of the effect of the Wars of the Roses on the outlook of municipal authorities we can make a count at ten-year intervals of the number of towns receiving grants of murage or other forms of financial aid for the same purpose. In 1460 there were nine; 1470, again nine; in 1480 only six, and by 1490 it was down to four. One hundred years earlier the same count shows seven in 1360, seventeen in 1370, fifteen in 1380 and fifteen in 1390. Two hundred years earlier it had been fourteen in 1260, seventeen in 1270, and ten in 1280 and 1290. The totals for these decades, though somewhat artificial, are very revealing: fifty-one in the thirteenth century, fifty-four in the fourteenth and only twenty-eight in the fifteenth. Measured in these terms it is clear that during the Wars of the Roses English townsmen were more relaxed than they had been in earlier centuries, though possibly fractionally more worried than they had been in the previous four decades (1420-50) when the total is twenty-six.
J. Gillingham, The wars of the Roses (1981), 12
