CHAPTER V

THE GREAT CHARTER

The staying power of Henry's constitution, its ability to sustain itself without the supporting presence of the king, was soon brought to the test. Richard I, who came to the throne on his father's death in 1189, was not interested in the problems of government and was not interested in England. While his elder brother lived he had been destined to be duke of Aquitaine and he had spent all his youth in that stormy province. His experiences there and the training he received strengthened the bent which was perhaps natural to him towards the military life of the time and the daily fighting of the feudal age then at its height. After he became king he visited England only twice for a short time on each occasion, but spent all his time either on the crusade or in his constant struggle with the king of France for supremacy on the continent. The institutions of England were left to run themselves, or rather left to the care of officers who had been trained in the school of Henry II, who carried them on in the spirit of that reign. The new judicial system was so well founded that it needed no special care and it may be left with the statement that it continued along lines of natural growth to the date of the granting of the Great Charter.

The advance which was new to this period was on the financial side in the first steps towards national taxation. In general the sources of income for the state remained in the last decade of the twelfth century what they had been a hundred years earlier. Coined money had been slowly coming into more frequent use, and payments in kind had

been in many cases transformed into money payments. The money income of the state had also been increased during the century by another commutation which goes back at least to the time of Henry I, a payment, called scutage, made by the feudal tenant in lieu of the military service which he owed. It is probable that the difficulties and expense of campaigns in France, so often necessary, led to an early development in England of the use of hired troops and to money payments by knights in lieu of their personal service. At any rate from about the middle of the twelfth century so long as the feudal system remained the chief dependence of the state for an army, scutage continued to be an important payment to the state. None of these sources of income, however, was of the nature of a national tax.

From the Saxons, as we have seen, the Normans inherited the Danegeld which was something like a general tax on land. This was occasionally levied by William I and William II, and in the last part of the reign of Henry I regularly, almost like an annual tax. It fell out of use again under Stephen and was revived by Henry II at least for occasional use. If we trust to the positive evidence which we have, this is all that we can say, but the character of our evidence is such that we suspect the tax was through the whole period in more regular use than directly appears. Certainly we may say that this form of land tax, somewhat transformed, was one of the sources out of which national taxation arose in the thirteenth century.

Another source of income was new in the generation immediately preceding Richard, the general tax in support of a crusade. It was suggested in part, it is likely, by the universal tithe payable to the church, for the crusade was an undertaking especially of the church, and in part by the vassal's "aid" for the crusade of the lord, which was not uncommon in France, and it was first imposed in that country in 1146. In 1166 Henry II followed the French example in a similar tax throughout his dominions, and again in 1184

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or 1185. The famous instance, however, which may be said to have fixed the practice as the beginning of the direct taxes of the modern state upon personal property and income, as distinguished from a land tax, was the "Saladin tithe " of 1188.1 These taxes were the first instances of general taxes laid by the great council to be paid by all classes. The Saladin tithe was to be collected in each parish by a mixed ecclesiastical and lay commission, and in case of a disagreement as to the amount of tax to be paid by any person a local jury was to decide a use very like that of the primitive jury and widely imitated in the following hundred years in taxation by the state.

It was not long before the government had to put into use for its own needs all the new means of raising revenue for in 1193-4 money had to be collected to pay £100,000 to the Emperor for the ransom of Richard, an enormous sum for the resources of those days.2 Nearly thirty years ago Maitland wrote: "Historians have not as yet succeeded in determining very precisely the nature and extent of all the various imposts which had been exacted for the purpose of raising" this ransom, and we must say the same today. A few things only seem certain. Taxes were laid on the kingdom at three different dates, the first proving insufficient. There were also at least three different kinds of taxes. There was a tax on military fees called a scutage, or sometimes an aid, but evidently the former since exemptions were allowed for services abroad with the king. There was a different tax on land called a hidage or a carucage, supposed by some to have been on land not held by military tenure; and there was a personal property and income tax like the Saladin tithe. There is mentioned in this connection also for the first time what was to be for some generations a principal source of revenue, for we are told that one year's crop of the wool of the Cistercian order was taken. In

1 Stubbs, S. C., 188-189; A. and S., 27-28.

a Stubbs, S. C., 245–246.

the development of taxation, however, the chief matter is the transfer to the uses of the state of the personal property and income tax begun for the crusades. There is loud complaint in the chroniclers of the heavy burden of this taxation, but it is evident that England was a rich country with strong reserves of wealth. The stern government of the Anglo-Norman monarchy repressed disorder and civil war and rendered possible the accumulation of property and forms of industry, like sheep raising, which could not be maintained without internal security. England continued, however, for a long time to be a country whose wealth and taxing resources depended upon the production not of manufactured goods, but of raw materials.

In 1198 another forward step was taken; the method of assessing a tax by sworn representatives of the locality was transferred from the personal property to the land tax.3 A tax of five shillings was laid on the carucate, or ploughland, and the commissioners appointed to levy the tax fixed a uniform measure of one hundred acres for the carucate. As in the Domesday survey it was a county court which was called to meet them but the tax was assessed in each vill by its reeve and four men, assisted by two elected knights for the hundred. With this tax the machinery for the assessment and collection of taxes which was employed for the next century with minor variations had been put into form. In this machinery the use of local representatives in a national service should not be overlooked and in a function closely related to that of the jury. The possible bearing of this practice upon the addition of local representatives to the great council, that is upon the origin of parliament, we shall have to consider later.

Notwithstanding his taxation, excessive for that time, Richard was constantly in want of money. He raised large sums by the extensive sale of offices, exemptions and privileges. At the end of 1197 an incident occurred which has Stubbs, S. C., 249–251; cf. 277–279, and A. and S., 35–36.

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sometimes been given an exaggerated importance. In place of the usual feudal levy, Richard called upon the barons to furnish three hundred knights for a year's service in France.* In the great council which considered the request, the bishops of Lincoln and Salisbury refused, asserting incorrectly that their fiefs were not liable to service outside of England, and the plan failed. The details of the incident are difficult to understand but at most we can see in it no more than a growing disposition to watch the king's conduct and to insist that it shall be strictly legal. It may be regarded as the sign of the coming revolution which secured Magna Carta, but not as a step in the development of consent to taxation.

The Anglo-Norman absolutism, strengthened greatly by the centralizing measures of Henry II, reached its culmination in the reign of John. The Christian states of western Europe for six hundred years after Charlemagne's death afford no example of a power so unlimited and so unshakable as his in England. For years he resisted the determined attack of the most powerful of medieval popes, Innocent III, with a highly organized church behind him, with no apparent weakening of his authority. The growing opposition of the English barons added to that of the church was not able to force him to yield in the least until a great French army was on the point of invading England with the sanction of the pope. Then John suddenly yielded but with such skill in the form of his yielding as to bring the pope over to his side and to compel him to serve as his protector both against France and against the English barons. He became the vassal of the pope and made England a papal fief with his feudal services limited to a rent charge of one thousand marks per year."

For a time it seemed as if the king had survived the crisis Stubbs, S. C., 249–250.

Stubbs, S. C., 270–273.

Stubbs, S. C., 277-279; A. S., 38-39.