THE GREAT CONTRACT OF 1610: PROPERTY, TAXATION, AND THE BACKGROUND OF FAILURE (ENGLAND, WALES).

摘要

The Great Contract of 1610 failed because the landholders of England and Wales would not meet the price of reform agreed upon in Parliament. The subject had much to gain from consummation of a bargain that included the near obliteration of feudal tenures, the abolition of wardship, purveyance, and informers, and many legal reforms. But the landholders feared far more what they might lose. Extensive examination of manuscripts, particularly the Additional, Harleian, Lansdowne (especially the papers of Sir Julius Caesar), and Rawlinson collections, as well as the State Papers, other collections, and printed sources reveals an intriguing dilemma. There was general agreement in the counties that serious reform of the feudal system of land tenures was necessary. The Earl of Salisbury offered to give up many of the Crown's feudal, fiscal, and legal advantages in return for an annual income of (POUNDS)200,000. The country would receive relief from these burdens in return for paying an annual tax. However, analysis of several contemporary papers and three tax schemes reveals two questions that contemporaries could not resolve: who should pay and how much should they be assessed? The solution would be to conduct a survey of all the lands of England and Wales in order to determine who held what land, what the value of an estate was, and what an equitable tax would be for each individual. But the consequences of such a survey (disputed claims, expensive legal battles, and the discovery of illegal or questionable holdings such as assart lands and defective titles) were potentially too disastrous for the landed classes to agree to the royal offer. Close analysis of the sources shows that contemporaries were keenly aware of the threat to the current economic, social, and political order posed by any attempt to conduct the land survey which the establishment of an annual tax system would entail. Thus the failure of the Great Contract seems to have become inevitable even before Salisbury laid his proposals before Parliament.