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Taxing all males over 12 - study of English peasantry opens up new interpretations
Posted on 16/03/09
University of Leicester
A study of taxation over 300 years of English history reveals new insights into the English peasantry.
The study by Matthew Tompkins of the University of Leicester Centre for English Local History analysed a penny tax known as Headsilver. This is a manorial tax by which every male inhabitant of the manor over the age of 12 had to pay the lord a penny every year.
Matthews study focused on Great Horwood, a village in north Buckinghamshire for which unusually detailed manor court rolls have survived.
He said: Medieval peasants are a challenge to academic study because there are so few written records to work with. Most of what we know about them comes from manorial records, principally manor court rolls - but these tend to ignore peasants who did not pay rents and taxes to the lord of the manor, leaving us uncertain as to the true size and nature of the peasant population.
The court rolls of the manor of Great Horwood survive from 1302 until 1925, though my study focuses particularly on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - a period chosen to cover the end of the middle ages came and the beginning of the modern period.
By careful analysis of the Great Horwood manor court rolls I have been able to demonstrate as is often suspected but seldom actually proven - that manorial records can indeed conceal substantial numbers of the peasant population.
The Great Horwood court rolls record the number of headsilver pennies paid in most years between 1307 and 1607. This data should, in theory, provide direct evidence of the size of the manors population during those three hundred years, and the effects on it of traumatic events such as the Black Death in 1348.
In my presentation, however, I will question this and consider other possible interpretations of the available evidence.
Matthew will present his research at a Doctoral Inaugural Lecture at the University of Leicester on Wednesday March 18, 5.30pm, in Lecture Theatre 3, Ken Edwards Building.
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