ABSTRACT
For several centuries after the Norman Conquest the rulers of England and their advisers devoted constant energy and ingenuity with continuing success to augmenting their financial resources by various kinds of direct and indirect taxation. The idea that ‘hereditary’ or ‘ordinary’ revenues derived from royal landed estates had formerly constituted the bedrock of English governmental finance originated in the political and legal theories of the seventeenth century. The only financial innovations in Henry IV's reign were further experiments designed to spread the incidence and increase the yield of direct taxation. The Yorkists and Henry VII were pledged to further the policies of economic, solvent government which such acts of resumption represented. The records of Henry VII’s receivers under his general surveyors of lands at the end of the period were couched in the normal, long-established form of the charge and discharge account as used in the central office of any late-medieval complex of private estates.
