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Colbert proposed to the king to remit the arrears of talliages, and devoted all his efforts to reducing them, whilst regulating their collection. His desire was to arrive at the establishment everywhere of real talliages, on landed property, &c., instead of personal talliages, variable imposts, depending upon the supposed means or social position of the inhabitants.
"The bailiffs generally, and especially those who are set over the recovery of talliages, are such terrible brutes that, by way of exterminating a good number of these, you could not do anything more worthy of you than suppress those," wrote Colbert to the criminal magistrate of Orleans.
Talliages, of one tenth or one-twentieth of their property, were demanded of the clergy; the tax of a penny, usually called Peter-pence, was paid to him by every family on St. Peter's Day, and generally collected by the two orders of begging friars, who rode about on this errand in boots and spurs, and owning the rule of no one but the Pope, were great hindrances to the bishops and parish clergy.
No great proofs were required for a swing on the gibbet, or for the inside of a sack and a plunge in the Loire. . . . Men who, like Sire de Commynes, had been the king's servants, and who had lived in his confidence, had no doubt but that he had committed cruelties and perpetrated the blackest treachery; still they asked themselves whether there had not been a necessity, and whether he had not, in the first instance, been the object of criminal machinations against which he had to defend himself. . . . But, throughout the kingdom, the multitude of his subjects who had not received kindnesses from him, nor lived in familiarity with him, nor known of the ability displayed in his plans, nor enjoyed the wit of his conversation, judged only by that which came out before their eyes; the imposts had been made much heavier, without any consent on the part of the states-general; the talliages, which under Charles VII. brought in only eighteen hundred thousand livres, rose, under Louis XI., to thirty-seven hundred thousand; the kingdom was ruined, and the people were at the last extremity of misery; the prisons were full; none was secure of life or property; the greatest in the land, and even the princes of the blood, were not safe in their own houses.
"They had plundered and ruined," he was told, "that beautiful and rich province; there were five or six talliages a year; one was no sooner over than another began; they had levied quite three millions of gold from Villeneuve-d'Avignon to Toulouse."
The talliages from which the nobility and the clergy were nearly everywhere exempt pressed upon the people with the most cruel inequality. "The poor are reduced to eating grass and roots in our meadows like cattle," said a letter from Blaisois those who can find dead carcasses devour them, and, unless God have pity upon them, they will soon be eating one another."
Peace was of short duration in the reign of Louis XIV., and often so precarious that it did not permit of disarmament. At the very period when the able minister was trying to make the people feel the importance of the diminution in the talliages, he wrote to the king, "I entreat your Majesty to read these few lines attentively.
He also built a splendid castle at his native place, Acton Burnel, where some of the early Parliaments were held. These Parliaments were only summoned by Edward I. when in great want of money, for in general he raised the needful sums by gifts and talliages, and only in cases of unusual pressure did he call on his subjects for further aid.
These assemblies were invested with authority to order, on the general account, all that the juncture required, that is to say, with a legislative power distinct from that of the crown and nation. . . . If the king ceased to pay the sums necessary to keep up the garrisons in the towns left to the Reformers, the governors were to seize the talliages in the hands of the king's receivers, and apply the money to the payment of the garrisons.
But, in the complicated state of society brought about by feudalism, the inferior lord was taxed by his superior, a system that ran down the whole feudal scale, and it would take a lawyer to explain aids, talliages, wardships, fines for alienation, seizins, rents, escheats, and finally forfeiture, the heaviest and most common of all in England.
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