Carucage
Carucage was a medieval English land tax enacted by King Richard I in 1194. It was a replacement for the danegeld, last imposed in 1162. The taxable value of an estate was initially assessed from the Domesday Survey. Other methods were later employed, such as valuations based on the sworn testimony of neighbours. Carucage never raised as much as other taxes, but nevertheless helped to fund several projects.
About Carucage in brief
Carucage was a medieval English land tax enacted by King Richard I in 1194. It was a replacement for the danegeld, last imposed in 1162, which had become difficult to collect because of an increasing number of exemptions. The taxable value of an estate was initially assessed from the Domesday Survey. Other methods were later employed, such as valuations based on the sworn testimony of neighbours or on the number of plough-teams the taxpayer used. Carucage never raised as much as other taxes, but nevertheless helped to fund several projects. It paid the ransom for Richard’s release after he was taken prisoner by Leopold V, Duke of Austria; it covered the tax John had to pay Philip II of France in 1200 on land he inherited in that country; and it helped to finance Henry III’s military campaigns in England and on continental Europe. Most information about the carucage comes from the financial records associated with its collection. There is no detailed description of the way it was collected or assessed, unlike the account of the workings of the Exchequer given in the Dialogue Concerning theexchequer, written in about 1180. It is unclear whether the geld was collected at all during the reign of Henry’s successor, King Stephen.
Under Henry’s son, Richard I, a new land tax was collected, the first since 1162. It organised by Hubert Walter, the Justiciar of England who was in charge of governing England while king was king. First, and the first land tax collected in England since theGeld, was collected in 1198, and usually called the ‘great carucages’ It was assessed at a rate of 2% of the size of the estate as measured in either hides or carucates, which was normally considered equivalent to a hide (or hide) The original assessment of the property was based on Domes day Survey, a survey of land holdings in England that was completed by 1087. The tax was levied just six times: by Richard in1194 and 1198; John, his brother and successor, in 1200; and John’s son Henry III, in 1217, 1220, and 1224, after which it was replaced by taxes on income and personal property. The geld, based on number of hides of land owned by the taxpayer, could be demanded by the king and assessed at varying levels without the need for consultation with the barons or other subjects. However, the main flow of royal income was from other sources, and carucAGE was not collected again after 1224.
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This page is based on the article Carucage published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
