The Lay Subsidy of 1524-5 (1)

The Lay Subsidy of 1524-5 (1) see also (2)

This national taxation measure was approved by Parliament in 1523, to raise money for war to be waged with France and Scotland (who else!), and with a hoped for total of £800,000 as its aim. As with previous countrywide levies, it was based on the value of lands held and rented out (where this was the major source of income), on movable goods (where these served the same purpose) and on wages for men of labouring or servant status. Land was assessed at twelve pence (12d) in the pound (£), equalling one shilling (1s), and movable goods at twelve pence in the pound for values above £20 and at six pence in the pound for those worth from £2 to £20. Wage earners who received £1 or more per annum had to pay four pence and aliens (foreign incomers) double that amount at eight pence. The latter were also liable for double payment on goods.

As with earlier taxations, the movable goods are noted as consisting of livestock (particularly cattle and sheep) and major field crops, with wheat and barley being almost certainly the most important of these for their use in making bread and brewing beer. It is noticeable that five of the richest Lowestoft merchants in the first part of the table below (these being indicated in bold font) were mainly involved in fishing activity and maritime trade, rather than in agricultural endeavour – though they would also have held land as well, either renting it out or having it worked for them. Lowestoft’s economy, like most other urban ones of the time, was of a mixed nature and the men chiefly engaged in sea-related pursuits would not have held sufficient areas of the parish’s soil to have that as the main means of assessing the tax due from them to the Crown. Therefore, their movable goods would presumably have included stock-in-trade items connected with fishing, fish-curing and coastal and cross-North Sea trade.

As with many other things relating to the past, it is often hard to get a full picture of what was being done at the time. And the matter of “movable goods” as a means of calculating individual wealth and relating solely to agricultural practice will certainly not provide the whole picture in mainly urban (rather than rural) communities– especially those with a strong maritime connection.

Table 1: 1524 Lowestoft Subsidy List

•  All names are given in modern spelling format.
•  There is a break in the sequence of tax-payers at this point, separated by the editor’s following comment: “Here a part of the membrane is torn off. The valuations and payments of ten persons can be read, but not their names. Their valuations are £1; £8; £4; £8; £2; £30; £12; £2; £16; £10. The one pounder pays 4d in the £, the thirty pounder pays a shilling, and the rest 6d. Their payments amount to £3:1:4. The payers of about £5: 15: 0 appear to be lost altogether.”
• The person paying the sum of 4d in the pound on £1 wealth was a wage-earner; the two people paying 6d in the pound on £2 were either upper-level wage-earners or lower-level craftsmen/traders; everyone else paying 6d was a merchant or tradesman of varying status; and the shilling in the pound contributor was a substantial merchant.

• This is where the 1524 list ends, with the total sum collected of £35 18s 7d stated at the bottom of the column indicating the individual sums paid by 122 named people and the ten missing ones. Small supplementary sums (referred to as oblites and increments) totalling £1 7s 10d are included, without reference to what the terms mean. The original document is set out as two columns: the first one consisting of the information presented in the first three columns of the table, the second showing the sums of money paid. In the published version of the text, there then follows an editorial note from Sydenham Hervey, the transcriber: “The printed items fall short of this total by about £5: 15: 0, the roll being imperfect. I here give an extract from the roll 180/141, being for the second year’s return of this subsidy, which will more or less supply the deficiency in the first year’s return.”

