Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

444 16. state, lordship and community in the west
(b) The decline of taxation
The post-Roman period also saw a decline in the taxation of agricultural
production. 25 This had a number of causes. In some areas, the highly
trained groups responsible for the sophisticated record-keeping and currency-management
necessary for its assessment and collection were, in all
probability, simply swept away in the chaos of the invasion period. It is hard
to imagine, for instance, their survival in post-Roman Britain. Linked to
this, whether as cause or effect is the collapse of some crucial elements of
the economy – particularly coinage and exchange – which rendered the
extraction of an agricultural surplus in usable form much more difficult.
The decline in taxation was also linked to the disappearance of professional
armies. If landowners were now directly responsible for their own
defence – the basic justification for taxation under the empire – why should
they also pay land-tax? Some successor-state kings did inherit rights to tax,
but then gave them away. Judging from Gregory of Tours, for instance, taxation
was a major issue in sixth-century Gaul. His narrative includes not
only examples of kings extracting revenues but also of kings coming under
considerable pressure to remit them. A major element in explaining this, on
the face of it, rather odd phenomenon is that kings seem never to have
taxed their original Frankish, Gothic or other followers. Thus, as similar
military services came to be demanded as well from the descendants of
Roman elements of the population, so the political pressure built up for
similar tax breaks all round. 26 Administrative difficulties and political pressures
may well have combined. As tax became more difficult to collect,
both administratively and politically, it became easier for kings to buy
support via grants of tax remission, than to raise revenue in the form of
coin and produce and then redistribute it.
The erosion of tax structures, like the disappearance of professional
armies, significantly altered the balance of political power in the post-
Roman world. Drawing on the largest sector of the economy, the land-tax
had brought in large sums of annually renewable income. All of one year’s
income could be spent without reducing revenue for the next. Once taxation
ceased to be a major factor in royal finance, however, kings were often
forced to rely on grants of land from the royal fisc to reward or buy
support. Once a piece of land had been alienated, however, a king could
no longer derive any income from it. Thus, when a political economy
comes to rely on land itself (economic capital) rather than recycled interest
on it in the form of taxation, it becomes much more difficult for kings
to reward followers in one year without reducing their own income for the
next. The traditional orthodoxy, indeed, is that the operation of such a
25 Durliat’s arguments to the contrary (1990b) are not convincing; cf. Wickham (1993b).
26 Cf. Wickham (1984); Wood (1990).
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