It was indeed hard to gather money at the moment, for in 1460 the Earl of Wiltshire, Treasurer of Henry the Sixth, making an excuse to get to Southampton under pretence of intercepting Warwick, found five great carracks of Genoa lying in the port, seized them all with all their wealth, filled them with his soldiers, provided them with victuals from the town without payment, and fled to Flanders with his booty.[565] Then came the new rulers, and Edward the Fourth ordered Southampton to pay the treasurer of his household £133 6_s._ 8_d._, and to the Earl of Warwick as constable of Dover castle an annuity of £154 out of the same ferm.[566] What with one trouble and another Southampton fell into arrears with its rent, and a burgess (the very Richard Gryme who had been mayor a year before and had made the advance to Lord Exeter) was thrown into the Fleet in London till it should be paid; two of his fellow-townsmen were sent riding to Westminster “to labour for his welfare,” and £20 was at last handed over before he was set free.[567] The same year the sheriff, also summoned before the Exchequer, rode to London at the town’s cost; and he only got off by having his debt paid by the Recorder, who was afterwards repaid by the town.[568] There was further trouble in 1469-70 when the Kingmaker, as the restored Constable of Dover under Henry the Sixth, demanded his pension from the ferm, and the mayor travelled to London “to reckon with the Earl of Warwick,” and spent twelve days there, “for the which twelve days the cost cometh to 50_s._ 6_d._”[569] Then a few months later came the other constable of the victorious Edward the Fourth, and the town had to pay him too and bear the double charge that year.[570]
All these financial difficulties were made yet more acute by the character of the municipal wealth. Of the £393 which made up the revenue of the town in 1428,[571] £302 3_s._ 4_d._ came from tolls; and the foreign commerce on which such sums were levied had to be maintained amid wars with France, quarrels with Brittany, attacks of Hanseatic and Breton and Genoese and Venetian traders always on the watch to seize ships on any plea of wrong done to their merchants, or in defiance of pirates that swarmed in the Channel, and of smugglers that haunted the coast. Again and again the people make complaint that the foreign merchants that used to bring their goods no longer came, and for lack of tolls to pay the ferm the burgesses had been forced to borrow £400 for their rent, and that many citizens had been driven from the town, and others were going unless something could be done to lighten their burdens.[572]