It seems like a lot of people, myself included, mix up medieval taxes with medieval rents as the source of the nobility’s wealth due to our modern conception of the private vs. public sphere whereas medieval forms of governance mix the two. Can you talk about how the intersection of the public vs. private spheres in medieval times differed from modern times? Was tax money nobles collected treated differently than the money they got from contractual rent?

Great question!

One of the reasons why libertarians have had a suspicious admiration for the Middle Ages is that feudalism turned what we think of today as the state/public sector (which is different from the public sphere b/c Habermas) into personal property rights.

In a feudal contract, the king gives taxation power, judicial authority, etc. over a geographically-defined area to an individual leasee, in return for that leasee providing a certain amount of military service. (Which in turn means that these leasees are also exercising significant amounts of military power, so there goes the monopoly on force.) And as I’ve discussed before, this grant changes over time from what we might call an outsourcing contract that can be reassigned to an inheritable estate, which makes it ever more propertyish than before. And when, over time, people are allowed to sub-lease parts of their grant to other people, it becomes more propertyish still.

This blurring of the public (taxation, military power, judicial authority) and the public goes all the way up the chain. For a long time, there wasn’t a clear distinction made between the king’s personal household and the state: we can see this from the fact that a lot of the offices of the privy council use the same names as offices on private estates, or from the fact that there wasn’t for a long time a clear separation between the personal income of the monarch and the revenue of the state (see for example the long bureaucratic struggle over whether the Office of the Wardrobe (which was supposed to pay for the king’s household but ended up paying for wars) or the Exchequer would be dominant in finance).

This begins to change in the Early Modern period, where you see the emergence of professional bureaucracies who can more efficiently collect taxes, keep accounts of moneys received and spent, so that ever-growing armies can be outfitted, supplied, and paid promptly enough to keep them from deserting. (This is all very much a work in progress.)

Not coincidentally, the growth of these large royal armies coincides with a period of struggle between monarchs and the nobility over the boundaries of the public and the private: whether the king’s courts could overrule local manorial courts, whether nobles could fight private wars, fortify manors without royal permission, keep more men under arms than their feudal service allowed, and whether royal tax collectors could directly extract revenue from their fiefdoms without the lords’ being able to intervene.

To answer your second question, there was a distinction between various income streams: in addition to feudal rents, the use of monoplies on mills and the like were called banalities (great name, imo), chevage or chiefage was a poll-tax paid by villeins, income generated for lords from fines in local courts was called the third penny, the sales tax on livestock was called the toll tax, and then there were a large number of what were called feudal incidences (fees paid when a peasant got married, inherited land, or died, etc.). And to go back to the paragraph above, one of the reasons why so much conflict arose over judicial reforms was because the king was often muscling into revenue streams that the lords considered their personal property right as opposed to public finance.

What was the effect of the Roman Empire being able to tax enough to support its army upon its populace? With medieval governments being smaller than the Roman one, did that mean a peasant in medieval Europe was taxed more lightly and was economically better off than his Roman counterparts? Or, was the Empire able to tax the wealthy more effectively, or have a more productive economy due to the sort-of globalization inside the Roman world? Or, did medieval taxes just support nobility lifestyles?

The main effect seems to have been a great deal of internal economic growth and peace, as we can see from the fact that Roman cities grew in size but didn’t build walls until the crisis of the third century.

In terms of your second question, I lean more towards the effective taxation of the wealthy angle (at least at the height of the Empire’s power), as medieval taxes tended to have higher rates and more regressive forms to make up for the fact that the medieval state often didn’t tax the wealthy effectively.

Calculating GDP per capita in premodern eras is extremely difficult, but it does seem as if there was decline or stagnation at best in living standards between 1 AD and 1000 AD, with a slow recovery during the High and Late Middle Ages, which picked up steam during the Renaissance and Early Modern eras, and then really took off following the Industrial Revolution.

Are the Manderlys richer than the Starks? What are Winterfell’s and Whiteharbours incomes?

I doubt that the Manderlys are richer than the Starks, since the Starks get income from the entire North in addition to from the Manderlys, so they’re taxing 3.5-4 million people rather than a hundred thousand or so. And even though the per-capita income of the Manderly’s subjects is way higher than the rest of the North, it’s not enough to outweigh the Stark’s manpower advantage.

I did a rough estimate of Great House incomes here, but let’s try to do some calculations based on the ones I did for the Seven Kingdoms as a whole. The North has 3.5 to 4 million people, and assuming that 90% of them earn around 3-5 dragons a year, we’re talking 10.5-20 million gold a year as the rough GDI of the North.

