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RELIGIOUS LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 4*9
lived, sometimes with considerable difficulty, upon the re^
venues ofthe patrimonies of St. Peter together with the normal
charges and gifts taken from litigants and petitioners and the
relatively small annual census levied upon monasteries and
fiefs that had sought papal protection, and from the free-will
offerings of individuals and countries (such as the ancient
Peter's pence of England, imitated later in Scandinavia and
Poland), and occasional solicited aids from abbeys and pre/
lates. Towards the end of the twelfth century the papacy, in
imitation ofsecular rulers, levied a tax for the Crusade ofone>
fortieth on clerical incomes. This was often repeated in the fol/
lowing century and finally replaced by a similar tax *fbr the
needs of the Church*. Taxes implied tax/collectors: at first
bishops and abbots were employed, but gradually the papal
camera developed a service ofcollectors, usually foreigners and
armed with full spiritual powers of coercion. A bureaucracy
tends always to proliferate and to be wasteful; taxes are always
considered excessive; and medieval men, unused to an elabo/
rate machinery of government, did not realize that an efficient
central government, either domestic or foreign, had to be sup'
ported by its beneficiaries; in England in particular all taxation
was resented as something essentially extortionate.
Besides the direct tax on clerical incomes a number ofother
resources were tapped. Archbishops and exempt abbots, who
needed confirmation at Rome for their election, had for long
given substantial presents in the Curia; these were gradually
(c. 1275) made obligatory at a high fixed tariffwhich (as in all
similar cases) by no means excluded later
subsidiary gratuities;
these irregular sums were turned by actuarial calculation into an
annual tax. A little later than this (1306), under Clement V an
old tax was given a new direction, owing partly
to its con"
nexion with papal provisions. This was the annates, a part of
the first
year's revenues of a benefice hitherto sometimes paid to
chapters or prelates and now diverted to the pope and made uni