ABSTRACT
It was an accepted principle that the king should only tax his people for the needs of war or in other exceptional circumstances, and through the consent of parliament. In fact an Act of 1483 declared that non-parliamentary taxation was illegal. Parliamentary opposition to taxation concentrated on restricting the total amount granted and the way in which the money should be levied and spent. However, in their search for ways of extending England’s antiquated tax system beyond the ‘fifteenth and tenth’, the early Tudors determinedly pressed parliament into granting a new form of taxation levied not by the traditional fixed valuations of whole communities, worked out for the fifteenth and tenth back in 1334, but on regular reassessments of individuals: these taxes were known as subsidies. It was easy for individuals to feel angry at an apparently arbitrary demand made under the new system: it is significant that in 1489 and 1497, and again in 1536, it was a subsidy rather than a fifteenth and tenth that caused anger.
