Market Tolls and Toll Disputes in Early Modern England

In this blog post, Hillary Taylor of the University of Padua introduces their research project funded by an award from the Carnevali Small Research Grants Scheme.

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Tolls were not only fundamental to the operation of early modern English markets and fairs, but also had the potential to generate tensions that belied their seemingly unremarkable role in contemporary economic affairs. With the increase in the volume of economic activity and the price of agricultural products from the second half of the sixteenth century, tolls had the capacity to generate more revenue for those who were entitled to them. But with the growth in private marketing, tolls also became increasingly liable to evasion. Matters were further complicated because tolling practices and the ends to which toll revenue was put varied from market to market. Tolls — how much was owed, who was obliged to pay, how long they had been collected, who was entitled to toll revenue, and so forth — were subject to debate. Tolls generated a fair amount of controversy from the second half of the sixteenth century and well into the eighteenth. These controversies played out in various ways, depending on the market in question and the particular constellation of entities involved in a given conflict.

Years ago, while working on a project that involved extensive use of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century litigation from various equity courts, I came across a number of suits about market tolls. These piqued my interest, not least because the classic chapters about the marketing of agricultural produce in the Agrarian History of England and Wales — while invaluable — seemed to only scratch the surface of the topic, and relatively little has been written about tolls in the intervening decades. Why did tolls become such a flashpoint in the early modern period? When tolls became controversial in particular markets, what was the causal relationship between their economic value and other factors? In what ways did tolls and toll disputes evolve in a period when the central government was becoming increasingly ambivalent on the question of market regulation? How can toll-related conflicts be used to shed light on some of the practical and conceptual tensions involved in economic life during a period of significant change?

These are among the questions this project seeks to address. To date, I’ve written two articles that use toll disputes to think about issues such as the mechanics of paternalism and changes in economic culture over the course of the early modern period. The first was published in Social History, and the second is forthcoming in Historical Journal. Both focus on disputes about grain tolls (‘toll corn’) and aim to address issues that have been neglected in studies of both grain marketing and market regulation more broadly. But the equity court records that constitute the empirical core of these articles represent only a fraction of the surviving evidence. Furthermore, controversies about toll corn — although important — represent only one subset of toll disputes in the period.

A good deal of rich and under-used material about tolls and toll disputes survives in record offices across England, and I will undertake research in promising collections with the support of The Carnevali Small Research Grant. In addition to the revenue generated by tolls in particular markets, the sources in question will enable a reconstruction of the role that tolls played in local economies of poor relief and the changing legal options that were available to market owners and lessees who attempted to stamp out toll evasion over the course of the period. The Carnevali-supported research will facilitate the production of additional publications that examine tolls, toll disputes, and their implications in a society that was undergoing significant economic change.

To contact the author:

Hillary Taylor

hillary.taylor@unipd.it

University of Padua