Thread | Brutkey

Maybe a dumb question: so Robin Hood and friends were robbing tax collectors to give money back to the poor, but how did that work?

As I understand it, in pre-modern economies, particularly in medieval Europe, currency wasn't used much. And in general the idea with currency was that taxes had to be paid with coins to force peasants to sell food to armies who paid with coins.

So that would suggest that robbing tax collectors was more about disrupting power relations than easing poverty, per se.

Passenger
@passenger@kolektiva.social

@foolishowl@social.coop

This one is actually interesting. At the time, the concept of "poor" in the sentence had nothing to do with the permanently impoverished peasantry, and instead referred to temporarily impoverished nobility.

In 1188, Salah Al-Din successfully recaptured Jerusalem from the crusaders. In response, the kings of England and France decided they needed to make war to reclaim it. Wars are expense, of course. To pay for it Henry II of England decided on what we would nowadays call a wealth tax: everyone who owned land had to pay a tax of ten percent of their total net worth, in cash, with exceptions for weapons, horses and holy objects. Of course, very few people have that sort of money lying around, and so those who couldn't or didn't pay were punished with imprisonment or land confiscation.

You didn't have to pay if you decided to go on crusade. That was the point: to encourage nobles to to on a crusade. Of course, going on crusade was something you had to self-fund, so that was even more expensive. Either way, a whole lotta nobles got bankrupted by what was called "the Saladin tithe."

Passenger
@passenger@kolektiva.social

@foolishowl@social.coop

Henry II died the following year, 1189, and his third son Richard took over as king of England. Richard was a terrible king who had no skill for or interest in ruling. He only liked fighting, hence his nickname "the Lionheart". Over the decade of his rule, Richard treated England as nothing more than a source of cash for endless war.

To put this in perspective, when Richard's more-competent brother chided him for selling off too many crown assets to raise money for his wars, Richard replied "I would sell London if I could find a buyer."

By 1199, England was completely bankrupt, the military nobility of England were even more bankrupt, and there was a class of wealthy people (often minor nobles or even wealthy merchants) who'd bought up those assets for cut prices and were sitting pretty.