shortly after william the conquerer came to power he initiated something known as ‘the doomsday book’- he sent envoys to survey his new lands to record the properties he now controlled so they could pay accurate taxes. every acre of field, every mill, livestock, buildings and their relative size- all would be recorded to determine the wealth of each settlement so a percentage could be expected as rent. for an example of what this book meant; the previous king was aware of and collected taxes from about 20 grain mills in england, william’s audit shot that number above 200. you dont know the meaning of ‘pedantic’ untill you start reading about medieval grain mills, theres a church that paved its floor with confiscated ‘illegal’ millstones to ensure that the town had to get its flour from the church’s official mill and one war simply about stealing the same millstone back and fourth for quite a few decades
of course word of these envoys traveled faster then they did, virtually every town they came to had time to claim they had far less taxable wealth then they actually did have by the time the audit arrived. in one of the more over the top cases an entire village pretended to have caught insanity- when the taxmen arrived they saw screaming laughing idiots with underwear on their heads so they left as fast as they could considering at the time insanity was thought to be literally contagious. it would be over five years before anyone tried to audit that town again. its safe to assume a large number of other villages also had sudden cases of strange diseases, mysteriously disappearing cows, or very large shrubberies and haybales shaped like buildings and you dont need to look over that hill either. thats not even touching how many small communities just plain didnt technically exist because they were too small, somewhere weird, or in legal limbo of who owned it
of course when the feudal part of feudalism started moving its gears you found that the local lord of that village was unlikely to divulge the exact amount of rents they could collect to THEIR lord either, knowing that the more they admitted to receiving the more they were expected to hand over. this was not exclusive to england either, the more you learn about feudalism the more you have to ask how all these minor lords out in the boonies kept having the money and soldiers to do all the political intrigue bullshit, the answer is also tax evasion. each village kept claiming it had fewer people living in shittier houses with less land and fewer livestock then they actually had, and each local lord kept claiming they were receiving less rents then they actually took so were also adverse to an accurate audit.
their knowledge of tax loopholes also extended to finding out that clergymen were either exempt from tax or received a far lower rate of tax, so proving you qualified as a clergyman was an endeavor that paid dividends. specifically to prove you were clergy you proved that you could read and write enough Latin to satisfy an official, so you could spend some money to hire someone to tutor you enough Latin to fake it. its estimated that due to this fully ten percent of medieval english households wrote ‘clergy’ on their tax forms.
another and even more extreme example was the peasants revolt of 1381, london was swarmed by the unwashed masses from all sides instigated by an official trying to collect (a lot of) unpaid poll taxes, an angry mob driving a teenaged king Richard II to retreat to a boat in the river, and culminating with 1500 peasants being executed by an emergency militia. this doesn’t sound like a huge success untill you dig into some of the details- peasants from a large number of villages all arrived at london at the same time, leaving dedicated forces specifically to stop ships from acessing london to break the siege, the peasants executed a select number of court officials and started burning paperwork- but systematically only burning the ones detailing who owned plots of land, debt records, and a few criminal records. the peasants who besieged london and scared the king into the river had successfully purged a whole lot of debts and reclaimed a lot of land in one very ballsy and highly coordinated move that relied on them being seen as illiterate dirt farmers with no ulterior motives besides pitchfork mob riot and trying to kiss the queen mother while they touch everything in the tower of london with their grimy hands
found it. this is… this is amazing. I did a BA in Medieval British History and we never, ever, once considered this. Not once. At a major Canadian university.
jfc this changes my entire brain
Just another WordPress site