i4o SERVILE BURDENS
ten years.1 Again, on a neighbouring manor, after being sta-
tionary at £8 for years, it suddenly rose to £r2.2 Fluctuations
such as these were hard to bear, and probably the cause of much
bitterness on the manor, for it must be remembered that the
serf had no understanding of why these sums were wrung out of
him. The lord's needs may have been real or only fanciful: the
peasant was but dimly aware that for some reason or other this
year (possibly most inconveniently for him) he had to pay more
tallage than usual.
Hence we should expect to find men endeavouring to fix the
sum, and thus it is that the customals begin to state that the
amount is fixed and may not be increased or diminished,3 and
the Ministers' Accounts show manors on which the tallage
exacted remains constant over a long period of years.4 We get a
little further light from a Yorkshire inquisition of 1250 which
states that "the tallage set in Newlimd, Kirkcdrux, and Lan-
gerak is £10, to which all must give whose names are placed on
the roll after those who only pay rent"/' Clearly here the fixed
amount had to be found by the peasants of the vills, possibly in
proportion to their holdings, while those who paid rent—that is
the freeholders—were quit of this tax. No doubt many won-
dered why the freeholders went quit while they wrere forced to
pay, and a desire to be free as were these men undoubtedly rose
in many breasts.
Although at first sight it would seem that a fixed tallage was
much to be preferred to one which varied from year to year (and
so undoubtedly it was for the majority), yet even a fixed tallage
had its dangers, for its inelasticity made no allowance for bad
seasons or for altering conditions in the neighbourhood. Whether
all the holdings, or only half of them, were occupied, the full sum
had to be found and this naturally created hardships. We have an
excellent example of this in thirteenth-century Yorkshire. The
men of Hedon, a jury of 1280 tells us, were "straitened and
poor", and the inquisition asserted plainly that unless some
change were soon made, men would move away "on account of
1 Mm. Ace. 936/4-16. Cf, 756/3-10*
2 Ibid. 936/18-33. Cf. Davenport, op. tit. 46; Villainage, 293*
8 A.A.S.R. xxxv, 7.
* See, for example, Min. Ace. 918/2- ; 987/15- ; 1004/1- ,
6 Yorks Inquis. I, 127.