Domesday Book: Taxing the taxable
Think your local, state and federal politicians are too grasping? Well if it’s any consolation a government with its hand in yourpocket is nothing new, in fact it has been going on for at least…at least…a thousand years Only difference now is that the definition of “rich” has been quite widely widened to include the not-so-rich, like, perhaps, you.
Back when Bill the Conqueror sent what must have been an army of auditors to every settlement in England to compile the Domesday Book the result was little more than a handful of rich folks worth soaking (not our characterization. See below.) And these worthies could also benefit from “patronage.” The king knew it and used it to his advantage. Patronage, considering what there was for the king to offer at the time, could easily be translated in modern terms to the phrase “government services.” And lately the term might easily also be translated synonymously as well to “government bailout.”
But don’t take our word for it. This is from the The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain
Patronage was lucrative, Men offered money in order to obtain what the king had to offer: offices (from the chancellorship down), succession to estates, custody of land, wardship and marriage—or even nothing more concrete than the king’s goodwill. All of these were to be had at a price, and the price was negotiable. Here was an area in which a king could hope to raise more money by consistently driving harder bargains. In these circumstances any document which told the King how rich his tenants were would naturally be immensely valuable. Domesday Book is just such a record—and it showed that half the value of the whole country was in the hands of less than two hundred men. By fining these men heavily when they were in political trouble or by offering them what they wanted, though at a price, the king had found a practical method of soaking the rich. Of course the information had to be kept up to date and throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Crown found ways of ensuring that it was. For example, one of the surviving documents produced by Henry II’s administration is the delightfully named ‘Roll of Ladies, boys and girls’. Thus to a hostile observer like Gerald of Wales the king appeared to be ‘a robber permanently on the prowl, always probing, always looking for the weak spot where there is something for him to steal.
Tags: Domesday Book
Domesday Book, history, taxation | bshears December 31, 2008
