Early Charity Law Sources

This appears to be the first example of the English parliament giving a charitable tax exemption. Here’s an edition of the act in question: 14500607RotParEng_Subsidy CollegesExemption

Before proceeding with the specifics of this story, there are several matters of background history to go over:

• The two main taxes most frequently imposed by mediaeval parliaments were the “subsidy” and the “fifteenth”. Both were usually wealth taxes fixed as a flat rate or fraction of the assessed value of the taxpayer’s goods and/or land. The difference between them was that the subsidy was collected by a hierarchy of centrally appointed officials who followed the rules against taxing the poor; while the collection of the fifteenth was left in the hands of parish leaders who habitually did impose taxes on their local poor.
• There already existed many secular charities, such as universities, colleges, hospitals, poorhouses, guilds, even bridges and other public works.
  • These were not called “charities”; that term had not yet acquired its modern legal meaning.
  • By “secular” charities we mean those founded not by the church but by the king or other noble families or groups with means.
  • These were primarily created through “uses” (trusts) set out in wills. In the latter centuries of the mediaeval era there had grown a tradition amongst elite families of writing pious wills bequeathing substantial legacies for such purposes not just to the church itself but also to non-church trustees.
  • Indeed, the idea of doing this was supported by one of the “bestsellers” of this era: The Vision of Piers Plowman, a religious allegorical poem attributed to William Langland that took final form about 1376-77. It contained wording that merchants—meaning the rich—who otherwise had great difficulty getting to heaven, could still get there if they used their profits to support charitable purposes. The well-to-do liked this idea a lot.
  • All these uses and funds were not yet tax exempt. Those in charge of such properties—trustees, executors and so on—were as liable to parliament’s taxes as if they owned the properties outright.
• There was, however, one special longstanding tax exemption, not enacted by parliament: the church itself.
  • The church in England was still the Catholic church headquartered and led by the pope in Rome.
  • It claimed, and to some extent actually had, tax exemptions, mainly from feudal taxes on its church properties. These privileges originated almost as far back as Christianity’s legalization by emperor Constantine in 313 AD.
  • So, in a vivid sense the church was the original tax-exempt charity.
  • Note, however, that even so, whenever parliament imposed a tax, to which the church was exempt, convocation (the church’s own parliament) usually found it advisable to “voluntarily” impose an equivalent tax on itself, the clergy of England, and give the proceeds to the king.
• Politically, English elites in this period were riven by dynastic factionalism (between Lancastrians and Yorkists) that would soon lead to the period of political chaos and civil disorder known as the “War of the Roses” (1455-1487). The king was the well-meaning and pious—but ineffectual, weak and mentally ill—Henry 6, a Lancastrian. This luckless king’s reign was one long tale of woe culminating with his death in 1471 in the Tower of London, probably secretly murdered on orders of his Yorkist rival Edward 4.

Before this tragedy, a new key thread of the history of charity began, in 1450. This was the exemption from legislative taxes. And this was, so it seems, new: After canvassing both the indices of the Statutes of the Realm and the taxes described by Jurkowski & al (1998), no earlier example than this one of 1450 has been found.

The tax itself, plus its new exemption, were in an act of the parliament of England—although you will not find it printed in the statutes of England.

• In this era many acts of a temporary nature, such as those which imposed taxes for a particular year, were not recorded as “statutes”, i.e. in the official “statute roll”, but only in the original “parliament roll”. On this was recorded the entire tedious proceedings of a parliament as they occurred along with the petitions and draft documents under consideration.
• In this case, the act was item 12 of the roll of the parliament that occurred from 6 November 1449 to 5 June 1450. This parliament was a fractious and tumultuous assembly that had to be prorogued several times.
• Item 12 shows that the house of commons, probably towards the end in June 1450, passed and presented to the king an “indenture”, in other words, a bill, written in late mediaeval English, proposing to give the king revenue from a proposed tax under various proposed conditions and stipulations.
• Most parliamentary taxes such as subsidies or fifteenths were like this. Each was quite literally a one-time “gift” from the commons to the King to meet an emergency.
• Item 12 recites the text of this proposal and records that it was agreed to by the king and the lords. Thus, all the elements for a valid act of parliament were there: approval by both houses, plus royal assent.

