Who benefited from this system? That question is easily answered: the king and the local elite, especially noble landlords. Who paid for it – the reverse side of the issue – is a more complex question. The contribution per feu and the number of feux had both become fixed in custom by the middle of the sixteenth century, so that any increases in direct taxation had to come from immediate military necessities. The king often levied military taxes between 1562 and 1598, peaking in the period 1589–97, but in the seventeenth century, save for local levies between 1614 and 1617 and again in 1628, he rarely did so.

Brittany had some 35,000 feux but the forced sales of feuxin 1577, 1638, and 1640 sharply reduced that number. In 1577, the sales did not include the western part of the province – no sales took place in Léon, Tréguier, and Cornouaille – so the sales of 1638 fell disproportionately there. We can compare the evolution of the number of feux between 1577 and 1640 in table 22. The example of the lawsuits over the tax assessments of Gévezé (see chapter 3) indicates that, by the seventeenth century, Bretons believed that a feu represented a given amount of cultivable land, rather than a fixed number (three) of actual households. Such an interpretation may have existed from the start, because a ménage could well have been interpreted to mean a manse, defined as a given area of land, rather than as an actual household. However one chooses to define the feu, it is clear that a feu bore no relationship to population after 1550.