novelraw Chapter 293: Wealth
Chapter 293: Wealth
For the next two months, Salomon and his entourage chose to linger in Londinium. Compared to the days spent living in constant fear in the mountains of Breizh, they were far more satisfied with their current situation.
With the heavy workload at the end of the year, Wigg ignored this group of freeloading idlers, shifting his focus to the annual assessments of the directly governed counties.
Overall, the situation this year was quite favorable. It even exceeded their expectations from the beginning of the year, giving Wigg a faint sense of surrealism.
Thirty thousand pounds. This was the royal family's total annual income, and it was achieved with the agricultural tax set at a mere fifteen percent. With no increases in other tax rates either, their financial situation was far better than the royal court under Ragnar.
During the cabinet meeting, the attendees looked at the reports in their hands and fell into a similar silence—especially Gorm and Om, the two veteran ministers from the previous administration.
In the past, Aslaug and Paffis had devised countless bizarre schemes to amass wealth, yet they had only managed to scrape together a little over ten thousand pounds. Furthermore, their actions had incited widespread resentment across the realm, severely undermining royal authority. When it came to administration and generating revenue, Wigg was vastly superior to them.
'Allowing him to resign as Prime Minister was the gravest mistake Ragnar made in his entire life,' Gorm thought silently to himself.
He flipped through the subsequent pages and discovered that the fastest-growing sector in terms of profit was the textile industry, completely crushing other industries like iron smelting, brewing, shipbuilding, and papermaking.
Looking back, the King's painstaking efforts to develop the textile industry—even going so far as to wage war against Flandre—proved to be an absolutely brilliant decision.
On the expenditure side, total annual spending amounted to twenty-three thousand pounds, with military expenses approaching eight thousand. The standing army had been expanded to four infantry regiments, one mountain infantry battalion, one ranger battalion, and one field ambulance battalion.The naval fleet now boasted over fifty vessels, including thirty-two two-masted warships and two newly commissioned three-masted warships. The remaining vessels primarily consisted of transport ships, training vessels, and the River Thames defense fleet.
Next was the expenditure on immigration. There were forty-six thousand new immigrants this year, forty thousand of whom hailed from Denmark, essentially emptying the central and southern regions of the country.
Following several previous wars, last year's refugee wave, and this year's mass migration, the population of the Kingdom of Denmark had plummeted to fewer than two hundred thousand. Consequently, the land area owned by the remaining residents had increased, reducing their motivation to move overseas. It would no longer serve as a primary source of immigrants in the future.
To resettle this batch of Vikings, the cabinet and the three counties of Londinium, Cambridge, and East Anglia were incredibly busy, spending a cumulative total of seven thousand pounds.
By now, the population of the directly governed territories had reached eight hundred and thirty thousand, with Viking immigrants accounting for two hundred and sixty thousand of that number. Factoring in the residents of the noble fiefdoms, the total population of the kingdom fell somewhere between two point four and two point five million.
After more than ten minutes had passed, the cabinet members finished reading the briefings one by one, and Wigg began to evaluate each item.
First was the finances. Once the new immigrants stabilized their lives, they would become producers of agricultural goods and consumers of handicrafts, which meant revenue was expected to see another substantial increase next year.
Next was the population. After experiencing large-scale migrations in recent years, the population in Northern Europe had declined. It was expected that the number of subsequent immigrants would dwindle, forcing them to supplement their manpower from Eastern Europe or the Finns.
The trouble was that there were certain cultural differences between the Vikings, the Slavs, and the Finns. These immigrants would require more time to adapt to their new lives, which would in turn increase the administrative burden on the regions they moved into.
Therefore, Wigg no longer forced the cabinet to maintain this year's scale of immigration. He chose to let nature take its course, keeping the influx to a steady level of a few thousand people per year.
