The attempt to identify the payment in dispute with the danegeld does indeed lead to the greatest possible difficulties, and Miss Norgate, who follows closely in Dr Stubbs' footsteps, is no more successful in answering them;[3] for, in the first place, the words of Grim do not apply to the danegeld if taken in their natural sense; and in the second the proceeds of the danegeld were already royal revenue, and were duly paid in, as such, at the exchequer. To meet this latter and obvious difficulty Dr Stubbs suggests that:
as the sums paid into the exchequer under that name (danegeld) were very small compared with the extent of land that paid the tax, it is probable that the sheriffs paid a fixed composition and retained the surplus as wages for their services (etc.).[4]
So, too, Miss Norgate urges that the danegeld 'still occasionally made its appearance in the treasury rolls, but in such small amount that it is evident the sheriffs, if they collected it in full, paid only a fixed composition to the crown, and kept the greater part as a remuneration for their own services'.[5] Now this suggestion raises the whole question as to the revenue from danegeld. We are told that 'the danegeld was a very unpopular tax, probably because it was the plea on which the sheriffs made their greatest profit ... having become in the long lapse of years a mere composition paid by the sheriff to the exchequer, while the balance of the whole sums exacted on that account went to swell his own income'.[6]
As against this view I venture to hold that the danegeld was in no way compounded for, but that every penny raised by its agency was due to the royal treasury, leaving no profit whatever to the sheriff. The test is easily applied: let us take the case of Dorset. The Domesday assessment of this county, according to the late Mr Eyton, who had investigated it with his usual painstaking labour, and collated it with the geld-rolls of two years before, was about 2,300 hides.[7] This assessment would produce, at two shillings on the hide, about £230. Now the actual amount accounted for on the Pipe-Roll of 1130 is £228 5s; on that of 1156 it is £228 5s; and on that of 1162, the last levy, it is £247 5s.[8] There is certainly no margin of profit for the sheriff here. In other counties, we find that the proceeds of the danegeld in 1130, 1156, and 1162, whilst slightly fluctuating, roughly correspond, as, indeed, they were bound to do, the Domesday assessment remaining unchanged.[9] I can, therefore, find no ground for the alleged discrepancy between the amounts accounted for by the sheriffs and those which the assessment ought to have produced.
This being so, the solitary explanation suggested for Henry's action falls to the ground, and it becomes clear that the payment in dispute could not have been the danegeld, as the proposed change could not increase the amount it produced already. As a matter of fact, the last occasion on which danegeld eo nomine was levied was in 1162, but to connect that circumstance with the Woodstock dispute of 1163 is an instance of the post hoc propter hoc argument, more especially as the danegeld was not in dispute, still less its abolition. On the contrary, the primate desired to keep things as they were. What, then, was this mysterious payment but the auxilium vicecomitis, or 'sheriffs' aid'? Garnier distinctly states that this is what it was,[10] and Grim's words no less unmistakably point to the same conclusion. To institutional students of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the auxilium vicecomitis is familiar enough. It was, writes Dr Stubbs, a 'payment made to the sheriff for his services',[11] and was, it may be added, a customary charge, varying in amount,[12] paid over locally to the sheriffs. It may fairly be said to have stood to the danegeld in the relation of rates to taxes.
On this hypothesis the difficulties of the case vanish at once, and Henry's object is made plain. To add this regular annual levy to his own revenues would be all clear gain, and would relieve him pro tanto from the necessity of spasmodic and irregular taxation. As for the sheriffs and the districts beneath their sway, they were possibly to be left to their own devices to find a substitute for the lost 'aid', like a modern county council bereft of its wheel tax; for the thought suggests itself that Henry was attempting to reverse the process that we have lately witnessed, by relieving the taxes at the expense of the rates, instead of the rates at the expense of the taxes. Whether, therefore, the attitude of the primate can be described as 'opposition to the king's will in the matter of taxation' is perhaps just open to question. He took his stand on the sure ground of existing 'custom', recognized at that time as binding on all.[13] One is tempted to discern a grim irony in Henry's action when he promptly proceeded to turn the tables on his old friend by appealing to the avitæ consuetudines as obviously binding on so rigid a constitutional purist as the primate.[14]
[1] Early Plantagenets, pp. 69, 70. So, too, Miss Norgate: 'It seems, therefore, that for the first time in English history since the Norman Conquest the right of the nation's representatives to oppose the financial demands of the crown was asserted in the Council of Woodstock, and asserted with such success that the king was obliged not merely to abandon his project, but to obliterate the last trace of the tradition on which it was founded' (Angevin Kings, ii. 16).
[2] Const. Hist., i. 462; so, too, Early Plantagenets, pp. 68-70; and Select Charters, p. 29, where it is described as 'Henry's proposal to appropriate the sheriffs' share of danegeld'.
[3] Angevin Kings, ii. 15, 16.
[4] Early Plantagenets, p. 69.