Taxation

Question 1

What was taxation?

Answer 1

The most important cause of protest in early Tudor England

Question 2

What happened in 1515?

Answer 2

Henry VIII returned payments from nineteen Yorkshire towns and villages as they were so impoverished

Question 3

When was tax levied and how many people were eligible to pay?

Answer 3

Only occasionally when there was an emergency

60%

Question 4

What happened in 1489?

Answer 4

Parliament had voted to allow Henry VIII £100,000 to meet the costs of a campaign against France

Question 5

Why was the 1489 tax unfair?

Answer 5

Traditionally people in the south funded wars against France while the northern counties met the costs of defending the Scottish border

Question 6

What had Henry VII done in 1489?

Answer 6

Exempted the counties of Northumberland, Westmorland, and Cumberland on account of poverty

Question 7

Why did the Yorkshire rebels of 1489 take exception to the tax?

Answer 7

The protestors were affected by a bad harvest in 1488

The unpopular Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland was to lead the tax commission

Question 8

What happened in January 1497?

Answer 8

Parliament had voted for £60,000 to fund a war against the Scots; the grant was an innovation and the money would be levied on individuals at rates assessed by royal commissioners

Question 9

What did the chronicler Holinshed say in 1497?

Answer 9

That the rebels wanted ‘to punish those responsible for the tax imposed on the people’

Question 10

Why did the Cornish rebels of 1497 take exception to the tax?

Answer 10

Customarily wars against Scotland were paid by a scutage or land tax and only only by the northern counties

Question 11

What councillors were blamed during the Cornish rebellion of 1497?

Answer 11

John Morton, the Lord Chancellor

Reginald Bray, the king’s chief financial adviser had been responsible for finding ways to increase revenue

Question 12

What was the Amicable Grant?

Answer 12

A parliamentary tax which commissioners were ordered to collect in 1525

Question 13

What had Wolsey done in 1522?

Answer 13

Raised £260,000 in forced loans which had not yet been repaid

Question 14

What had Wolsey done in 1523?

Answer 14

Tried to get parliament to vote for a subsidy of £800,000 but only received £151,000 payable over four years

The Church was expected to pay £120,000

Question 15

What did the Grant do?

Answer 15

Made excessive demands on the laity and clergy

Question 16

Since 1513 Wolsey what had Wolsey done?

Answer 16

Introduced tax assessments based on land, income, and personal assets, and collected whichever yielded the highest tax

Question 17

What did Wolsey’s assessments end, what were the laity required to pay, and what did this mean?

Answer 17

The principle of paying a fixed rate

A tax of 5% if they were rated below £20 and 16.6% if rated above £50 a year

Many of the protestors would’ve been paying tax for the first time

Question 18

What were the clergy to pay in 1525?

Answer 18

At a rate of 25% of their annual revenue or value of their goods worth less than £10, and 33% for those above £10

Question 19

What was the economic situation in 1525?

Answer 19

There was a shortage of coinage

Rising unemployment following a fall in wool prices

Question 20

What did the Amicable Grant protestors say to the Duke of Norfolk?

Answer 20

‘since you ask who is our captain, for sooth his name is Poverty, for he and his cousin Necessity, have brought us to this doing’

Question 21

What did Item 14 of the Pontefract Articles request?

Answer 21

To ‘be discharged on the fifteenth and taxes now granted by act of parliament’

Question 22

What did the POG rebels not want to do but what was the case?

Answer 22

Pay the taxes due from the Subsidy Act of 1534

The subsidy’s yield of £80,000 was small and affected only a few people, but many claimed they couldn’t afford it

Question 23

What did the articles presented by rebels in Yorkshire argue?

Answer 23

The king was only allowed to collect taxes in defence of the realm, whereas the preamble to the Act claimed that costs incurred in defence of the realm were the same as if the country was at war

Question 24

What alarmed people in Lincolnshire?

Answer 24

Rumours that the tax was a prelude to further fiscal exactions, such as a tax on white meat and horned cattle

Question 25

What was the 1534 subsidy?

Answer 25

The only attempt to collect taxes in peacetime that had provoked a popular protest

Question 26

What were the objectives of the Duke of Somerset’s Subsidy Act of 1549?

Answer 26

To raise as much money as possible at a time of acute shortage

To encourage more farmers to return their lands to tillage

Question 27

What did the Duke of Somerset levy?

Answer 27

A tax of 1d on a sheep and 1/2d on every pound of woollen cloth

Question 28

What was the impact of the 1549 tax?

Answer 28

Hit poorer peasants and tenants most of all as wealthy clothiers and sheep farmers raised their prices to offset its cost

Question 29

Why did the Subsidy Act of 1549 add to the lists of grievances against the government?

Answer 29

The tax was due to be assessed two weeks after the introduction of the English prayer book

Question 30

What was Devon in 1549?

Answer 30

A largely enclosed county and was affected more than most