• The end of the Lowestoft data has an editor’s note, to the effect that the sums of money paid in his 1525 supplement add up to £7 11s 8d, which is larger than the £5 15s 0d he remarked upon at the end of the 1524 list.
• The six names in bold font in the first part of the table, together with the anonymous sum of £30, show that these seven persons paid 58% of the town’s 1524 total tax liablility. They represent 14% of the people referred to in the goods categoryin the 1524 list and just over 5% of all the names recorded (including the ten missing).
• John Jettor Jnr. has the editor’s appendage [sic] against his valuation, implying that £101 is perhaps an error. It may be that he had entered another tax-band and that the extra £1 worth of goods cost him £1 more in tax.
• Though not stated as such, it is likely that the wage-earners following the names of John Jettor Jnr. and Robert Hodds Snr. may well have been these men’s servants. Both taxpayers are in a category of assessment described as “remarkable” in N. Amor, Late Medieval Ipswich (Woodbridge, 2011), p. 37 – the example cited here being a foreign merchant named John Vancleve, who also paid tax on £100 worth of movable goods. 
• Ralph Dean, John Fairweather, John Harman and Geoffrey Lobbes are names given in both the 1524 and 1525 data, with identical assessments and payments recorded. This may mean that payment had not been made first time round and was being collected the following year.
• Towards the end of the 1525 supplement, it would appear that Martin Cornelius (as an alien) paid double his double-amount of tax due. It should have been 7s on £7 worth of goods. Similarly, Lucas Martinson seems to have paid the same rate as native-born taxpayers, as his alien’s contribution should have been 12s. Sydenham Hervey (the editor) makes no comment on either person’s payment.
• Use of an asterisk throughout all parts of the table indicates surnames to be found in the 1568 Lay subsidy.
• Only seven women are recorded as tax-payers (4% of the total number of 172 people referred to in the table). Four of them were widows taxed on movable goods, while two more were probably widows also, having assessments based on legacies. The remaining one (taxed on movable goods) could have been either married or single and possibly running her own business enterprise. Female servants and menials do not feature in the assessment. 
• Any attempt to calculate a possible population for the town using the 1524 list only and ignoring the editor’s concluding supplement (added to make up for a shortfall of £5 15s 0d on the amount collected) can not be attempted. If the 132 named taxpayers and the ten unnamed ones are added to the 144 recorded a year later in 1525 – the latter not forming part of the editor’s transcription – the total of 286 adults would produce 1,358 inhabitants, using an approved family-size demographic multiplier of 4.75. However, this raw figure does not take into account the unknown number of people needing to be eliminated from the reckoning: namely, women and foreign nationals resident in the town. And then there is the matter of “double recording” to be factored in, since (as has been observed in the fifth note above) four of the names in the editor’s supplement feature in the original 1524 list. The best that can be achieved is to apply a 20% downward corrective, which would give a population of 1,086 people. By the end of the 16th century, using parish register burial data to produce observable death-rates as a means of calculation, the number had increased to about 1,500. 

In addition to the utilitarian function of the table to show a community’s tax liability in 1524 (interesting as that may be), there is much data incorporated that is of value in presenting a more detailed picture of Lowestoft in the third decade of the sixteenth century. It is significant that surnames listed in two previous taxations – the Hundred Roll of 1274 and Lay Subsidy 1327, respectively – have scarcely any replication in the table above (Allenand Steyngatebeing the two exceptions, with the possibility of Deanhaving derived from Deacon). Nor is there any notable presence of surnames belonging to the men recorded in connection with the town’s maritime activity during the 14th and 15th centuries. The Boofs, the Boulds, the Grymes, the Lacys, the Palmers, the Pyes, the Reynalds, the Ryveshales, the Tutelers and the Wymers – community leaders, many of them – are not to be found. Only the Bochers [Butchers] and the Steyngates are visible – the latter family running all the way through from the 1274 Hundred Roll. The Black Death would have taken its toll of all families at the time of its first appearance (1349), but a number of the names are to be found after the ravages of this most destructive epidemic, as well as before. So what had occurred to create the turn-over in population by 1524?

The answer probably lies in human mobility, which is evident is Suffolk from the thirteenth century onwards and was caused by a number of factors noted by Mark Bailey in his overview of the county, Medieval Suffolk 1200-1500 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 36, 42 & 54. Firstly, the high rate of free tenancy recorded at Domesday (estimated to be as high as 45% of all land-holding, against a national average of 14%) created individual freedom of choice and the ability to move from place to place. Then there was the relatively low degree of villein tenancy (c. 20% of the county total), which resulted in lesser numbers of people tied to their manors and unable to move as they might wish to. And, finally, there was a substantial (but unquantifiable) proportion of the lower orders who were landless and therefore rented small holdings as best they could on a short-term basis, before moving on somewhere else. Following the ravages of the Black Death, and its great demographic, economic and social dislocation, the opportunity (or compulsion) to change one’s surroundings probably increased further. Lowestoft’s fortunes had burgeoned from c. 1300 onwards through activity based on fishing and seaborne trade, and this upturn in economic enterprise would have acted like a magnet, drawing in people endowed with practical skills from both near at hand and from further afield.

