Richard's Government contented itself with the perfectly useless prohibition of export of gold or silver (statute 5 Rich. II. cap. 1). Four years later, accordingly, the matter was again pressed upon the attention of Parliament, and even by the Chancellor of the realm, Michael de la Pole himself, in his opening speech. The English money, he said, was in greater estimation and of higher value in all other places than in England. It was therefore sought out and craftily withdrawn, and the chief or greatest remedy was to increase the value or price of the said money.
In spite of such recommendation as this the measure was not adopted, and Richard fell back on his previous expedients, crying down by proclamation the value of the Scotch coins, 1387, and of the gold coins of Flanders and Brabant, 1393, and ordaining by enactment that exporters of goods should bring in 1 oz. of gold for every sack of wool which they sold.
Such an ordinance as this last is of the commonest and most frequent occurrence in the enactments of fifteenth-century England, but always unworkable as warring against the most elementary principles of international trade.
On his accession, therefore, Henry IV. found himself heir to an accumulation of monetary evil, through the impolicy and want of courage of Richard. Page 55
He was obliged, at the request of the mayors and merchants of the staple of Calais, to abolish the last unworkable ordinance just referred to, and attempted at the same time to provide a positive remedy by reviving a proclamation against the currency of silver halfpennies brought from Venice, of which three or four only were equal to one sterling in value. In 1401 the Commons complained in Parliament that nobles of Flanders were so common in England that a man could not receive a sum of 100 shillings without taking three or four such nobles, each of them more feeble than the English noble by two-pence.