While spending the Christmas time of 1085 in Gloucester, William [the Conqueror] had deep speech with his counsellors and sent men all over England to each shire to find out what or how much each landholder had in land and livestock and what it was worth.

from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

And the Duke of Normandy certainly had the power and authority to do this. His armies were the last to successfully invade the British Isles, twenty years earlier, and his Domesday Book was the tax survey of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom he had won, so that none of his newly-appointed lords and vassals could avoid paying their share of the King’s tax. This colossal and detailed inventory is a snapshot of Britain’s economy and properties in the 11th century. Every parcel of land, every cultivated field or orchard, every manor house, castle, even every single beast or fowl was meticulously recorded.

The purpose was quite straightforward. It was the base line of all property, and the King’s tax collectors could now confront the local nobility with documentary evidence of their wealth, and if there was any dispute as to what was to be taxed, it was up to the local barons to bear the burden of proof. When tax time came, taxes were levied according to the Book, since it wasn’t always possible to update the catalog every year. If livestock died, or fields made fallow, it was up to the owner to provide detailed evidence he need not pay taxes on that lost asset any longer. Conversely, if those lands had prospered and wealth increased since the compilation, the Domesday Book could serve as proof. There was no hiding loot from the King.

Although William’s Norman war-lord retainers (who had replaced the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy defeated at Hastings in 1066) owed their English lands and wealth to William, they obviously had no intention of paying him the taxes he was owed. Like aristocracies everywhere, they were prepared to lie about their wealth and cheat on their taxes, and the Domesday Book (“Domesday” is the medieval spelling of “Doomsday”) was the Crown’s hammer. The King’s tax inventory was clearly meant for Judgement Day (tax time). There was no 4th Amendment in Norman Britain, it was a lot harder to keep two sets of books.

The Plantagenets (the Norman French kings of England) proved to be wise and capable rulers, at least up to Henry II (yeah, the guy who married Eleanor of Aquitaine and had all that trouble with a certain troublesome priest). Peter O’toole played him in the movies. Henry established the first comprehensive system of courts and magistrates and laid down the basis of Common Law, which survives to this day in most of the English-speaking world. It wrested control of day-to-day justice away from the nobility and replaced it with a uniform and systematic code of courts, statutes and procedures. Every Englishman, even the lowliest peasant, now had some protection from the law and was no longer totally vulnerable to bullying by the local gentry. No doubt, the peasantry was much happier with this than the local barons. Along with the Book, this was another threat to their raw power–although I have no doubt they preferred to refer to it as their “Liberty”. Whenever you hear words like “Liberty” and “Freedom” bandied about by the rich, make sure you keep a firm grip on your wallet.

But Henry’s son John (he of Robin Hood and Sheriff of Nottingham fame)marked the beginning of the decline of Plantagenet power. His disastrous wars in France and his attempts to pay for them with crushing taxes led to the Magna Carta, the Great Charter of 1215 that established limits to the Divine Right of Kings. Although a great step forward in the evolution of modern democracy, it must be kept in mind that the Magna Carta was not about the rights and freedom of the People, with a capital “P”. It was about setting limits on the power of the King over the interests and property of the nobles. In other words, like the English Revolution and Civil War of 1642 and the American Revolution of 1776, it was never about the People vs Tyranny, or Democracy vs Dictatorship. It was about the Big Boss vs the Local Bosses. Who was going to have the last word? Were the final decisions about power and money to be made by the Central Government of the nation, or the local property owners and business big shots?

This debate has plagued Western civilization for millennia. The Roman Republic (upon which our own is carefully based) was formed because the Roman patricians feared the tyranny of their kings. They set up the Roman Senate (made up of the great landowning families) and chose temporary Consuls to alternate the leadership–under the supervision of the Senate. They were willing to share power, but only with their own peers, and only temporarily. Much the same happened in the United States, and with the English Parliament in the 17th century.

The Magna Carta established the primacy of the nobility over the Monarchy. The English Revolution was a conflict between the landed aristocracy and the rising commercial middle class. In America, there was no hereditary aristocracy, but there was an aristocracy of property–agricultural in the Southern colonies, Mercantilistic in the North. The American Civil War was another manifestation of this same struggle, but it was one lost by the loosely confederated Southern aristocrats, and won by the commercial nobility of the Union North.

You can still see traces of these ancient patterns reflected in today’s history. We have new socio-economic classes now, the government bureaucracy, the corporate managerial/professional elite, the administrative/executive caste, the technocracy, the educated intelligentsia and academia, what the Russians call the nomenklatura. But basically, the world is still divided into the same three divisions Orwell described in his novel 1984: The proles, the Outer Party, and the Inner Party; the lower, middle and upper classes. The lower class wants to be middle class, the middle class wants to be upper, the upper wants to protect its privilege, and both upper and middle make promises they can’t keep to the lower to buy their help in defeating their rival. After the dust settles, the new upper class consolidates its power and a new middle class coalesces from the other two. The lower class remains lower, although perhaps altered in numbers and influence.

In each case, great strides have been made by the lower classes, but only because they have been granted by either the central power (King/Government) or the local satraps (merchant and land holders, i.e., the owners of the means of production) in return for assistance in the never ending struggle between the Big Boss and the Local Thugs. The hereditary aristocracy has since vanished, but it has been replaced by its equivalent, the propertied class. Although having a rich father does not guarantee your own wealth and having a poor one does not mean you must remain poor; statistically, on the average, the game hasn’t changed that much. The aristocracy is smaller today, the middle class larger and class mobility is easier, (yes, there has been some progress!) but its still essentially the same game played by the same rules. Same as it ever was.