A scrutiny of the 1524-5 Subsidy record relating to the half-hundreds of Lothingland and Mutford suggests that a number of the Lowestoft tax-payers may well have had antecedents in the surrounding parishes. For instance, the name Allen is to be found in Pakefield; Annot in Southtown; Arnold in Blundeston and Carlton Colville; Bache in Gorleston; Barker in Bradwell, Kirkley and Pakefield; Booty in Gunton and Oulton; Chancellor in Herringfleet; Coe in Somerleyton; Fairweather in Corton, Gorleston, Fritton, Hopton and Oulton; Fowler in Kirkley; Hill in Kessingland and Pakefield; Holland in Mutford; Nestlyn in Corton and Rushmere; Thompson in Carlton Coalville and Kirkley; White in Gorleston; and Wilde in Carlton Colville, Corton, Kessingland and Rushmere. Moving further away southwards, down the coast, the Dunwich bailiffs’ accounts of the early fifteenth century not only have Arnold and Chancellor, but Cooper, James and Wright also. If there were the time and opportunity to do so, a wider area of search would no doubt yield even more recognisable surnames.

There is little or no way of accurately assessing of the turn-over of population during the medieval period, and it is not until the introduction of parish registers during the 16th century and the listingsof residents sometimes made in communities during the 17th and 18th that calculating such movement can be done. In Lowestoft’s case, it is possible to estimate from registermaterial (using marriage and baptism data, and burial entries to a lesser degree) that, between 1561 and 1730, 25% of the town’s population had a residencyperiod of three years or less and 33% one of twelve years or less. The mobile element of the population, on the evidence of occupational references given in the registers, consisted largely of servants, labourers, lesser tradespeople and artisans, with a small number of gentry thrown in. Very little information is given as to the places of origin of these people, but a book of settlement orders (beginning in 1698 and ending in 1769) provides crucial insight. It reveals that, for the first three decades of the eighteenth century, most of the inward migration came from places within a fifteen-mile radius of Lowestoft, with the strongest “pull” exerted by the town on local parishes lying within a five-mile distance. And that may also have been largely the case in medieval times. 

Having noted that there is very little tie-up between the surnames of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth century and those of the 1524-5 Subsidy, there is not a great deal between Henry VIII’s taxation and that of his daughter Elizabeth in 1568. The latter records 112 names (seven of them women), with a total sum of £34 19s 8d collected. On the evidence of parish register entries, the people taxed do not constitute a full head of population by any means and the way they were selected is not known. Given that there is a gap of only forty-four years between the two subsidies, there is not a great deal of overlap in the surnames recorded, which again suggests continuing turn-over of population as people moved from place to place for whatever reasons motivated them. In the case of the lower orders(especially servants and labourers), it was probably a matter of moving on to find improved conditions of employment, while craftsmen and tradespeople(including merchants) would either have gone to where more money could be made or to where they might elevate their social standing on the strength of the wealth they had accrued in their previous place of residence.

In terms of surname replication, the following ones are to be found in both lists: Allen, Annot, Arnold, Barnard, Chancellor, Cornelius, Drawer, Gilbank, Hatch, Hill, Holland, James, Jettor, Scarlet, Shotsham, White, Wilde and Woodshed. The total of eighteen represents about 12% of the overall number of surnames listed in the 1524-5 data and one of the people taxed at that time was still alive, living in the town and paying tax, in 1568: Thomas Annot (merchant). Robert Barnard (shipwright) is another possibility, but his presence cannot be proved as that of the other man is able to be. Annot had increased his wealth and status since his earlier days, paying £2 13s 4d on lands worth £40 a year – the most heavily taxed by far of all Lowestoft citizens. He was into the final decade of his long life and his burial is recorded on 15 November 1577. Another link may be seen with William Wilde, son of the man who had paid 1s on £2 goods in 1524 – the year that he was born. Wilde paid 6s 8d on goods worth £8 in 1568 and did not die until 23 March 1611 at the age of eighty-seven years, being buried two days later. Thomas Annot’s grave slab is located behind the organ, at the end of the north aisle in St. Margaret’s Church; that of William Wilde, which recorded the date of death and his age and said that he “lived harmless as a child”, is no longer present in the middle aisle as it once was.