Now, medieval taxation thankfully was generally simple (because medieval states lacked the bureaucracy to get fancy) so we’ll be using the English “tenth” (i.e, a 10% tax on moveable property and income) as our model. That would suggest that the North generates 1-2 million in tax revenue. Now, a good part of that goes to the King, but the Starks probably keep the bulk of it.

Now, the North is considerably less fertile and prosperous than the rest of Westeros, so we might want to start with the low range for peasant income and then adjust further. So if the North is half as prosperous as the average, then the North has a GDI of 5.25 million and produces 525,000 gold in tax revenue. If we say it’s two-thirds, then we’re talking a GDI of 7 million and 700,000 in tax revenue.

The Manderly’s income is a bit harder to figure out, because we don’t have a firm number on their total population – we know that White Harbor has 50,000 people living in it, but we also know that the Manderlys control a broad swathe of territory beyond just the city and have a higher per capita GDI than the rest of the North between their silver and their artisans. I would say that at a minimum, the population of White Harbor brings in 15,000 golden dragons to the Manderlys just on the regular tenth, not counting taxes and fees coming in from the port.

what was Davos smuggling pre- Robert’s Rebellion ? Was there an active black market in goods in Westeros ? And an effective system of port duty collectors that needed to be evaded ? And who would have been backing him ? Also, did Davos break the siege of Storm’s End as a freelancer ? If not, who hired him ?

Given the size of Black Betha, Davos would have prioritized goods of a high value to size ratio. His former master Roro Uhoris, for example, sold weapons to the wildlings in exchange for furs, ivory, amber, and obsidian (and got hanged for it). From his conversation with Salladhor Saan, Davos used to specialize in smuggling spices and silks from Braavos, Myr, and Volantis, which fit the bill as being both very valuable and relatively compact.

As most royal taxes are excise taxes of some kind and there is a pretty substantial bureaucracy of harbormasters, customs sergeants, factors, etc. there is an active black market and a small industry of men like Davos Seaworth and his former master who evade them for a profit. In terms of who backed him, Davos used to work with Salladhor Saan, for example.

Davos went to Storm’s End of his own accord.

I just read that link on Henry VII and bonds, pretty interesting, thank you. Just one question, the article mentioned that Henry recieved money for knighting his son, could you please elaborate on this occurrence?

So this is an example of Henry VII looking back into the statute books to find old rights or powers that hadn’t been invoked in a while – in part because earlier kings had abused the hell out of them and in the process helped to provoke the Barons’ Revolt and the Magna Carta – and then using the hell out of them.

In this case, Henry VII was invoking the right of feudal aid. Feudal aid was a special one-time payment to be made to one’s liege lord on special occasions: when the oldest son became a knight, when the eldest daughter was to be married, when the lord was going on crusade or needed to be ransomed, etc.

Henry VII missed few tricks, so not only did he invoke feudal aid when he knighted his eldest son Arthur, but when Arthur died and Henry became his new eldest son, he did it again, and then again when he married his daughter to the King of Scotland. And each time, he raised the equivalent of at least £11-20 million pounds in today’s money.

You convinced re: Maidenpool! Your ED series is brilliant, and I appreciate the discussion of the nuts and bolts of feudalism – it all adds to the feeling of a medieval world + magic. Concerning taxation: was this a means of punishing rebel lords, e.g. post Trident or Blackfyre rebellion? And would each tax rate for each lord be determined individually? The bureaucracy required for this system would have been monumental, so I presume there is another way I have not thought of. Thanks!

Thanks!

As for taxation, it could be used to punish taxation, but it was a bit more common to simply confiscate the property of rebels or to levy a one-time fine, rather than expect compliance with taxes in the long run. Henry VII had a lot of success using bonds instead – people who chose the wrong side in the Wars of the Roses ended up having huge liens put on their estates that the King could call in at any time, which gave him a lot of control over the nobility.

In terms of the tax rate of lords, it would be generally fixed by tradition – whether it’s a knight’s fee or the specific terms of a feudal contract – although when the king wanted to raise new revenues, it was usually by levying a flat percentage tax because that was a lot easier to do bureaucratically.

Help me solve a dispute- do the secondary lords pay taxes to their Lord Paramount lieges?

It’s not entirely clear how taxation interacts with the process of subinfeudation, and it’s not helped by the fact that when we see lords interacting with their vassals, it’s almost always between immediate vassals.

The only clue I can think of is that the Redwynes have to pay excise taxes on wine to the Crown despite being vassals of the Tyrells. That may suggest that lords pay taxes both to their immediate liege lord and that lord’s liege lord, or that the Redwynes are a special case because they are directly exporting goods to foreign countries on a scale that most vassals wouldn’t.