Alex Brayson

This work scrutinises B. P. Wolffe’s influential argument that the Yorkist «land revenue experiment» transformed the English crown’s finances. It pioneers quantitative estimates of the Yorkist royal budget which emphasise the limited net gains derived from the crown’s resumption of alienated lands. This demonstrates that Sir John Fortescue’s concept of the king «living of his own» did not afford a realistic blueprint for how a fifteenth-century government should manage its finances. Fortescue’s fiscal writings instead seem to constitute an ideological treatise in favour of a low tax regime on behalf of a county squirarchy which had been faced with a relatively heavy lay tax burden across the recession of the mid-fifteenth century. These themes demonstrate the intellectual rigour of the «Bonney-Ormrod model of fiscal change», which accounts for cases of historical fiscal systemic regression from «tax» to «domain» states, as occurred in Yorkist England, just as much as it does cases of systemic fiscal advancement characteristic of much of early modern Western Europe.

This is the second of a two-part article on the later medieval Cumberland outlaw ballad of Adam Bell, the first of which appeared in last year's Transactions (2021). Whilst Part 1 focused on the narrative and far North-Western provenance of Bell during the early-to-mid Lancastrian era, Part 2 considers the similarities between Bell and Robin Hood, the classic exemplar of later medieval outlaw balladry. It is argued that there are similarities between the two ballads in terms of their propagation of the common theme of outlaws operating in and around a forest setting for entertainment purposes. However, the narrative, socio-political and ideological differences between the earliest Robin Hood tales and the Adam Bell tale are emphasised.

This is the first of a two-part article which provides a detailed historicisation of the later medieval outlaw ballad of Adam Bell. It draws upon textual and contextual evidence to demonstrate that Bell reflects the socio-political conditions prevalent in early 15th century Cumberland. In particular, there are shown to be striking similarities between the violence depicted in Bell and that which was prevalent in Carlisle and its environs at this time. These themes raise doubts regarding conventional scholarly attempts to view Bell as an appendage of the later medieval Robin Hood tales, which will be discussed comparatively in the second part of this article to be published in the next issue of Transactions,

The experimental parliamentary subsidy on knights’ fees and freehold incomes from lands and rents of 1431 was the only English direct lay tax of the Middle Ages which broke down.  As such, this subsidy has a clear historiographical significance, yet previous scholars have tended to overlook it on the grounds that parliament’s annulment act of 1432 mandated the destruction of all fiscal administrative evidence.  Many county assessments from 1431-2 do, however, survive and are examined for the first time in this article as part of a detailed assessment of the fiscal and administrative context of the knights’ fees and incomes tax.  This impost constituted a royal response to excess expenditures associated with Henry VI’s “Coronation Expedition” of 1429-31, the scale of which marked a decisive break from the fiscal-military strategy of the 1420s.  Widespread confusion regarding whether taxpayers ought to pay the feudal or the non-feudal component of the 1431 subsidy characterised its botched administration.  Industrial scale under-assessment, moreover, emerged as a serious problem.  Officials’ attempts to provide a measure of fiscal compensation by unlawfully double-assessing many taxpayers served to increase administrative confusion and resulted in parliament’s annulment act of 1432.  This had serious consequences for the crown’s finances, since the regime was saddled with budgetary and debt problems which would ultimately undermine the solvency of the Lancastrian state.

This article provides a radical new approach to the fiscal collapse of the late Lancastrian state prior to the Wars of the Roses.  Whereas previous historians have sought to locate the origins of the infamous £372,000 royal debt declared before parliament in 1449-50 in the short-term fiscal political context of Henry VI’s troubled kingship during the late 1440s, the current article demonstrates the development of a longer-term structural crisis in the public finances.  During Henry VI’s early majority in the late 1430s and early 1440s, parliamentary-controlled income declined markedly as a result of historically low indirect tax yields and MPs’ unwillingness, at a time of growing socio-economic problems, to respond to the king’s personal fiscal overtures and concede the required level of lay taxation to fund heavy expenditures.  Consequently, a growing annual deficit characterised all areas of the royal budget, whilst the total annual average fiscal deficit doubled.  By the close of the early majority as government gravitated towards Henry VI’s court, total debt was already well in excess of £300,000.  Viewed in the context of R. J. Bonney and W. M. Ormrod’s ‘new’ fiscal historiography, these developments signify that the political and economic limits of the medieval English ‘tax state’ had been reached, thus paving the way for a structural fiscal regression to a low yield ‘domain’ state from the 1450s.

Influenced by the “new” fiscal historiographical agenda of the 1990s, this article pioneers a radical reconstruction of the Yorkist-era royal budget.  This demonstrates that the increased role of demesne revenues managed by the royal chamber in financing total expenditures under Edward IV, which was famously applauded by B. P. Wolffe, signally failed to provide for long-term fiscal stability. The removal of Edward’s French pension in 1483 led to a substantial deficit which compelled Richard III to contravene his brother’s pledge to “live of his own”. Richard’s sustained attempts, during 1483-4, to resurrect and revise controversial late Lancastrian attempts to secure permanent lay taxation failed, in a general climate of hostility to Ricardian rule. This resulted in a series of desperate royal attempts, in 1484-5, to levy loans, and to reform the administration of the chamber and the exchequer, prior to the early Tudors’ restoration of a “tax state” capable of funding an explosion in expenditures.

This article is the first detailed examination of the English parishes and knights' fees tax of 1428, based upon parliamentary and exchequer material. It demonstrates that the house of commons insisted upon granting this novel tax, in place of a more financially burdensome fifteenth and tenth, during the financial crisis of 1427–8. The parishes and knights' fees tax was efficiently administered, notwithstanding some local complications, although its yield was not commensurate with the scale of the crown's financial needs by the late fourteen-twenties. This provides a unique insight into the origins of the well-documented late Lancastrian fiscal crisis.