Seeing that the King had lowered the assessment standards in this regard, the ministers breathed a sigh of relief, especially the Minister of Justice, Om. Since the new immigrants were unfamiliar with the kingdom's laws, incidents of theft and robbery occurred frequently. This had caused Om to waste the majority of his time over the past year dealing with such matters; he even occasionally muttered legal statutes in his sleep.
With the decrease in immigration scale, the number of cheap laborers would drop accordingly, driving up the cost of constructing large-scale projects. Wigg intended to slow down progress in this area next year.
"The road connecting Londinium, York, and Tyne was completed a year ago. I have decided to extend this crucial main artery further north from Tyne, all the way to Edinburgh, and then connect Edinburgh to Glasgow. There is no need to rush; the construction period is tentatively set for two and a half years." As the meeting concluded, Wigg stretched lazily and left the cabinet room. After a full year of hard work, he could finally enjoy a peaceful and leisurely holiday.
After lunch, Wigg leaned back in his lounge chair, preparing to take a short nap. However, Heregyth suddenly sought him out to discuss their eldest son's marriage.
This was an issue that warranted careful consideration. Wigg stood up and pushed open the window, letting the biting cold wind dispel his drowsiness as he pondered over suitable marriage candidates.
In plays and popular tales, maternal relatives—such as a grand preceptor or a royal uncle—were always portrayed as villains, but that was not actually the case. At certain critical times, such as the transitional period when a young monarch ascended the throne, these maternal relatives could protect royal authority and act as a counterbalance against other factions.
If one wanted to eliminate the influence of maternal relatives, the only method was to emulate the Ming Dynasty: having the heir marry a daughter from a commoner family, thereby severing the political roots of the consort's family. The price, however, would be losing the support of powerful in-laws.
After weighing the options for a long time, Wigg decided to follow current conventions and have his eldest son marry a daughter of the nobility. "Over the coming days, secretly draft a list of suitable candidates. I will then have the intelligence network investigate their personalities and family members."
At her husband's arrangement, Heregyth revealed an 'I knew it' expression.
"It is always like this. Whenever you are too lazy to handle something, you love to dump it on me, or dump it on the cabinet..."
After complaining for several minutes, Heregyth realized that her husband had long since slipped out of the office. She quickly rushed to the window, only to see him draped in a black cloak—carrying a wooden box in his left hand and a fishing rod in his right—gradually disappearing into the distance under the escort of the Royal Guard.
On the north bank, where the view was expansive, Wigg wore a thick black sable coat. He sat upright on a folding stool wrapped in fur, gazing at the muddy, slow-flowing surface of the River Thames.
A small silver charcoal brazier sat beside him, and a thick, windproof canvas had been temporarily erected behind him to block the biting cold wind blowing down from the north.
"I hope I can catch a few river perch,"
Wigg muttered to himself. Occasionally, he glanced toward the downstream dock area. Four treadwheel cranes were still operating endlessly, with countless silhouettes rushing back and forth. The chimneys of the riverside taverns billowed with puffs of white smoke, presenting a scene of utmost busyness.
Crucian carp, crucian carp, pike, crucian carp...
As time slipped away, the number of river fish in his wooden bucket steadily grew, yet Wigg still had not caught the perch he desired.
The sky gradually darkened, and the residential houses on both banks, along with the stone bridge spanning the river, lit up one after another. Wigg wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief and headed home for dinner with a hint of regret.
Over the following days, Wigg routinely fished by the riverside. It was not until the fifth day that he finally hooked a pale yellow perch with five black spots.
"Haha, this spot is not bad at all! Quick, throw some more bait down to chum the water."
Wigg excitedly unhooked his catch. Just then, an attendant rode up on horseback and hurriedly conveyed an urgent report: Denmark had been invaded, and Ubbe had fallen in battle!
"Why is the news from Denmark always so dreadful?"
In his daze, the grip of Wigg's left hand slightly loosened. The perch in his grasp thrashed its tail violently, immediately plummeting back into the river and twisting its body as it swam away.