shortly after william the conquerer came to power he initiated something known as ‘the doomsday book’- he sent envoys to survey his new lands to record the properties he now controlled so they could pay accurate taxes. every acre of field, every mill, livestock, buildings and their relative size- all would be recorded to determine the wealth of each settlement so a percentage could be expected as rent. for an example of what this book meant; the previous king was aware of and collected taxes from about 20 grain mills in england, william’s audit shot that number above 200. you dont know the meaning of ‘pedantic’ untill you start reading about medieval grain mills, theres a church that paved its floor with confiscated ‘illegal’ millstones to ensure that the town had to get its flour from the church’s official mill and one war simply about stealing the same millstone back and fourth for quite a few decades
of course word of these envoys traveled faster then they did, virtually every town they came to had time to claim they had far less taxable wealth then they actually did have by the time the audit arrived. in one of the more over the top cases an entire village pretended to have caught insanity- when the taxmen arrived they saw screaming laughing idiots with underwear on their heads so they left as fast as they could considering at the time insanity was thought to be literally contagious. it would be over five years before anyone tried to audit that town again. its safe to assume a large number of other villages also had sudden cases of strange diseases, mysteriously disappearing cows, or very large shrubberies and haybales shaped like buildings and you dont need to look over that hill either. thats not even touching how many small communities just plain didnt technically exist because they were too small, somewhere weird, or in legal limbo of who owned it
of course when the feudal part of feudalism started moving its gears you found that the local lord of that village was unlikely to divulge the exact amount of rents they could collect to THEIR lord either, knowing that the more they admitted to receiving the more they were expected to hand over. this was not exclusive to england either, the more you learn about feudalism the more you have to ask how all these minor lords out in the boonies kept having the money and soldiers to do all the political intrigue bullshit, the answer is also tax evasion. each village kept claiming it had fewer people living in shittier houses with less land and fewer livestock then they actually had, and each local lord kept claiming they were receiving less rents then they actually took so were also adverse to an accurate audit.
their knowledge of tax loopholes also extended to finding out that clergymen were either exempt from tax or received a far lower rate of tax, so proving you qualified as a clergyman was an endeavor that paid dividends. specifically to prove you were clergy you proved that you could read and write enough Latin to satisfy an official, so you could spend some money to hire someone to tutor you enough Latin to fake it. its estimated that due to this fully ten percent of medieval english households wrote ‘clergy’ on their tax forms.
another and even more extreme example was the peasants revolt of 1381, london was swarmed by the unwashed masses from all sides instigated by an official trying to collect (a lot of) unpaid poll taxes, an angry mob driving a teenaged king Richard II to retreat to a boat in the river, and culminating with 1500 peasants being executed by an emergency militia. this doesn’t sound like a huge success untill you dig into some of the details- peasants from a large number of villages all arrived at london at the same time, leaving dedicated forces specifically to stop ships from acessing london to break the siege, the peasants executed a select number of court officials and started burning paperwork- but systematically only burning the ones detailing who owned plots of land, debt records, and a few criminal records. the peasants who besieged london and scared the king into the river had successfully purged a whole lot of debts and reclaimed a lot of land in one very ballsy and highly coordinated move that relied on them being seen as illiterate dirt farmers with no ulterior motives besides pitchfork mob riot and trying to kiss the queen mother while they touch everything in the tower of london with their grimy hands
found it. this is… this is amazing. I did a BA in Medieval British History and we never, ever, once considered this. Not once. At a major Canadian university.
jfc this changes my entire brain
Any sources on this? I’d like to use them for a paper I’m working on.
okay, ive been INNUNDATED by people asking me this and i dont really have a good way to address all of the questions. partially because thats surprisingly harder then youd expect
firstly- im absurdly over read. im the kind of nutjob that reads this for fun so i have the hurdle of trying to remember which of 200 plus sources im actually drawing from and it doesnt help that asking this makes me doubt sources that i already checked for credibility before i even read them in the first place. i have a LOT of background radiation that ive spent years checking for expiration dates as i keep replacing knowlege, and its hard to dig up the papers (yeah, actual research papers, im that much of a nerd) that im thinking of because their naming/searching system is also crap. theres a dearth of cool shit i read but have no hope of finding again on command
secondly- when you get into ‘history’ fact hunting you repeatedly run into a bibliography issue where you find that your source cites a source that cites a source that itself is dubious, or that you have thirty sources that all cite the same source thats been proven wrong. this is probably the hurdle -you- have to smash through as well, a handy default is to give prefference to any newer source that actively challenges the pre concieved notion- as they had to explain and give reasons as to why previous notions were wrong
with that out of the way there are a few good places to -start- in digging up the decidedly NON whitewashed versions of history. seriously, if you like my rants you probably are in love with the idea that all of human history was full of actual live assholes instead of clean respectable boring statues.
