Moveable Tax And Fiscal Revenue In Medieval England, 1166-1334

The structure of fiscal revenue of England had a significant change during thirteenth century: private revenues were replaced by public obligation ones, which became the main part of the financial revenue gradually, opened up the history of the national tax system of England.The fiscal revenue structure of England, which based on the principle of private obligation revenue, could not accord with the requirement of the public politics, ran on fiscal revenue fumes, when the public affairs manifold increasingly in late twelfth century. Altering the structure of fiscal revenue, thus, became imperative, as had two ways to conduct: change the private obligations to the public ones with the structure changed subsequently; or impose new public tax as replaced private income.The majority of revenue came from land, as other agricultural-basic societies, in feudal England. The essential of private relationship between right and obligation, and the unwritten law tradition in which everything acted by tradition, however, did not allow to change the obligation that was attached to land from private to public. The universal land tax therefore, could not to be established in England, and changed the revenue structure in the other way. Enlightened by Christianity, England imposed moveable tax by representative voting, by which instituted universal obligation on moveable. The moveable revenue decreased increasingly, only because the medieval society rejected tax which damaged private property. In terms of the decreasing, English government had to maintain the quantity of moveable tax by traditionalizing method; the moveable tax lost the increase space following the development of economy as an aftereffect, which made a foreshadowing for the king to choice indirect tax, loan, and risk danger in desperation.Incapable of executive ability, as the characteristic of feudal society, which largely related to political system, legal custom, and cultural tradition, caused the failing of land tax and traditionalizing of moveable tax directly. England was forced to take the administrating policy in the way that can not hinder the development of agricultural economy initiatively, as impuissance regime could not undertake the distribution of social wealth by force, after that the probability of the wealth accumulation of the mass increased greatly.Although both land tax and moveable tax were universal national tax, the different results between them can make a perspective to the particularity of the property rights relationship in medieval society of England, and also a forecast to the particularity of the progress of modern society development. The paper bases on the latest study of European fiscal history (Chapter one), narrates the history of the failing of land tax and the establishment of moveable tax from the second half of the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth century (Chapter two), and further analyses on traditionalizing of the moveable tax and the particularity of the national tax system in medieval England (Chapter three). It argues that the particularity of English national tax system in middle ages converges at the fact that England did not (or can not) establish universal land tax.