II
FEUDAL AND ROYAL TAXATION
THE NORMAN AND THE ANGEVIN KINGS
1066-1215
Character of the Norman Rule
Under the Saxon kings the structure of government was only half built. The foundation, laid in the shire and hundred moots, the townships, and the incidental organisms of local government, was solid and capable of upholding a heavy superstructure. But the Saxons scarcely built further. They left to the Norman kings, peculiarly fitted to their work by temperament and habit, the task of setting up a strong central government. The price which the nation paid for it was the loss of what right it had possessed of assenting to taxation.
During the whole period from the coming of the Normans in 1066 to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215 there can be brought forward only two or three instances of assent by the National Council to taxes levied by the king, and these few instances are at best equivocal. They are insufficient to justify the belief that the National Council had any final power over the levying of taxation. But the period is not altogether gray; it concludes with the enunciation in Magna Carta of rights which cast a halo of color over the whole subsequent narrative of the struggle for parliamentary taxation.
William the Conqueror 1066-1087
William the Conqueror was precisely the man most likely to exercise supreme control over taxation. Elected to the kingship according to the Saxon forms and with his title to the crown backed up by force of arms, he created a system of government of which he himself was the center and in which his authority, even to the vassals of vassals, was supreme.[14] With his thirst for power thus satisfied he was given a free hand to indulge his besetting sin of avarice. Small wonder was it therefore that he clung to the revenues of his predecessors and added new imposts of his own.