Tin Memoranda

Oxford’s Calculations

These are Oxford’s calculations which made sense to him but took little account of the tin industry’s exceptional constitution known as stannary law, constitutionally administered by stannary parliaments in stannary courts from the 12th century using a their own mercantile law, until they were abolished in 1836. Apart from alerting Her Majesty to areas where more and higher charges could be applied, the bid does not recognise that managing Her Majesty’s preemption involved serious work which Oxford was not qualified to perform. Burghley, to whom they are mostly addressed, gives him no encouragement.

The memoranda are fascinating in their way — you can see Oxford genuinely working at the arithmetic, getting some of it right, missing the structural complexity entirely, and never quite grasping that the tin industry’s quasi-parliamentary system meant Burghley couldn’t simply hand it to him even if he’d wanted to.

The Stannary Palace, Lostwithiel. The Cornish stannaries were suspended as a consequence of the Cornish rebellion of 1497. Henry VII restored the stannaries in return for a payment from the tin miners of the, at the time, enormous sum of £1,000, to support his war on Scotland. In addition to restoring the stannaries and pardoning the people who participated in the rebellion, Henry’s Charter of Pardon of 1508 provided that no new laws affecting miners should be enacted without the consent of twenty-four stannators, six being chosen from each of the four stannaries at Lostwithiel, Launceston, Truro and Helston. Anyone looking to make drastic changes in the way tin was mined and paid for would have found themselves trying to herd cats.

Title	Description
Letter 01	An undated memorandum comparing Oxford’s offer with that of Lord Buckhurst, who has fallen from £7,000 to £4,000 a year. Oxford itemises the risks Buckhurst cites to justify his reduced offer — variable mine yields, tinners refusing to work, the Pewterers’ competing claim, and the treaty rights of Genoese and Venetian merchants — and argues that bearing all these hazards himself he could still match Buckhurst at £8,000, a thousand more than Buckhurst’s best offer.
Letter 02	A memorandum of around 9 March 1595 setting out the Queen’s current tin revenue — customs on domestic consumption, customs on exports, and the existing imposition — totalling just over £3,283 a year. Oxford then proposes that by buying tin at the coinages for £25 per thousand weight and reselling at £35, the Queen could raise this to over £10,000 a year with a working capital of under £9,000. He closes by petitioning for a personal licence to export tin and lead, offering £500 a year rent and tighter enforcement of export weights.
Letter 03	A memorandum of 4 June 1595, written on the day Oxford was bled, setting out a point-by-point rebuttal of Carmarden’s arguments for accepting Buckhurst’s offer of £4,600 a year over Oxford’s imposition scheme. Oxford argues that Carmarden’s volume figures are self-servingly low, that foreign demand for tin is inelastic, and that an agency arrangement buying at £25 and selling at £40-50 per thousand could yield the Crown between £20,000 and £40,000 a year — figures that make Buckhurst’s offer look negligible.
Letter 04	A memorandum exposing the Pewterers’ suit as a scheme by a small group of wealthy merchants to extract the tin preemption from the Crown under the guise of poor relief. Oxford argues that the half-penny per pound they are seeking is worth at least £10,000 a year, that it will induce a further half-penny grant which will go entirely to the suit’s promoters, and that the cumulative effect of the three interlocking branches of the suit will permanently foreclose the Queen’s ability to take the preemption herself. He notes that the claimed benefit to five hundred poor workers will in practice accrue entirely to five or six wealthy masters of the Pewterers’ Company.
Letter 05	A short memorandum arguing that preemption is preferable to imposition as the means of raising the tin revenue, since it eliminates the merchants’ weight allowance fraud at source. Oxford calculates that taking the preemption alone, without any imposition, would yield the Queen £8,500 a year above existing customs, and warns that the Pewterers’ grant, if passed, would give away the preemption itself under the cover of a minor concession, permanently barring the Crown from recovering it.
Letter 06	A major memorandum addressed to the Queen, presenting Oxford’s fullest arithmetic case for the preemption. He calculates annual transported tin at 1,260,000 pounds weight and total production at 1,500,000 pounds weight, and works through the gain per block, per hundred blocks, and per thousand blocks at various buying and selling prices. He concludes the Crown could net £24,000 a year from the preemption alone, rising to £34,500 with a twopenny imposition on exports. He also explains the tin merchants’ practice of artificially inflating prices whenever the Queen appeared likely to act, and notes they dropped the price again as soon as the threat passed.
Letter 07	A detailed memorandum written around Easter, with marginal annotations added by Oxford after the main text. He calculates that the Queen’s working capital need be only £10,000-12,000 since there are four coinages a year and the stock turns over quarterly. He describes the tinners’ dependency on merchant credit — and the control that gives merchants over coinage prices — arguing the Crown could break this cycle by supplying working capital itself at five per cent, paid in tin. His marginal notes correct an arithmetic error in an earlier memorandum and observe that the merchants’ demand for £40,000 in capital itself proves the tin volume is larger than they have admitted.
Letter 08	A brief memorandum summarising the tin preemption case for the Queen, estimating the annual gain at £10,000 and warning that a conspiracy of private interests has divided the overall opportunity into three apparently separate suits — the Pewterers’ half-penny, a second half-penny imposition, and a doubled customs rate — in order to distribute among themselves the revenue that rightly belongs to the Crown. Oxford argues the Queen should recognise that what they have divided into parts is simply the whole preemption, and should reassemble it herself.
Letter 09	A single sheet comprising a tabulated list of tin prices from 1571 to 1592, with a marginal note in Oxford’s hand observing that over twenty-three years tin sold at an average of £23 per thousand weight, but that at three recent coinages merchants raised it to £31 10s — and will push it higher — solely to discourage the Queen from proceeding with the preemption. He identifies Alderman Taylor, father-in-law to the royal agent Middleton, as one of the chief engrossers behind the manipulation, and offers an alternative proposal: a personal farm of the imposition on tin and lead at £6,000 a year, with a surrender clause if the agency scheme proves more profitable.