1. Lay subsidies present the historian with certain problems as sources. Assessment of taxable wealth involved a deductible. Goods considered necessary for subsistence were not to be taxed. Not enough is known, however, about local attitudes towards subsistence to comment on the extent of the deductible; however, it is generally considered that assessments on grain and livestock, the principle movables listed in returns, were taxes on surplus that could be marketed: Willard, Parliamentary Taxes, p. 85. The extent of exemption and evasion is very difficult to measure, too. Each subsidy had its own eligibility minimum. Peasants whose assessed taxable wealth was less than the minimum, which in 1297 was set at nine shillings, would not appear on the rolls. In a study of the Lay Subsidies of 1327 and 1332 for the village of Broughton, Huntingdonshire, the roster of village taxpayers was crosslinked with the names of individuals and family groupings identified from the contemporary series of manorial court rolls.
2. Production for the Market on a Small Fourteenth-Century Estate
3. Periodic market-places and periodic marketing