Tax fairness in eleventh century England

Accounting Historians Journal, The, Jun 2002 by McDonald, John

Although Domesday Book records 112 boroughs, agriculture was the predominant economic activity, with stock rearing of greater importance in the south-west and arable faming more important in the east and midlands.

The Domesday Survey was commissioned on Christmas day, 1085, and it is generally thought that work on Domesday Book was terminated on the death of William in September 1087. The task was facilitated by the availability of Anglo-Saxon hidage lists. The counties of England were grouped into (probably) seven circuits. Each circuit was visited by a team of commissioners, bishops, lawyers and lay barons who had no material interests in the area. The commissioners were responsible for circulating a list of questions to land holders, for subjecting the responses to a review in the county court by the hundred juries, often consisting of half Englishmen and half Frenchmen, and for supervising the compilation of county and circuit returns. The circuit returns were then sent to the Exchequer in Winchester where they were summarized, edited and compiled into Great Domesday Book.

Unlike modern surveys, individual questionnaire responses were not treated confidentially but became public knowledge, being verified in the courts by landholders with local knowledge. In such circumstances, the opportunities for giving false or misleading evidence were limited.

Domesday Book consists of two volumes, Great (or Exchequer) Domesday and Little Domesday. Little Domesday is a detailed original survey return of circuit VII, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. Great Domesday is a summarized version of the other circuit returns sent to the King's treasury in Winchester. (It is thought that the death of William occurred before Essex and East Anglia could be included in Great Domesday). The two volumes contain information on the net incomes (referred to as the annual values), tax assessments and resources of most manors in England in 1086, some information for 1066, and sometimes also for an intermediate year. The information was used to revise tax assessments and document the feudal structure, "who held what, and owed what, to whom".1

The study described in this paper is based on data relating to 574 lay estates in the county of Essex in 1086. Essex was chosen because more detailed data are available on the counties described in Little Domesday, and the manorial entries for Essex are easier to interpret than those of Norfolk and Suffolk.2

EARLIER STUDIES OF THE GELD

The Domesday tax assessments relate to a non-feudal tax, the geld, thought to be levied annually by the end of William's reign. The tax can be traced back to the danegeld, which was introduced by King Ethelred in 911 to provide finance to bribe or fight the Danes. Originally the geld was a land tax assessed at so much per hide. A hide was traditionally the acreage needed to support a man and his family, conventionally 120 acres, but in practice variable from place to place depending on the fertility of the land. Oldroyd [1997] describes the role of hidage lists and Geld Rolls in public accounting during the Anglo-Saxon period and their significance for accounting history. By Norman times it is thought that, although it retained the nomenclature of a land tax, the geld was no longer solely a tax on land. In 1086 it was one of a number of public revenue sources and probably contributed about a quarter of the total public purse. The geld was a significant impost on landholders, the rate struck in 1083-- 4 of six shillings to the hide, implies the tax amounted to about 15 percent of the annual value of the average Essex lay manor.3