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THE BURDEN OF TAXATION ON SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2001

IAN W. ARCHER
IAN W. ARCHER
Affiliation:
Keble College, Oxford
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Abstract

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This article seeks to establish the burden of direct taxation in the city of London in the sixteenth century. Previous discussions have been confined to the yield of parliamentary subsidies which cannot give a full picture because of the way responsibility for equipping military levies was increasingly devolved on to the locality. Estimates of the costs of the various additional military levies are therefore made. Innovations in parliamentary taxation enabled the crown to levy extraordinary sums in the 1540s, but they required a level of intervention by the privy council which Elizabeth's government was not prepared to make. The subsidy performed especially badly in London in the later sixteenth century. Local military rates compensated to some extent, but tax levels in real terms were very much lower in the 1590s than the 1540s. Nevertheless taxation was becoming increasingly regressive, which helps explain the greater level of complaint in the 1590s.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 2001 , pp. 599 - 627
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

Footnotes

Earlier versions of this article have been given to the Tudor seminar in Cambridge, the early modern Britain seminar in Oxford, and the sixteenth-century seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, and I am grateful to participants for their comments. It has also benefited from comments by Caroline Barron, George Bernard, Mike Braddick, Tom Cogswell, Trevor Griffiths, Steven Gunn, John Morrill, Andrew Pettegree, Conrad Russell, and Penry Williams. The accompanying web-site was designed by Vasan Seshadri.