Fifteenths and tenths, 1334

FIFTEENTHS AND TENTHS: QUOTAS OF 1334

By the last quarter of the 13th century Englishmen had become familiar with a system of tax assessment which took no account of such old-fashioned assessments of wealth as hides or knight's fees. This new system of assessment was based on a valuation of certain personal property, usually described by the vague word 'movables'. Of this value Parliament had granted the king a fraction: the fraction itself varied from grant to grant but in each grant a greater fraction was levied on cities, towns, and royal demesne than on other areas. Thus in 1332 the townsman found himself contributing a tenth of his assessed movables but the countryman only a fifteenth. In addition there were some categories of goods which the collectors were instructed to ignore, and as a result the statistics from the collections deal only with those Englishmen and women who were wealthy enough to fall under the scrutiny of the local assessors. It is rather like an iceberg the size of whose submerged depths is unknown. In addition there was probably evasion and under-assessment everywhere.

At each fresh grant there was a new assessment. The resulting rolls were preserved in the Exchequer and were sometimes compared when evasion was suspected. (fn. 1) But the degree of survival varies very much from county to county. Wiltshire has only the rolls from 1269, 1297, 1327, and 1332. (fn. 2) The roll for 1269 is a simple list of village totals; and that of 1297 is not an elaborate list of individual personal possessions (such as that for part of Yorkshire) (fn. 3) but merely a collector's note of the totals collected from each hundred and from the boroughs. In 1327 the Wiltshire roll has 33 membranes and its list of boroughs and villages and of property owners is of the same form as the roll from Somerset already printed. (fn. 4) The roll for 1332 follows the same form and is of particular importance since it was the last tax to be assessed on a fresh personal valuation. (fn. 5)

In 1334 the Exchequer was content to accept from each city, borough, and vill a sum which had resulted from a series of local negotiations between the collectors and the communities. So long as this sum reached at least that of the personal assessments in each vill in 1332 no further questions were asked, and the local community was left to share out the tax among its members as it pleased. The result of this change of policy can be seen in the sudden shortening of the Wiltshire rolls which now needed to be no longer than a list of the 540 or so separate vills in the county; personal names and assessments disappear. (fn. 6) It can also be seen in the various increments when the 1332 and 1334 sums are compared. Thus Salisbury paid £74 6s. 1d. in 1332 and £75 0s. 2d. in 1334; Old Salisbury paid 17s. 4d. on each occasion, probably a concession to its empty poverty; Wilton's total rose by 6s. and the whole rural hundred of Staple paid 10s. more. This close relation between the personal assessments of 1332 and the 'quotas' agreed upon in 1334 makes it impossible to put too much weight on the figures yielded in 1334, as an exposition of the whole of the 'wealth' of the various places in the county and the kingdom.

In the next grant and collection of a fifteenth, in 1336, it was found convenient to use the same assessment as in 1334, and not to inquire further into personal wealth. But what began as an administrative convenience hardened into a convention, and there were villages which were paying at the same rate in the reign of Charles I as they had been in 1334. But in addition to the ease of collection the Exchequer soon had a good reason for not wishing to carry out a fresh personal reassessment. Reassessments are all very well if a tax collector thinks that people are getting wealthier, but if in fact they are worse off it is to the Exchequer's interest to hold by a bargain like that of 1334 and to listen only to the most desperate petitions for relief, such as those from places washed away by the sea, drowned in the floods, or burned by the Scots and Welsh. (fn. 7)

In the years immediately following the Black Death there was an urgent need to give some temporary and local relief to places whose population had diminished, but the rigidity of the assessments even between 1334 and 1352 may be another of those signs that some contraction in population and economic activity was already under way and had been noticed by the Government. In the years of the plagues the local quotas of 1334 were adjusted by applying a relief fund made up of the fines collected locally from offenders against the Statute of Labourers. No schedule of village-by-village reliefs seems to have survived from Wiltshire, and no relief was applied at all in the collections of 1352 and 1353 when many other counties were relieved. In 1354 a sum of £280 9s. 5d. was applied against the £1,521 5s. 10d. which was due, and in later collections there were small reliefs obtained from the sale of the confiscated goods of fugitives and felons. (fn. 8)

