Taxation Under The Early Tudors 1485-1547

Societies, according to Schofield (senior research associate, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, UK), are constrained in the kinds of taxes they can levy by the nature of their economic resources and by their levels of administrative skill, as well as by their political ability to enforce the essential coercion of taxes. He examines the failed Tudor experiment with direct assessment of each individual for what it can reveal about the changing political limits of the Tudor state, and of changing notions regarding constitutional concepts of obligation and consent. For Schofield, the eventual failure of the levy is not surprising, what is remarkable is the initial ability of the Tudor state to gain the acquiescence of the leading social classes to obtaining valuations of that were relatively accurate. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Roger Schofield is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Statistical Society and the British Academy. He is Senior Research Associate of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. He was previously editor of the journal Population Studies and is the co-author of The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (1981) and English Population History from Family Reconstitution (1997).