Both men represent the best in the civic responsibility shown by certain people of their time. Annot, who was the end of his male line (having no living sons), is best known for endowing a free grammarschool for forty local boys in June 1570, while Wilde was the founding father of a family which remained in Lowestoft for over 200 years and gave dedicated service to the town in all kinds of ways – including, eventually, a free grammar schoolof their own. The latter was established in principle by the will of John Wilde in July 1735, but the testator’s intention was not carried out until 1781 owing to the longevity of a particular legatee. The building in which the school was once housed is still in existence (located on Wilde’s Score, off the High Street), currently serving as the headquarters of the Lowestoft Heritage Workshop Centre. It is fitting in some respects that both of these schools (which had changed radically from their original intention and form) were eventually amalgamated, thereby merging two notable charitable acts, and the work of education continued in enlarged premises until bomb damage sustained during World War Two effectively brought it to an end.

As a conclusion to this article, the following table gives a summary of the payments made in 1524 by the inhabitants of the Mutford and Lothingland half-hundreds. Both jurisdictions have the data presented in “league table” fashion, set out in descending order on the amount of tax paid by each township, so as to give some idea of the relative size of local communities at the time in terms of population and economic strength.

Table 2: Local Area 1524 Subsidy Payment

• The asterisks used in the second part of the table indicate six communities in Lothingland which have certain personal names listed, but no indication of the amount of tax paid by those particular individuals.
• Barnby is included in Mutford Half-hundred this particular taxation list, but did not feature in that of 1327.
• Both Flixton and Newton are missing from the Lothingland list – the former possibly being subsumed in Oulton (with which it was combined in the 1327 Subsidy). Oulton was a post-Domesday community which grew in size at Flixton’s expense and reduced it to a diminished parish on its northern boundary. Its inclusion in the Oulton data would help to account for the latter’s third-place position in the Lothingland list. Newton was a parish to the east of Hopton, greatly reduced in size by coastal erosion. Never large in size (as seen in the Domesday Survey of 1086 and in its absence from the 1327 Subsidy data), it might have been included with Hopton.
• The higher number of taxpayers (and therefore the larger size of population reflected by this) did not always lead to a greater tax burden. For instance, in Mutford Half-hundred, Carlton (Colville) with 45 taxpayers paid £1 3s 10d less than Gisleham with 20 – which was the result of the latter place having two of its inhabitants (Robert Collett and Thomas Hollok) paying £3 13s 4d between them. Then, in Lothingland (and perhaps even more striking) Belton with 24 taxpayers contributed £1 2s 4d less than Gunton with only 7 – which resulted from Robert Myghell paying a £2 liability. He was member of a family of merchants which later moved into Lowestoft and established itself for over 200 years, with the first of that line named Richard building No. 27 High Street in 1551. 
• The sum total of tax collected and paid over in the transcribed documentation Is given as £39 8s 9d for Mutford Half-hundred and £63 11s 8d for Lothingland. This compares with £39 7s 10d and £64 15s 10d in the table itself, meaning that there is an 11 pence (11d) debit discrepancy for Mutford and a £1 4s 2d credit one for Lothingland. No explanation for this can be given.
• The transcriber of the 1524 Lay Subsidy documentation, the Revd. Sydenham Henry Augustus Hervey (1846-1946), was Vicar of Wedmore – in Somerset – and a member of the family whose seat was Ickworth House in Suffolk. He was a gifted antiquarian of his time.
• All the material used in this article is to be found in his work called Suffolk in 1524 – Suffolk Green Book Series no. 10 (Woodbridge, 1910) – pp. 242-65.

CREDIT: David Butcher