The History of Parliamentary Taxation in England

by Shepard Ashman Morgan

The Parliament which met in 1312 granted Edward no money. His position was desperate and he turned everywhere in the hope that he could raise funds wherewith to meet his necessities; the merchants and the clergy, even the Pope, were induced to lend him money. But they could not satisfy his needs; therefore in December, 1312,Tallage of 1312: Riots in London and Bristol the Council determined to levy a tallage on the demesne towns and the royal demesne of a fifteenth of movables and a tenth of rents.[207] The imposition met with opposition, resistance being most riotous in London and Bristol. The objections which the people of Bristol raised were not based upon legal grounds; it so happened that at the moment certain of their burgesses were confined in the Tower of London, and that grievance, so they maintained, warranted their refusal. The basis for resistance raised by the citizens of London was not so casual; they claimed immunity from a royal tallage on the ground of the “ancient privileges” guaranteed to them under Magna Carta. Neither cited De tallagio non concedendo as the defense of their actions, and the presumption against the validity of the so-called statute is therefore enhanced. The king secured his payment by way of compromise; the Londoners granted a “loan” of £400 and another of £1000, from which sums they were to be relieved at the time of collection of the next general aid. Many other towns escaped upon the ground that they were not situated within the royal demesne. The principle that the king could levy tallages upon his own demesne thus remained unquestioned; but no tallage was levied during the rest of this reign.[208]

It is unnecessary to follow Edward II to Deposition of Edward II his melancholy end. His deposition came more as the result of stress in his own household than because of any strain which he put upon the constitution. Favorites, an unfaithful wife, and factions which he bred among his barons, did more to bring about his dethronement and his subsequent murder than any condition of taxation. In the list of grievances which Bishop Stratford drew up as furnishing cause sufficient for the overthrow of Edward, nothing appears which has any connection with the question of taxation, much less any assertion of parliamentary right to control it. The king consented to the election of his son in his stead on January 20, 1327. Eight months thereafter he died; few doubt that he was murdered.

The reign of Edward III dates from the 24th January, 1327. Edward III, 1327-1377 He was crowned five days later at the age of fourteen and took the same stringent oath as that which had failed to bind his father. Parliament appointed a council of government which was to be in constant attendance upon the king; but the queen and her familiar, Mortimer, assumed so dominant a control over the young king that the influence of the Council was nil. Edward went through the formality of confirming the charters and forbidding illegal assessment of aids. His rule really did not begin until November, 1330, when Mortimer was killed.

Edward III, being no statesman, but a warrior, energetic, without scruple, lavish, and ambitious, was not a figure designed to loom large in constitutional history. He did not mould events as did his grandfather; he watched them move. As a matter of fact there was advance. Tallage was prohibited and there came, too, the abolition in law of other forms of arbitrary taxation.

Edward had in mind in 1332 the reduction of Scotland.[209] To that end he revived a financial expedient which had not been exercised since his father’s embarrassment in 1312, and tallaged the demesne cities and boroughs, and the rural demesne.Tallage of 1332 and its withdrawal On the 25th June, he sent out orders for the collection of a fourteenth of movables and a ninth of rents.[210]

Parliament met three months later, on the 9th September, and a request formulated by the prelates, earls, barons, and the knights of the shires, was addressed to the king praying the recall of the commission for the tallage; Parliament offered as a substitute a fifteenth from the shires and a tenth from the towns. Just why a Parliament in which the Rolls do not note the inclusion of the burgesses should accomplish such a substitution, which obviously benefited the townsmen, is not clear, unless a considerable portion of the knights dwelt within the royal demesne or in small towns formerly subjected to the exaction of tallage. In his acceptance of the grant Edward promised for the future that he would not lay such a tallage, “Except as was customary in the time of our ancestors, and as he might rightly do.”[211] It was not, however, until the sweeping legislation of 1340 that tallage became illegal.

In parallel to the struggle against tallaging the royal demesne was the contest with the king in the matter of the custom on wool. Edward in 1328 confirmed the reëstablished scale of 1322 New Customs become a regular means of revenue which his father in his hour of supremacy had laid upon the alien merchants, in amount equal to the “nova custuma” of Edward I. From this time the New Customs became a part of the regular revenue of the crown, though Parliament did not yield its sanction until a time some fifty years after the first levy, when, in 1353, it gave its assent to the Statute of Staples.

But the regulation of the relations between king and merchant denizens, and incidentally through them, his relations (aside from the New Customs) with the aliens, is not so briefly told. Throughout the reign of Edward III the question was being quietly fought out as to whether or not the king might tamper with the wool customs irrespective of parliamentary sanction. In 1332 Edward issued an ordinance which provided for the collection of a subsidy on the wool of denizens; the rate was to be half a mark on the sack and 300 woolfells, and twenty shillings on the last of leather. A year later on the 30th June, 1333, Edward recalled his ordinance, but he did not relinquish his grasp upon the customs; by negotiation with the merchants, he received ten shillings on the sack and 300 woolfells and a pound on the last. In order to bolster up the legality of the proceeding, he issued a royal ordinance to the same effect.[212]

The wool customs