In 1051 Edward the Confessor abolished heregeld and saved money by selling off his navy, giving the responsibility of naval defense to the Cinque ports in return for various privileges. The amount due from each hide was variable. This tax used similar machinery for collection as Danegeld and was again based on the number of hides a tenant had. Later, after the conquest of England by Sweyn's son Cnut the Great, the geld was continued. The reinforced military was needed, in the face of an invasion of England, by King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark. The year 1012 saw the introduction of the geld or heregeld (literally "army tax"), an annual tax first assessed by King Æthelred the Unready to pay for mercenaries in the army and navy. Despite all these changes, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records payment of £132,000 in tribute to the Scandinavian attackers from 991 to 1012. All profits from these actions went to the king and were a royal right. Long after Alfred's death, his great-grandson Edgar developed the tax system further by periodically recalling and reminting all the coinage, with the moneyers being forced to pay for new dies. The Burghal Hidage contains a list of over thirty fortified places and the taxes, recorded as numbers of hides, assigned for their maintenance. To fund all of these changes Alfred required a new system of tax and conscription that is contained in a document, now known as the Burghal Hidage. He also updated the traditional fyrd to provide a standing army and navy. After his victory over them at the Battle of Edington (878), he set about building a system of fortified towns or forts, known as burhs. In the 9th century Alfred the Great confronted the Viking problem. The tax was known as Danegeld and was used to pay the raiders off rather than fight. With increasing problems from raiding Vikings, the Anglo-Saxon leaders raised taxes, also based on the landholding(or hidage) of their tenants. Tenants had a threefold obligation, based on their landholding, they had to provide manpower for the so-called "common burdens" of military service, fortress work, and bridge repair. Over time the hide became the unit on what all public obligation was assessed. Initially, the size of the hide varied according to the value and resources of the land itself. In early Anglo-Saxon England, the hide was used as the basis for assessing the amount of food rent (known as feorm) due from an area. Coinage became a royal right and was probably introduced to make payment of taxes easier. Charters from the time of King Offa of Mercia show that tolls were collected on trade, and it was during Offa's reign that coinage in silver pennies was first introduced into Anglo-Saxon England. A document from the 7th or 8th century, the Tribal Hidage, shows that much of the Anglo-Saxon lands had been divided into hides by that time. Although other early Anglo-Saxon kings are not mentioned as collecting taxes, the medieval writer Bede does mention that land in Anglesey and the Isle of Man were divided up in hides, defined in Ine's law as a unit of land that could be used for collecting food and other goods from the king's subjects. Other mentions of taxes are contained in the law code of King Ine of Wessex. No other forms of taxes are mentioned in Æthelberht's law code, but other forms of taxation are implied by the grant of an exemption from taxation given by another king, Wihtred of Kent, to a church. The first unequivocal mention of taxation in Anglo-Saxon England comes from the Law of Æthelberht, the law code of King Æthelberht of Kent, which specifies that fines from judicial cases were to be paid to the king. The Emperor Honorius told the Britons in 410 that they were responsible for their own defence, and from then until the landing of Augustine of Canterbury in the Kingdom of Kent in 597 as part of the Gregorian mission, little is known about Britain's governmental structures or financial systems. After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the geld continued to be collected until 1162, but it was eventually replaced with taxes on personal property and income.īritannia, the southern and central part of the island of Great Britain, was a province of the Roman Empire until the Roman departure from Britain in around 400 AD. The most important tax of the late Anglo-Saxon period was the geld, a land tax first regularly collected in 1012 to pay for mercenaries. During the Anglo-Saxon period, the main forms of taxation were land taxes, although custom duties and fees to mint coins were also imposed. Taxation in medieval England was the system of raising money for royal and governmental expenses. The initial page of Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 173, the Peterborough Chronicle, which contains the oldest surviving copy of Ine's laws.
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