The Distribution of Taxable Population and Wealth in England during the Early Sixteenth Century

Abstract

Lists oftaxpayers were compiled during the lay subsidy surveys of 524-25 and 1543-45. It is possible to map the distribution of taxpayers and the amounts of tax paid over the greater part of England, and these maps may be taken as a guide to some of the major elements in the distribution of population and wealth at that period. This paper examines the nature of the lay subsidy surveys, and discusses their limitations as source material. It is concluded that the surveys provide a framework into which the mass of more local evidence on the economy and society of Tudor England may be placed. THERE is very little information on the distribution of population and wealth in the early sixteenth century because there were no national or regional censuses. Priests did not begin to keep parish registers until I538 and many of these early records have been lost: for example, only half of the parishes in Huntingdonshire have registers going back as far as the sixteenth century.1 As a result, historians and geographers have attempted to use taxation records which relate to the greater part of England and affected a relatively high proportion of the population. J. Cornwall, for example, took samples from the muster of 1522 and the lay subsidies of 524 and i5252 and estimated a provisional population figure of 2.3 million.3 Fiscal returns must be used very carefully in this type of social and economic study for, as G. R. Elton has noted, 'studies demanding systematic records are usually handicapped, either by loss of evidence or, more seriously, by the fact that the ages in question were not interested in the statistics which the modern historian wishes to extract'.4 There is, however, no other source which is likely to help in studying the distribution of population and wealth over the greater part of the country in the early sixteenth century, and this paper will suggest ways of interpreting the taxation lists prepared for the lay subsidy returns of 1524-25 and I543-45.