The period when the molecules of society seem to have begun to combine anew, is generally assigned by historians to the eleventh century, when feudalism had become systematized into something analogous to general government, and the power of the Church was especially manifesting itself; and was recognized to such an extent that it was able to establish throughout nearly all Europe a period known as "God's Truce," when warfare, plunder, and bloodshed were forbidden from sunset on Wednesday to sunrise on Monday; and "during the Christmas holy days and Lent no new defenses were to be erected, nor old ones repaired. But this was not all. The provisions made for the protection of the laborer and for the produce of labor were far more characteristic of the dawning of a new era. Peasants in hostile territories were not to be injured or confined; the tools of agriculture, the hay and the grain stacks and the cattle, were all taken under the protection of the Church; and if seized, it must be for use and not for destruction. He that violated this truce was placed under censure of ecclesiastical power." From this period, therefore, it is only practicable to take up anew the thread of history, and attempt to resume the relation of some of the most instructive incidents that have since characterized the attempts of governments to defray their expenditures by levies upon the persons and property of their subjects or citizens. Preliminary, however, to so doing, the following historical facts may properly find a place.
How THE Druids collected Revenue.—An annual payment in the nature of a tax was exacted by the ancient Druids from every family for the benefit of the priests of the temple in the district in which the family lived. The families were obliged, under penalty of an ecclesiastical curse, to extinguish their fires on the last evening of October, and attend at the temple with a prescribed annual payment. This being made, they were entitled to receive, on the first day of November, some of the sacred fire from the altar, to rekindle the fires of their houses; and their neighbors were also forbidden, under a similar penalty, in any way to assist them. The result was, that delinquent taxpayers found themselves not only interdicted from the society of their fellow-men and from justice, the usual sequence of ecclesiastical excommunication, but also from the use of fire during the approaching winter. This expedient for collecting a revenue was referred to by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a speech in Parliament in 1871, in connection with a proposal to tax matches; and the motto, Ex luce lucellum, was proposed to be inscribed on match boxes in case the tax was enacted.[1]
- ↑ Toland's History of the Druids, quoted by Dowell, in History of Taxation in England.