In 1433 the complaints of the 'over-taxed, impoverished and depopulated places' was such that the parliamentary grant now specifically provided for a reduction (deduccio) in the rigid quotas of 1334. A sum of £4,000 (later £6,000) was distributed in relief. Wiltshire was faced with distributing £167 6s. 6¾d. or about 11 per cent. of the sum usually due. From the surviving rolls of deducciones it seems that at first there was a realistic basis of relief, and that a particular vill was not relieved in the same proportion each year and indeed might well not be relieved at all. In 1433 only 3 vills from the 8 in Cadworth hundred obtained relief, but in 1442 3 more were relieved and one of those relieved in 1433 had its relief cut. In 1446 only 4 of these 6 places were relieved. (fn. 9) But here again the flexible passed into rigidity and in the collections after 1480 the same sums were allowed without alteration. In the taxation rolls of the 1620's there are villages solemnly assessed to the sums fixed in 1334 abated by the reliefs fixed in the 1470's.

The basis for Table 1 is the roll of particulars for 8 Edward III (1334). (fn. 10) Where the text was obscure, this document has been checked against the rolls for 1332, (fn. 11) 1338–9 (fn. 12) and 1348–9 (fn. 13) and against a register, prepared about 1420, in which the township totals for the whole kingdom, apart from the palatinates of Chester and Durham, were entered. (fn. 14) The register contains several misreadings, and in certain other ways is of limited value for comparative purposes. Thus it places some vills in different hundreds from those to which they were assigned in 1334, without, however, necessarily indicating any change in the hundred totals, and sometimes the vill totals are different from those of 1334. (fn. 15)

All totals are expressed in the table in shillings and pence, even where in the original they are expressed also in pounds. The vill totals have been summed and have been found to tally with the hundred totals except in the cases of Chippenham and Warminster hundreds, which exhibit inexplicable discrepancies.

Wherever possible place-names have been identified with a modern equivalent, and for this purpose The Place-Names of Wiltshire (E.P.N.S., 1939) has been taken as the standard. This volume is arranged by the hundreds of 1086 and these in turn are subdivided into the civil parishes existing about the time of publication. Within the parishes are grouped hamlets, farms and other sites and places of no present administrative significance. By 1334 some of the Domesday hundreds had disappeared (fn. 16) and some of them had altered their constitution. Besides this there is no reason to conclude that the parishes of the 20th century always or indeed often coincide with the vills of 1334 that bear the same names. The identifications therefore are largely artificial. Places that are less than parishes have been entered in the table with the name of the enclosing parish, as given in The PlaceNames of Wiltshire, added in brackets. (fn. 17) These bracketed appendages are added only for the sake of helping the reader to find the vill upon the map and are not to be taken as indicating that the vills lay within those parishes in 1334 or even necessarily that they may be deemed to do so now. A consequence of the adoption of these methods is that some hamlets or even parishes appear in one hundred in 1334 and in another in The Place-Names of Wiltshire. Thus Surrendell was rated in Chippenham hundred in 1334, but it is said to lie 'in Hullavington', which was then a vill in Startley hundred. Vills of the same name but with different prefixes or suffixes, like East and West Tockenham and the three Blunsdons, and vills linked together to form a single parish, like Pitton and Farley, have been treated in the table as though each was a distinct parish in 1939. Changes in boundaries that have occurred since 1939 resulting in the absorption of one parish into another have been ignored. Places transferred to another county since 1334 are expressed, in round brackets, as 'in' that county. Unidentified places are enclosed in quotation marks.

