ABSTRACT
Despite an abundance of sources held in national and municipal archives, medieval taxation has long failed to attract researchers, partly because financial and fiscal history – as Jean-Claude Waquet wrote in 1990 – is “unanimously respected for the state secrets it penetrates, for the arid language it uses, and above all for the boredom it instils and which is a clear sign of its distinction”. Taxation is governed by a set of legal norms. Normative and regulatory documents are therefore the starting point for any analysis of taxation and fiscal management insofar as they lay the legal framework for the latter. The decrees of municipal councils, recorded in the registers of ordinances and deliberations, are an essential normative element of municipal taxation. The development and proliferation of offices for the collection of taxes also required a vast corpus of regulations to be drawn up. Accounting sources are by far the most abundant materials available to historians of medieval taxation.
