Yeomans and the Tax Collector

Yeomans and the Tax Collector

Yeomans, Longford, Middlesex

Thomas Streeting was not a popular man. He lived in the biggest house in the village of Longford, Middlesex, and employed many of the villagers to work on his farm. This non-conformist land-owner might have received the respect of his labourers, but in some households he was unwelcome. He was the parish tax collector and twice a year he visited every house in the village to collect taxes. 

The tax collector’s job was unpaid. The gentry of the parish formed the Vestry Meeting (parish council) and oversaw the parish governance. Each member of the Meeting was expected to play an important, but voluntary, role. One member would be appointed as tax assessor. His job was to assess the rental value of each property, and this would be the figure on which the land and poor relief tax was based. The assessment varied little from year to year. Then the nominated tax collector, in this case Thomas Streeting, would have the job of extracting these sums from his friends and neighbours in the parish.

There were government taxes to be collected, too. In 1748 there were 34 land tax payers in Longford. This was a regular tax paid twice yearly from 1692 until 1963. However, in the reign of George III, this was not enough to fund the various conflicts that Britain was fighting in Europe and Colonial America, and so other sources of taxation had to be found, some of them very inventive. In 1696 window tax was introduced which was easy to assess. The Longford records for the years 1766/1767 show who had to pay window tax. Most houses, with seven windows or less paid a flat amount of two shillings a year. For larger houses there was a variable rate. In 1767 Thomas Streeting, as owner of one of the largest houses in Longford with nineteen windows, was paying twelve shillings for his window tax and £4.17.6d for his land. Thomas Streeting died in December 1773 and his son-in-law, Thomas Weekly, at the Weekly house took on his role as Tax Collector. Thomas Weekly’s voluntary job of collecting taxes was now not just a time-consuming, form-filling, distraction from his farm and his Baptist chapel, but was an onerous role to perform when individuals objected to having to pay extra tax when they were struggling to survive after the poor harvests of 1795.[1]

There were so many different taxes to collect that parish tax collectors received a preprinted form from the government to help them enumerate them all. Previous tax collections in the parish had just been noted in a hand made notebook. One new tax was on male servants (1777-1852). A male servant was considered a luxury and their employers' were liable to pay tax for this privilege. Those servants engaged in husbandry, trade or manufacture were exempted. The servants of tavern-keepers, shop-keepers and merchants were also exempt unless they performed any personal duties like scrubbing floors or cleaning shoes, or saddling a horse. In 1779 this tax was one guinea per servant per year.

Another tax was Horse Tax (1784-1874). This was liable on riding horses, including racehorses, but not working horses. In 1785 an amendment exempted those farmers occupying a farm worth not more than £150 a year rent in which the horse was used only for riding to church or market. The yearly rental exemption rate was reduced in 1802 and thus many more owners were liable.

There was also a dog tax (5 July 1796 to 5 April 1797). This was a tax on non-working dogs, and people receiving poor rate were exempt. Most people in Longford had just one dog, but Mrs Bedford at the Kings Arms inn (now the Grade II listed King Henry or The Stables) had two dogs.

The following tax year, there was also a clocks and watch tax with a variable rate depending on whether the watch was gold, silver, or of another metal. Thomas Weekly’s tax bill was 4s.10½d on his thirteen windows, and 11s.3d on his five horses. He had one clock and one silver watch for which he paid five shillings seven and a half old pence. Of the 60 householders/rate payers in the parish only 35 had a clock and 5 had two clocks. No one had a gold watch. This tax was repealed nine months later. It was difficult to collect because people hid or disposed of their clocks and watches. Inn-keepers were happy to pay the tax when they found that their clocks attracted customers who came in just to check the time, but it was devastating for the clock and watch manufacturers when people no longer bought them.[2] Not only was the tax payer liable to these sundry taxes, but in some years a surcharge of 20% was added to the total.

In 1796 Britain, after years of fighting in the American war of Independence and in the process losing the colonies, was now fighting a war against Spain and a separate conflict with France. The government needed to introduce more taxes to fund these wars. They had already been levying tax on all types of possessions, but then the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, in anticipation of the need to establish a war chest of cash in case of a war with Napoleon who had just became First Console of France, had to think of other means to raise tax. In addition to the supplementary taxes in 1799 the Prime Minister introduced, the concept of income tax as a means of raising funds for the government. It was the first tax to be raised on people’s incomes and was intended as a temporary tax.[3] Anyone earning over £60 per annum had to pay ten per cent of their income. Initially it had to be collected from individuals and was not deducted at source until four years later. However, most of Longford’s labourers earned less than £1 a week and were not eligible. The introduction of this tax reduced Pitt’s popularity.

Those eligible to pay tax sometimes struggled to find the money, especially when the amount demanded varied from year to year. The increasing taxation was inflationary making goods cost more, but wages did not keep up. A pound in 1795 would be worth £117 today. This does not seem an excessive amount to pay today, but compared to the average earnings of an agricultural labourer of fifteen shillings a week, all of which would go on food and rent, for some people it would be a struggle.[4] This is why the parish tax collector was not a popular man.

[1] https://bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/01n1a5.pdf

[2] https://taxfitness.com.au/Blog/the-clock-tax-of-1797#:~:text=The%20tax%20was%20introduced%20by,their%20clocks%20or%20destroyed%20them. [3] www.politics.co.uk

[4] A Short History of English Agriculture by W. H. R. Curtler

This house and the village of Longford in West Middlesex will be demolished if the third runway at Heathrow airport is built.  My book, Longford: A Village in Limbo, which tells the story of Longford over the last three hundred years, is due for publication soon.