Parliament was assembled on 29 March 1340 and on 3 April the lords and commons granted a ninth of corn, wool, and sheep (‘the ninth sheaf, the ninth fleece, and the ninth lamb’) for two years. This basic grant was subject to modification for certain classes of people. Town-dwellers were to pay a ninth of the value of all their moveables, while rural merchants, people living in forests or wastes, and those who did not live by growing crops or sheep-farming, were to pay a fifteenth of the value of theirs. The first year’s payment was due on 1 November 1340, and that of the second year on 2 February 1341. The proceeds of this tax, expected to reach £100,000 in each year, were explicitly reserved for the war with France and its administration was placed in the hands of the baronial council in England, headed by the archbishop of Canterbury and the earl of Huntingdon.

The novel part of this tax, which comprised a payment in kind, was based on the ecclesiastical tithe, and had in fact originally been proposed in the form of a tenth for two years at a session of the lords in the parliament held the previous October. Some such innovation seemed necessary because of the severe depletion of the money supply, and it was perhaps also thought that the revenue from such a tax would exceed that from a similar levy in money. This scheme necessarily involved the revival of the parish as a local taxation unit for a lay subsidy (for instance, it had previously been utilized for the Saladin tithe of 1188), although in at least some of the cases where a parish was composed of several vills, the vill continued to be the ultimate unit of assessment.

Letters patent dated 20 April appointed men in each county to assess, by inquisition or otherwise, the value of the ninth and fifteenth in each parish, borough, and city, and to collect or arrange for the sale of the goods. Supervisors, who were either prelates or magnates, were appointed in each county to oversee this process. At about this time, it seems, the assessors were further advised that the goods from each parish were to be sold at a value exceeding that normally paid by the church towards the clerical subsidies - that is, the amount registered in the ecclesiastical taxation of Pope Nicholas IV made in 1291.

The goods themselves would hardly be available before the seasons of shearing and harvest, which explains why the first payment date was no earlier than November, but the council apparently intended that those persons who agreed to buy the goods should hand over their money in advance and that each taxpayer would later deliver his assessed amount directly to the purchaser. This may have been why the officials were instructed to sell the goods, wherever possible, to people of the same parish, as long as they were ready to pay as much as could be got for them elsewhere, preference being given in the first instance to the rector or farmer of the parish church. In other words, at the lowest level, the administration of the tax would be as far as possible identical with that employed for the gathering of the tithe, and the goods required from each taxpayer would simply represent an addition to those that they contributed to the church. Only after the parish folk had been approached in vain were the local officials to look elsewhere to make the sale.

The assessors were instructed to take sufficient security from the purchasers, but did not collect the money themselves. On 6 and 12 May receivers (generally abbots and priors) were appointed in each county to gather the money and pass it in turn to two principal receivers commissioned for the districts north and south of the Trent, who were to keep the revenue in the treasury of York Minster and the Tower of London before transmitting it to the king.

The subsequent history of the tax is complicated. Problems caused by the shortage of coin and the high prices fixed for the sale of produce were compounded by the general weariness of taxation and resistance to the novelty of the tax. By the end of 1340, only £15,000 had been received. Yet the money was urgently needed: before the king sailed, at least £200,000 of the subsidy had already been assigned, particularly to merchants of the societies of the Bardi and Peruzzi, and to William de la Pole, in return for loans of money. The king’s officials thus resorted to various measures designed to speed up the collection.

At the next parliament, which began on 12 July 1340, further debate was had concerning the operation of the tax, which was said to have been disrupted by the actions of the ‘lords of the towns’ and other ‘troublemakers’ (|barettours|). As a result, revised instructions ('the second commission') were issued to the assessors, who were directed that, although the ninth should still be sold at as high a price as possible, it might be sold if necessary at a price equal to the value of the parish church according to the 1291 tax (E 179/113/13 m 2, the 'second commission' for Gloucestershire, is dated 15 July 1340). If they were unable to sell the ninth at the stated value, they should commit it to the lords of the towns for that amount, and such lords would then be answerable to the king (by the hands of the receivers) for the proceeds. If the lords were unwilling to co-operate, the goods were to be committed to four lawful men of the town, who would similarly be held responsible. The names of these lords and men were then to be certified to the principal receivers. 'This', as E B Fryde notes, 'amounted to a forced sale of the ninth'. The assessors were also instructed that if they had made any sales below the tax of the churches, they should be revoked with all haste. In addition to this, the bishops were directed to summon before them the parsons of their churches to ascertain their correct values. This measure, however, raised hopes that the minimum sale price for the ninth might be lowered further still, and led some assessors to arrest their operations altogether. In the same parliament, the burden upon the country was increased by the grant of a loan of 20,000 sacks of wool, the repayment of which was to be a first charge on the second year of the ninth. The collection of this, as may be imagined, was no more successful than that of the subsidy itself and helped to foment the rising discontent. The Cistercian order was able to procure an exemption from the levy of the ninth on 18 July 1340, following its petition to the king. It agreed instead to pay a subsidy of one-tenth of their annual income.

