The History of Parliamentary Taxation in England

by Shepard Ashman Morgan

John, the youngest son of Henry II, the thinnest figure that ever sat upon the English throne, succeeded to the crown some six weeks after the tragic passing of Richard. Richard was the creation of his own times, the incarnation of the mediæval spirit, and where it fell short he fell short. To attribute the meanness of his brother to any conditions of environment would be to perpetrate a slander upon the times. Yet, notwithstanding the vileness of the king, there eventuated from his reign the first of the three books in what Lord Chatham denominated “the Bible of the English Constitution.” The progress toward the finished writing of Magna Carta, especially in so far as the events concern laying of taxes, is the next step in this history.

An interregnum of six weeks elapsed between the death of Richard and the coming to England of John. Then Archbishop Hubert Walter set the crown upon his head and declared him elected to the kingship. John’s stay in England was necessarily brief, because Philip II of France was already in a fair way to win his possessions on the far side of the Channel. For his expedition into Normandy John exacted a scutage of two marks on the knight’s fee; the rate was unusually high, almost without precedent.

John’s heavy taxation

Being unable to make head against Philip, John concluded a truce for which he had to pay 30,000 marks. The Jews had to pay a good deal of it and in addition John took a carucage of three shillings on the carucate, which, like the charge of scutage, was an exceedingly high rate. John laid this imposition, apparently, solely upon his own authority; Roger Hoveden says that he “took” the carucage and makes no mention of a Council.[62] He demanded the aid, and the justices issued the edicts. In 1201 John contributed, at the instance of a papal delegate, a fortieth of his revenues for the Crusade; from his barons he urged a similar offering, not “as a matter of right or of custom or of compulsion.” Freeholders and tenants by knight’s service paid at a similar rate; just what liberty they had in refusal is shown in the direction of Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, the justiciar, at the end of his address to the sheriffs: “And if any persons shall refuse to give their consent to the said collection, their names are to be entered in the register, and made known to us at London.”[63] In the same year he exacted a scutage at the high rate of two marks on the knight’s fee.

The importance of the part which scutage played in the tragedy of John can hardly be overestimated; it was the great moving cause which brought about the crisis of 1215 and Magna Carta. Scutage, a cause leading to the Charter Not only did John raise scutage to an amount which had not been equalled since the Scutage of Toulouse in 1159, but he levied it as though it were a regular and almost annual obligation. Previously understood as a commutation arranged at the pleasure of the king for knight’s service not rendered, as an extraordinary impost reserved for extraordinary occasions, John changed its character and used it as a means of supplying his heavy financial needs, irrespective of customary right or of shrewd policy.

John began with a demand of two marks on the knight’s fee.[64] The barons had accustomed themselves, during the reigns of Henry and Richard, to expect at the outside a demand of twenty shillings; sometimes indeed the imposition had fallen to a single mark or even as low as ten shillings. His second scutage came in the third year of his reign, two marks on the fee. Then for four successive years John kept his barons on edge with annual scutages of two marks each. In 1205-06, apparently fearing a storm, he reduced his imposition to twenty shillings, and then waited for three years before laying another. The three years of relief, however, were not as innocent as they seem; it was in 1207 that John broke with the Pope, and the freedom to plunder ecclesiastics which this quarrel gave him, made unnecessary for the moment any further demands upon the baronage. But this source of revenue shortly proved insufficient, and John turned again toward scutage. In the two financial years from 1209 to 1211, he laid three scutages which aggregated some seventy-three shillings on the knight’s fee. Then for the space of two years John paused.

But it was only a pause. On June 1, 1212, he caused to be taken the Inquest of Service, Inquest of Service, 1212 by which he sought to bind the cord more tightly upon his demesne tenants by ascertaining in the now familiar manner of the local jury, how great was the return which he might expect from the lands of each crown vassal. It is easy to see in this Inquest, recalling in its nature Domesday Survey and the Inquest of 1166, the intended basis for another imposition of scutage.[65] It came in 1213-14, when John made the wholly unprecedented levy of three marks on the knight’s fee. Apparently he was doing all he could to hurry the crisis which should lead him to Runnymede.

There were two features of John’s use of scutage aside from the magnitude and frequency of his levies Attendant abuses of John’s levies of Scutage which made them particularly onerous. The first had to do with the fines which he exacted from such of the baronage as were delinquent in paying the imposts of Richard, some of which had been in arrears since 1190. Miss Norgate notes an instance which illustrates John’s habit, and throws light upon his character. Two men of Devon in 1201 were charged with fines by reason of their absence from the train of Richard in 1193, and the cause of their failure was this, that “they had been with Count John.” At the moment John was in rebellion against Richard, but now that he was become king in Richard’s place, he exacted fines for service the nonperformance of which he himself had been the cause of.[66] The collection of fines owing to Richard bore with special heaviness upon the northern baronage and these, it will be remembered, were the leaders in the assault upon John in 1215.