The range of tax quotas was large. At the head of the ladder was Salisbury, assessed at 1,500s. At the foot were several tiny fiscal units assessed at 10s. or less. These are Choulston (4s.), Hatch (4s.), Ratfyn (5s. 6d.), Twyford (6s. 8d.), and Tytherley (3s.) in Amesbury hundred; Addeston (5s.) in Dole hundred; Ansty (8s.) and Whitecliff (6s. 8d.) in Dole hundred; Stokke and 'Ford' (8s. 6d.) in Kinwardstone hundred; Trowle (5s.) in Melksham hundred; Rabson (10s.) Shaw (8s.), and Snap (8s.) in Selkley hundred; and Melbourne (9s.) and Stoke (10s.) in Westbury hundred. They may be compared with the lists of small fiscal units of 1377 (p. 312), and of small parishes of 1428 (p. 314). Some names appear in all three lists. Table 3, which shows the most highly rated fiscal units, differs markedly from the Table on p. 313 which shows the fiscal units containing the largest number of tax payers in 1377. The head and foot of the ladder are brought into proportion by Table 2 which shows the percentage of fiscal units that fell into various size-groups, beginning with those paying less than 10s. and ending with those paying over 150s. The figures for the two neighbouring counties of Gloucestershire and Dorset are printed in parallel, and it will be seen that the distribution is very similar, and that the county averages also show affinities. These similarities do not show in other counties; (fn. 18) Lincolnshire, for example, had a much greater proportion of large quotas and Northumberland a preponderance of small assessments.

Table 1: Fifteenths and Tenths in 1334

Tenths

Salisbury

Other Places

Fifteenths

Alderbury Hundred 811s. 4d.

Amesbury Hundred 1,755s. 10d.

Blackgrove Hundred 659s.

Bradford Hundred 582s. 8d.

Branch Hundred 754s.

Liberty of Bromham (fn. 33) 140s.

Cadworth Hundred 316s. 8d.

Calne Hundred (fn. 34) 912s.

Cannings Hundred 664s.

Cawdon Hundred 503s. 8d.

Chalke Hundred 666s. 8d.

Chedglow Hundred 649s. 8d.

Chippenham Hundred 2,102s. [recte 2,085s.]

Cricklade Hundred 520s.

Damerham Hundred 423s. 4d.

Liberty of Longbridge Deverill (fn. 40) 110s.

Dole Hundred 515s. 8d.

Downton Hundred 778s. 8d.

Dunworth Hundred 767s. 4d.

Elstub Hundred (fn. 44) 849s.

Liberty of Everleigh (fn. 49) 313s. 4d.

Frustfield Hundred 274s.

Heytesbury Hundred 958s.

Highworth Hundred 1,321s. 8d.

Kingsbridge Hundred 543s. 8d.

[recte 553s. 8d.]

Kinwardstone Hundred 941s. 10d.

Bishop's Knoyle Hundred 208s.

Melksham Hundred 910s. 8d.

Mere Hundred (fn. 64) 619s.

Ramsbury Hundred 270s.

Bishop's Rowborough Hundred 638s. 8d.

King's Rowborough Hundred 458s.

Liberty of Rowde 106s. 8d.

Selkley Hundred 1,081s. 8d.

Staple Hundred 216s. 8d.

Startley Hundred 591s. 8d.

Studfold Hundred 517s.

Swanborough Hundred 727s. 4d.

Thornhill Hundred 725s.

Underditch Hundred 438s. 4d.

Warminster Hundred 1305s. 8d. [recte 1205s. 8d.]

Westbury Hundred 398s. 8d.

Whorwellsdown Hundred 768s. 8d.

Totals

£1,595 13s. 7¾d.

where-of in 15ths £1,421 6s. 1d. in 10ths £174 7s. 6¾d.

Table 2: Fiscal Units of 1334 Classified According to the Size of their Assessments

Table 3: The Most Highly Rated Fiscal Units in 1334