Tallage

Tallage or talliage (from the French tailler, i.e. a part cut out of the whole) may have signified at first any tax, but became in England and France a land use or land tenure tax. Later in England it was further limited to assessments by the crown upon cities, boroughs, and royal domains. In effect, tallage was a land tax.

England

Danegeld is a similar type of land tax, but tallage was brought to England by the Normans as a feudal duty. Under the sons of Henry II it became a common source of royal revenue. It was condemned in the Magna Carta of 1215, and was abolished in England in 1340 under Edward III.

Like scutage, tallage was superseded by the subsidy system in the 14th century. The last occasion on which tallage was levied in England appears to be about the year 1332.

The famous statute of 25 Edw. I. (in some editions of the statutes 34 Edw. I.), De Tallagio non Concedendo, though it is printed among the statutes of the realm, and was cited as a statute in the preamble to the Petition of Right in 1628, and by the judges in John Hampden's case in 1637, is probably an imperfect and unauthoritative abstract of the Confirmatio Cartarum. The first section enacts that no tallage for aid shall be imposed or levied by the king and his heirs without the will and assent of the archbishops, bishops, and other prelates, the earls, barons, knights, burgesses, and other freemen in the kingdom.