firstly, ‘medieval lives’ by Terry Jones. Terry is your best friend. name sound familliar? yeah, after monty python he became one of the leading historians simply by accepting the possibility that people in the middle ages actually had lives and thus actually started scrutinizing beliefs that had been considered fact for nearly a century. this is the go-to book of his to start with. its entirely possible that this was thought of -because- of monty python putting in the idea that people were just as much twats back then, as you can see from my rant that basically paints half of village elders, knights, and barons as basically being Grunkle Stan wearing wollen hose (probably the most accurate way to think about it, considering a society based on that makes just too much sense)
its divided by chapter based on what class in society you were looking at- peasants, jesters, monks, knights, women; which is super handy because one of the chief problems with historians is they only bother to find out what the king was doing and not the 99.9% rest of the population was up to. supplement this with the documentary version as well, hes also got some very informative information on the crusades (he kind of put out the allegation that king richard had mainly gone on them to follow his bedroom budy the king of france) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_oYlqav7eA
while on the subject of doccumentaries you can also check out basically anything by Mike Loades, particularly his history channel ‘going medieval’ special which keeps going on and off youtube due to third party issues but is exquisite as it deals with all medieval life not just what the royals were up to. seriously follow this guy on facebook, he posts such beautiful historical reenactment photos of any weapon or horse he finds. Mike is predominant because he engages on living recreations of what hes investigating to test it out and gets as many sources of his own as he can- that ‘going medieval’ special includes such things as examining soaps used, common clothing styles, what kind of foods someone with a bit of land might use for a party, agriculture observations, and a forray into falconry that shows how many phrases in the english language are because of danger-birds. Mike is also the author of several books although they chiefly feature warfare logistics- a lot of other bits of medieval life make more sense when you piece together how logistics work, for example i have a separate rant on how the adoption of the english longbow forked up the feudal system and the legend of robin hood is actually a very specific story of exactly how it fell apart screwing over everyone in england, and made france invent french toast in rebuttal (another installment of sounds like i made it up but im not)
he was quite irritated at that stunt archer claiming to have ‘re discovered’ forgotten techniques a full two years after this book was published- also that stunt archer was using a bow of 40 pounds or less draw, whereas any bow for war would have been well over double that, typically between 100 and 150. this dude deserves a knighthood for his absolute gusto
you may notice much of that is -essays-, a lot of people bump into that and mistakenly think theyve come across a dump of someones homework; but keep in mind that college professors (a sizable portion of Tolkein’s work is considered ‘essays’, as well as Douglas Adams, dont assume theyre all stale boring tripe) write a shitload of essays and sometimes they are absolutely glorious in their ability to ask a question nobodys asked before or to connect two things nobody has connected yet (i recommend reading larry nivens ‘man of steel, woman of kleenex’ if you need to injure yourself snorting). i could do some good ones myself if i got over my horrible, horrible mistreatment of commas, airquotes,
parentheses, and reliance on crassly colorful language (though i swear very seldom, i may use a euphemism about an anus from time to time)
another bizzare tip would be to find some (gasp) textbooks. weird, right? this one is beyond ironic as so many of us who have gone to college had to pay for textbooks we barely covered. assuming we even got to take the plastic off of it we typically only got to open 1/3 of the individual chapters for anything and of that only included about 1/6th of that chapter in the course material. well i spent money on those cursed textbooks so damned if i didnt actually read the rest of the chapters and was honestly surprised some of it actually contained information i enjoyed learning amdist all the regurgitated date/name soup. the deal also is ‘this class taught me nothing about india’ but the book had whole chapters on it, class content and book content only lightly overlap. if you dont have spare textbooks laying around dont worry, people are literally throwing them away if theyre over six months old because the institution of college is a broken scam, used bookstores practically use them as carpeting, you can likely find one from within the last 10 years for less then a sandwitch (do avoid any textbooks printed in the 90s or earlier, they have a bad case of citing sources from the 60s or earlier without critical thought)
another great standalone book is ‘lies, damned lies, and history’, i highly recommend even just for fun
anyone still reading after all of this? if folks actually like me ranting im happy to respond and very glad most people have been very polite about asking me where the hell i got all this instead of dissing or being accusatory that im full of shit (im barely half full) and if theres more anyone would want me to engage in rant mode let me know, my inbox is open and im grossly over educated even if its hard to track down where i get it from after eating all these books
just moving along like everyone else 