The tax this act imposed was for King Henry 6’s war in France, which by this time had become a full-blown disaster. It was an unusual tax.

• Though called a “subsidy”, it did not take the normal form of the late mediaeval subsidy tax. Instead, this tax appears to have been, of all things, an early attempt at a graduated or progressive income tax. It taxed revenue from land rents, and from wages and fees, at higher rates for higher income brackets. The rates varied from 2.5% to 10%.
• This was apparently an experiment that did not work well and was not repeated for a long time. We can hazard a guess that in these rough, illiterate, innumerate and non-bookkeeping times, determining what tax bracket some fellow was in must have been difficult.
• The act contained a clause (s 19) specifically exempting “spiritual”, i.e. church, revenues from the tax—but as usual, this was effectively nullified within a month by convocation “voluntarily” imposing a matching tax on the clergy of England.
• Several changes were made over the next few years and this tax ended up raising £7,303 for the king’s war, a disappointment since £10,000 had been anticipated. (Do not be deceived by the smallness of these numbers. Economically speaking—and as discussed elsewhere in this website on the editorial practices page—these amounts would be comparable to $200M or $300M in Canada today.)
• For more details about how this unusual tax worked, see Jurkowski & al (1998) at pp xxxvii-xxxix and 102-104.

The new tax exemption that this act created was for the unfortunate King Henry 6’s college projects. Three of the few good things that Henry 6 is renowned for in history are his founding of what are now known as All Souls College in Oxford (1438), Eton College for boys (1440) and King’s College in Cambridge (1441).

• The first college, All Souls, was built quickly. It was completely church-funded by its co-founder the archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, and construction was finished in 1443.
• The other two, Eton and King’s, were eventually built many decades later. Their construction barely started under Henry 6. He only founded these institutions; he never had the money to build them.

So, the 1450 tax act included a clause (s 20) that granted an exemption from tax to two of the above three colleges, King’s Cambridge and Eton.

• The exemption clause refers to the two colleges as “our” royal colleges. Now, an interesting point: Had this clause been originally drafted by the commons in its bill addressed to the king, they would have referred to “your” royal colleges.
• Leaving the wording as “our” royal colleges shows that the wording of this clause derived from the king or his ministers—thus indicating that the motive for this, the first parliamentary tax exemption for what we today recognize as charitable institutions, was simply that the king did not wish his pet projects to incur more costs by having to pay this war tax.

1453—Three years later, the commons in the parliament of March 1453 granted King Henry 6 another rather unusual gift. This one took the form of a requirement on all the communities of the nation to tax themselves to raise, maintain and pay 20,000 archers for six months’ service in the French war (item 11). The king reduced this to 13,000 archers (item 13), and the commons wrote the bill accordingly (item 14). The king then postponed this tax burden for two years (item 15). Ultimately, this “archers” tax was never collected, but instead substituted by other taxes. The commons bill (item 14) repeated the exemptions for Eton College and King’s College Cambridge, this time referring to “your” royal colleges.

As mentioned, soon after this England descended into the War of the Roses. King Henry 6 and his Yorkist supplanters Edward 4 and Richard 3 had much more on their minds than colleges or tax exemptions; and the latter two kings were entirely uninterested in continuing projects initiated under Lancastrian rule. Stability did not begin to be restored until Henry Tudor’s victory in 1485. He became King Henry 7 and during his reign the construction and founding of colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge universities resumed. Also, a charitable tax exemption for colleges reappeared in the subsidy act of 1496—this time for all colleges, not just two.

The construction of Eton College occurred sporadically depending on events and benefactors and seems to have been largely complete by 1500. King’s College Cambridge was finally finished in 1544.