THE TAXATIO of POPE NICHOLAS IV the Taxatio Ecclesiastica Was A
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
APPENDIX THREE THE TAXATIO OF POPE NICHOLAS IV The Taxatio Ecclesiastica was a valuation of all church income, both temporal and spiritual, carried out in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in 1291–92. Pope Nicholas IV ordered the assessment so that a tenth of the income could be given to Edward I for the crusade he had promised to undertake. The assessors in each diocese were usually two clerics of the diocese who took sworn statements from incumbents as to their incomes.1 There was some variation in practice amongst assessors in their recording practices: in the diocese of Exeter, for example, all bene ces which had incomes of less than 6 marks—and hence were not liable to be taxed—were recorded nonetheless, whereas in other dioceses they were omitted.2 However, the results listed in the Taxatio are problematic. Robinson’s investigation of the Taxatio for his study of the Augustinian canons demonstrated that because of the many inaccura- cies and omissions in the assessment, the lists must be used with great caution.3 Appropriated churches—a signi cant source of income for religious houses—were not included in the returns of the majority of dioceses.4 The information is more reliable for some dioceses than for others: the diocese of Exeter, for example, was grossly under-assessed both in terms of spiritualia and temporalia.5 The text of the whole Taxatio Ecclesiastica was printed by the Record Commission in 1802 from the Exchequer copy in the Public Record Of ce. In 1889, as an appendix to his edition of the Register of Walter Bronescombe, F.C. Hingeston-Randolph printed a version of the Taxatio for the diocese of Exeter. The text came from what Hingeston-Randolph contended was a near-contemporaneous copy of the Taxatio.6 The information in these two texts of the assessment is virtually identical. 1 J.H. Denton, “The Valuation of the Ecclesiastical Bene ces of England and Wales in 1291–2,” Historical Research 66 (1993), 234. 2 Ibid., 238, 244–5. Bene ce holders who held a number of bene ces worth singly six marks or less still had to pay a tenth of the sum total. 3 Robinson, Geography of Augustinian Settlement, pp. 110–20, 145. 4 Rose Graham, “The Taxation of Pope Nicholas IV,” in English Ecclesiastical Studies (London, 1929), p. 296. 5 Robinson, Geography of Augustinian Settlement, pp. 119–20. 6 Reg. Bronescombe & Quivil, p. 450. 256 appendix three Finally, there survives in Bishop Tanner’s copy of extracts from the lost Plympton cartulary a list of the priory’s spiritualia. The version from Bodleian MS. Tanner 342 seems to have been an incomplete fourteenth-century updating of the returns made in 1291. This is suggested by the fact that the value for Ilsington church is omitted on account of its transferral to Ottery St. Mary, and by the fact that the value for Newton St. Cyres has increased, as one would expect after its appropriation by Plympton in 1338. An examination of the information from the assessment on Plympton Priory’s spiritualia, when compared with other sources such as the Valor Ecclesiasticus and Bishop Grandisson’s con rmation of 1334, dem- onstrates that there are serious lacunae in the printed texts. The two largest sources of Plympton Priory’s spiritual income according to the Valor—its appropriated churches and its chapels—have been almost entirely omitted from the printed texts of the survey. When values are given for Plympton Priory’s appropriated churches, no mention is made of their connection with the priory. Essentially, the Plympton material in the Taxatio as it appears in the Record Commission edition and in Hingeston-Randolph’s edition of the register of Bishop Bronescombe are lists of the priory’s pensions. The assessment as listed in the MS version is more complete than the printed texts, as it includes incomes from the priory’s appropriated churches. It is hard to gauge the accuracy of these gures, as they are quite different from those in the Valor Ecclesiasticus and the Ministers’ Accounts of the sixteenth century. Then again, since these values were based on income sources—tithes, offerings, the yield of glebe land— which were subject to economic in uences like in ation, increased or decreased productivity, and alterations in personal wealth, one would expect them to have changed over time. Conversely, the gures listed for the pensions in the manuscript copy are identical to those which appear in the Valor, with the exception of Blackawton, which was appropriated in the sixteenth century..