Records of Central Government Taxation in England, c.1190-1690; Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Oxfordshire

One of the most important series of medieval and early modern records of central government in the Public Record Office is the collection of tax records with the reference E 179. It includes all the surviving detailed records of taxation of lay people in England from about 1190 to 1690, well over 30,000 in all, covering a variety of taxes levied by the monarchs. The records comprise a wide variety of types of document, from summaries of accounts, exemptions, abatements, petitions, receipts, inquisitions and schedules of arrears to long, detailed assessments giving the names of taxpayers and the sums with which they were charged. As well as being a prime source for the history of taxation, E 179 records are used for a wide variety of other purposes by social, economic and local historians, historical geographers and others. <br> <br> Before 1995 the documents in the collection had never been systematically examined, and accurate information about their date, type and tax never recorded, so the catalogue used by researchers to access them was woefully inadequate. From 1995, as part of the Records of Central Government Taxation Project, work was done on fourteen counties, and this project was begun to make a comprehensive and detailed examination and re-appraisal of the records in respect of six further counties (Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire), and as before to record the information in a database and output the data in several different formats, to facilitate the use of the records by researchers in a number of fields.<br> <br> Within each county the procedure was to systematically examine the surviving documents in chronological order, as far as it was already known, recording the details discovered about them in a database. The first step was to examine each one to establish and record its physical characteristics: the material of which it was made; its format, whether a roll, a file, a volume or one of the large number of other lesser document types; the number of membranes, pages or folios it contained. Next, the attempt was made to establish as far as possible the tax which led to its creation, using a list of taxes already created as part of the database during an earlier stage of the project, but which was added to or modified if the document provided new information about a tax. Finally, a repertory of all places mentioned in the document, arranged in their hierarchy as given, was compiled, and included where appropriate corporate bodies and other units other than places which were the units of taxation.