Further modifications followed. On 24 August new supervisors were appointed in all the counties, while on 7 September the assessors were taken to task for failing in their duties and were directed that half of the money should be in the hands of the receivers by 1 November. This was, however, impossible. The mounting pressure led officials to indulge in illegal seizures and extortion, which generated further local resistance. In September collectors were assaulted in Somerset, and in October the council received reports of communities refusing outright to pay the sums assessed upon them. No manner of enforcement seemed adequate to meet the defiance in the country, and the failure of the council to supply the king with funds brought his campaign to a halt.

On 27 November it was ordered that the money collected was to be brought to a central collector, William Edington, disregarding any assignments to royal creditors, but three days later the king returned, broke up the council, and embarked on a programme of inquiry into the failure of the tax. At the beginning of the new year he made an important alteration to the scheme of taxation ('the third commission': those for Gloucestershire and Lancashire, E 179/113/13 m 3 and E 179/130/15A, are both dated 26 January 1341): namely, that where the true ninth of the parish did not attain to the assessment of the church according to Pope Nicholas’s taxation, the true valuation should be levied without regard to the assessment. The money was now expected by mid-Lent (26 March). This alteration seems to have allayed much of the resistance to the levy, or at least the difficulties of putting it into operation, and it has been estimated that the revenue eventually collected from the first year of the subsidy represented a 70 per cent increase on the issues of the customary fifteenth and tenth. Most of the records connected with this tax which survive in the PRO series E 179 were compiled as a result of the third commission, and they indicate that the first two commissions were executed in only a few parishes. A sample of these documents is printed in a Record Commission volume under the title |Nonarum Inquisitiones|, though the sample includes not only inquisitions, but also valuation schedules and particulars of account.

New assessors were appointed on 11 March 1341 for the second year’s payment, but in the parliament which opened on 23 April of that year the estates complained that the tax was impoverishing them and the second payment was replaced by a grant of 30,000 sacks of wool. This commutation has not yet received a satisfactory commentary. Apparently the first 20,000 sacks were payable by 1 August 1341 and the remaining 10,000 by 24 June 1342, the first year’s levy being apportioned by parliament among the counties according to the rate of the triennial fifteenth and tenth of 1337. Conditions attached to the grant specified that it should be collected by local men. As before, difficulties were experienced in putting the tax into operation. Magnates and others were appointed in each county on 20 June 1341 to hear complaints connected with the levying of the tax, and as late as December 1343 the county of Northumberland had still not paid the wool charged to it; as a result, writs were sent to the local collectors demanding their returns. Moreover, the articles of oyer and terminer commissions issued at the behest of the 1343 parliament suggest that the collectors were also suspected of collecting more than they delivered, selling good fleeces and replacing them with substandard ones, or taking money in place of fleeces and purchasing substandard ones for delivery to the king.

(|Rot. Parl|., II, pp 112-113, 117-118, 120, 126, 131-133, 137; |CPR 1338-1340|, pp 499, 532-533; |CPR 1340-1343|, pp 124-125, 151-155; |CCR 1339-1341|, pp 434-437, 591-3, 618-20; |CFR 1337-1347|, pp 177-179, 186-187, 282-286, 353; |Nonarum Inquisitiones| (Record Commission, London, 1807); |Taxatio Ecclesiastica Nicholai IV|, (Record Commission, London, 1802); Harriss, |King, Parliament and Public Finance|, pp 253-293; E.B. Fryde, 'Edward III's War-Finance, 1337-41' (Unpubl. D.Phil. thesis, Univ. of Oxford, 1946))

enrolled account: E 359/12A, 12B