A. 1110. This was a year of much distress from the taxes which the king raised for his daughter’s dowry.
A. 1118. England paid dearly for all this (i. e., the Norman war) by the manifold taxes which ceased not all this year.
A. 1124. Full heavy a year was this; he who had any property was bereaved of it by heavy taxes and assessments, and he who had none, starved with hunger.
From the edition of J. A. Giles.
[27] Chron. Sax. a. 1137.
[28] Henry of Huntingdon’s Chronicle, a. 1135. Trans. by Thomas Forester, 264.
[29] Henry II was the first king since Edward the Confessor in whose veins ran the blood of the Saxon monarchs, being the grandson of Matilda, wife of Henry I. Matilda was great-granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, the son of Ethelred the Unready.
[30] 1 Stubbs, Const. Hist. Eng. 500.
[31] Grim, V. S. Thomæ, 21, 22, in Stubbs, Sel. Chart. 129.
[32] Bishop Stubbs (1 Const. Hist. Eng. 500) believes this struggle between Henry II and Becket to have been the deathblow to the levy of the Danegeld, which is not noted in the Pipe Rolls after 1163. J. H. Round [Feudal England, 497-502, in the paper “The Alleged Dispute on Danegeld (1163)”], effectually establishes his contention that the tax in question was not the Danegeld, but the “auxilium vicecomitis” or “Sheriff’s aid,” which was a customary, variable charge paid over locally to the sheriffs in payment for their services.