Fiscal policies and the institution of a tax state in Anglo‐Saxon England within a comparative context¹

Abstract

This article begins by noting that military revolutions and civil wars in early modern Europe provide an unduly narrow framework for understanding the transition from a domain to a tax state. Taking Anglo‐Saxon England as a case study, it is suggested that political restrictions led to the establishment of direct and indirect taxation, thereby providing rulers with revenues which surpassed those from domain resources. The main section of the article uses sources from coinage and wills to poetry and letters in order to give a general idea of the chronological development of a medieval tax state. This analysis challenges the views of the new fiscal historians, who argue that a collapse in a medieval domain state acts as the precondition for the emergence of a tax state. Instead, this article suggests that new policies arose because of the need of Anglo‐Saxon kings and their advisers to take account of the requirements of ecclesiastical authorities, as well as a heavy revenue imperative, in paying for resistance against the Vikings. The article ends with a discussion of the comparative applications of the contexts and catalysts which lead to the adoption of pioneering fiscal policies.

Review of periodical literature published in 2012

“…Wareham is concerned with issues which affected the whole of late Anglo‐Saxon England in his examination of the possible transition from the ‘domain’ state, roughly one in which the business of the ruler was carried on by use of the revenues from his estates and from customary dues and renders owed him, to the medieval ‘tax’ state. He is anxious to show that the collapse of the domain state is not necessarily the precondition for the emergence of the medieval tax state and sees late tenth‐century England as an important example which allows the transition to be studied in some detail.…”

“…He suggests that in the later tenth century the revived church, much more tightly organized than it had been in the ninth century, refused to allow this to happen, turning the king towards the ‘tax’ solution. Regular taxation did of course cease during Edward the Confessor's reign and Wareham must be right to attribute this, in part at least, to the diminution in silver supply by that time, but in view of the ability of William the Conqueror to exact heavy and regular gelds not many years later, when the money supply had not improved, it surely must be the case that political weakness, as well as recession, played a part in the hiatus.…”

From credit to debt: A political history of English sovereign finance and money from the seventh century to the seventeenth

“…This is pursued through the deployment of two analytical lenses -jurisdictional enlargement and religious authority -consideration of which deepens our understandings of the monetisation and early successes of pre-modern sovereign credit, the decline of that mode of fiscality and the subsequent development of sovereign debt. In respect of religion, my work borrows from that of Wareham (2012) on the fiscal role of the Anglo Saxon church up until the eleventh century, Bell et al (2009) on the medieval church's prohibition of usury, and Munro (2011) on how that prohibition was weakened and overcome, allowing modern sovereign debt to emerge. My rereading of the literature on sovereign fiscality through the lenses of jurisdictional enlargement and religious authority is intended both as a substantive contribution to the history of English sovereign money, credit and debt and as a stimulation to methodological debate.…”

Royal Taxation and Written Record in Eleventh-Century England and Ninth-Century West Francia

“…It is possible that methods for collecting heregeld, as a general levy on the hide, may have related most closely to the system of ship-scot. 69 Did these circumstances generate a need to enforce the liability of landholders with new legal teeth?…”