The Land Burdens of the Era. 241 



deduct certain boroughs whicli paid down a lump sum of money 

 to compound the charge, and a few churches which had been 

 able to establish a claim to entire immunity, the whole EngUsh 

 soil up to the end of the twelfth century had become subject to 

 the hidage tax. "With the trivial exception of a few merchants' 

 fines and the prisage of wine, the land sustained the entire 

 burden of national taxation. Personal property, including rent 

 incomes, first incurred indirect taxation at the Assize of Arms, 

 in 1181, when its owner's military equipment was proportioned 

 to the amount he possessed ; and the same kind of property in- 

 curred direct taxation when the Saladin tithe rendered it liable 

 to a charge of one-tenth. In 1201: the barons were paying John 

 a seventh on the value of their movables, and in 1207 the same 

 king exacted a thirteenth from the whole of the laity. 



So far all taxation on real property had been computed by the 

 hide, but in Henry the Second's reign this uncertain basis was 

 replaced either by the carucate containing a determinate area 

 of 100 acres, or by the knight's fee of 20.9. The old terms of 

 taxation, such as hidage and Danegeld, gave place to the new 

 nomenclature of carucage and scutage. No doubt owing to 

 the coincidence of dates in the disappearance and reappearance 

 respectively of the old and new names, Dr. Stubbs has rightly 

 associated Danegeld with the newly imposed carucage, and 

 hidage with scutage.^ It seems, however, more natural to 

 reverse the process, and connect the new carucage with the old 

 hidage payments and the new scutage with the old Danegeld 

 charge. For was it not Danegeld which got rid of the enemy 

 without recourse to fighting ? and was it not Scutage which, 

 for similar reasons, commuted personal military service into a 

 money equivalent ? And further, were not the hidage and 

 carucage bases theoretically identical, though practically there 

 may have been some 60 to 100 acres difference between them ? 

 Be this as it may, for the future, tenants in chivalry were liable 

 to scutage, occupiers of land to carucage, townspeople to the 

 same charge under the name of tallage, and personal property 

 to whatever percentage the fiscal authority demanded ; for this 

 tax seems to have varied every two or three years, like our 



' Stubbs, Constit. Hist., ch. xiii., p. 622. 



