Taxation and the mid‐Tudor crisis

Abstract

otions of a mid-Tudor crisis are out of fashion.' Over the past 20 years, there has been a chipping away at the doom and gloom accounts of the central decades of the sixteenth century. Periods of political instability are acknowledged, but government continued much as normal. Rebellions, whether popular as in Norfolk and the West Country in 1549, or political coups as in 1553 and 1554, were abnormal intrusions into life. The change of religion, whether to Protestantism or back to Catholicism, proceeded in a managed fashion and the latter change, we are assured, may even have been welcomed by a majority of the population. 'Conflict and sterility' is out; 'concord and creativity', albeit with caveats, is in.2 If most recent writing on the political history of the period has been relatively positive in its assessment of government achievement, the prognosis for its economic history remains gloomy. The problem here is that the central decades of the century saw one mishap after another. The currency was debased between 1542 and 1552; there were periods of harvest failure in 1545, between 1549 and 1551, and most severely between 1555 and 1557. The connection between the two was never clear to contemporaries who tended to see all 'dearth' as a matter of failures in supply and who pilloried farmers for problems which were not of their making. There may well have been problems of population growth in the early sixteenth century and population decline in 1556-8.3 There was, throughout, a concern about both rural and urban depopulation and the decay of towns. Both Palliser and Phythian-Adams have argued for a general 'urban crisis' from the 1520s through to the 1570s, the argument in part turning upon a comparison of urban population numbers deduced from the 1524-5 lay subsidies with numbers estimated from the 1563 return of communicants.4 The reality of this crisis has been treated with great scepticism by Dyer in his summary of the literature. 'It is also hard to comprehend', he writes, 'why this period should see the lowest point in the fortunes of towns when one would expect it to come rather earlier.... By the 1530s, and probably earlier, population was swinging upwards, as were agricultural prices, while the