SPIRITUALITIES AND TEMPORALITIES

The political relationship of Winchelsey and the Crown can be best understood if the spotlight rests on the problems of clerical taxation. Two ‘extraordinary’ taxes – taxes, that is, for which the Crown had no customary right based on feudal or tenurial relations – had grown to a position of outstanding importance by the closing decades of the thirteenth century: the taxes on personal property, or ‘lay movables’, and the taxes on clerical income. The two were quite distinct in the processes of granting, assessing and collecting. Consent was given to taxes on lay property in parliament. Taxes on clerical income granted directly to the king were, naturally, the concern of the clergy. Sometimes the clergy granted taxes in parliament (as for the tenth granted in November 1295 and the fifteenth in October 1307), and sometimes they met separately but by the king's direct summons (as for the half granted in September 1294). But more usually, and to the greater satisfaction of those fighting for the preservation of ecclesiastical liberty, the clergy assembled in independent councils summoned by the archbishop (as when there was acquiescence in the imposed fine of a fifth in March 1297, when a tenth was granted in November 1297, and also when taxation was delayed in 1302 and was refused in January and August 1297 and in 1311). Study of the occasions when taxation was discussed in clerical assemblies of the southern province will be one of the central concerns of the following chapters.

In the history of public finance, and of the development of parliament, the taxes on lay movables have occupied a special place.