The taxation of 1297: a translation of the local rolls of assessment for Barford, Biggleswade and Flitt hundreds, and for Bedford, Dunstable, Leighton Buzzard and Luton

Church Street, Shillington

photo: Clive Makin

About this volume

The introduction explains the method of taxation in the thirteenth century. By the 1290s, taxes were levied as a fixed proportion of the value of a person’s goods: a ninth, a fifteenth, a thirtieth or other fraction, as ordered. The proportion in 1297 was a ninth. The rolls transcribed here contain a valuation of stock, crops and other goods, followed by their total value and the amount to be paid in tax.

An account of the circumstances of the 1297 tax is given. There is an analysis of the returns for Bedfordshire, with tables, and a commentary on what was omitted from the assessment. The returns are translated into English and a glossary has been added to explain how Latin terms have been translated.

There is also a translation of the collection of a fifteenth for Shillington in 1301.

About the author(s)

A. T. Gaydon (1)

Alec T. Gaydon (1929-1974) was an historian. He worked in the Gloucestershire County Record Office in the 1950s and was editor of the VCH Shropshire in the 1960s. Although many of his publications were local to Gloucestershire and Shropshire, he also wrote Bedfordshire letters of Bunyan’s day, with P. L. Hull, a pamphlet published by Bedfordshire County Council in 1955.

Reviews

‘Gaydon presents a translation not of the usual, summary county rolls that went to the exchequer but rather of the much more rarely preserved and printed local rolls which include the sub-assessors’ detailed analysis of each taxed individual’s taxable possession. … These rolls are translated rather than edited. This may make them seem less valuable to some scholars, but they have the great advantage of being immediately available to the timid-Latinist student. … The hard caution and exact figuring of Gaydon’s carefully produced text and his spare, incisive introduction are more potently evocative even of peasant life – Robert Brentano, Speculum, vol. 35 (1960), p.115-16.

Publication details

The taxation of 1297: a translation of the local rolls of assessment for Barford, Biggleswade and Flitt hundreds, and for Bedford, Dunstable, Leighton Buzzard and Luton, by A. T. Gaydon. Streatley, BHRS, 1959. xxxvi, 126p. BHRS vol. 39

Out of print

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Keywords

Barford hundred (1)

Bedford (17)

Biggleswade hundred (1)

Dunstable (7)

Flitt hundred (1)

Leighton Buzzard (5)

Luton (14)

Shillington (3)