The land tax: Background
The 'Land Tax' was introduced in 1698, but was founded upon previous revenue raising practices whereby a tax quota was specified which counties had to meet. The raising and implementation of this quota was administered locally. From 1698, local administration of the land tax was placed in the hands of commissioners, assessors and collectors. The 'land tax' was not intended to be solely a tax upon land; personal estate and the incomes of officials was also to be taxed. The tax remained in being until the twentieth century. From 1698 to 1772, the rate of the tax varied, but from 1772 it was officially fixed at four shillings in the pound. Despite the intention that goods such as the stock-in-trade of traders and the salaries of officials was supposed to be assessed and taxed, and in some places this was certainly done (especially up to 1798) there was no uniformity whatsoever in this practice. In 1798 (in a bid to raise revenue quickly to finance the war with France) those assessed could permanently free themselves from the levy by purchasing consols equivalent to the value of fifteen years of the tax. It would appear that despite this offer, many did not take the opportunity and even if they did, their names could still be recorded in the assessments (although the fact that they were 'exonerated' from the tax would be noted).
Before the tax could be first levied in 1698, the value of property had to be assessed. This was referred to as the 'rental'. It would appear that at no time after 1698 was there ever a systematic revaluation of the rentals and although they continued to be recorded each year, they could become progressively less indicative of the value of the property they referred to unless some form of local revaluation was made.
Previous use of the land tax assessments by historians
Until the late 1970s and early 1980s the land tax assessments were generally employed for studying agrarian questions. There was a particular debate employing these records, which focused upon whether enclosure had led to a decline in the number of small-scale, owner-occupied farms. Attempts were made to correlate the tax recorded against each name with the acreage held, an 'acreage equivalent' as it became termed. The problem was, that while the national tax level was set at four shillings in the pound, local practices varied sharply, with the tax rate being at variance even between contiguous parishes. As an attempt to estimate how much property an individual held, the early studies were therefore challenged, particularly by Charles Mingay. None-the-less, some have maintained that as a measure of relative size of property the assessments have remained useful in the agrarian setting, and, within parishes where the tax rate is known, something can be said regarding the actual size of the holding.
More recently, land tax records have begun to be employed to examine urban questions. In September 1981 a conference was held in London under the auspices of Portsmouth Polytechnic and the Open University to consider work based upon the land tax assessments. Agrarian questions were again discussed, but newer urban related work was presented. For instance, Margaret Noble from Hull College of Higher Education, presented a study of the development of eight small towns in the East Riding of Yorkshire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She made no attempt to employ some form of urban 'acreage equivalent', but used the land tax assessments to distinguish periods of rapid turnover in ownership and identify changes in the numbers of 'large' and 'small' property owners (without trying to estimate the precise size of property holdings).
A stimulating study was presented to the conference by Adrian Henstock of Nottinghamshire County Record Office; he had led a group examining Ashbourne in Derbyshire during the period 1780-1832. Henstock again eschewed any attempt to estimate property size using the assessments. He sought to study the development of the town, examine questions such as infilling or rebuilding and learn something of ' ... the structure and operation of local society ...', for instance the turnover rate of inhabitants. Henstock found the stock-in-trade of some of the better-off tradesmen and the incomes of a few local officials were assessed in the records.
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Select bibliography:
Jeremy Gibson and Mervyn Medlycott, Land and Window Tax Assessments. Birmingham, 1983.
Michael Turner and Dennis Mills (eds.), Land and Property: The English Land Tax 1692-1832. New York, 1986.
Donald E. Ginter, A Measure of Wealth: The English Land Tax in Historical Analysis. London, 1992.
W. R. Ward, The English Land Tax in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford, 1953.
'The Significance of land-tax assessments' in The Local Historian, 15 (1982).
Using the London land tax assessments for researching the book trades
