SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EFFECTS

It has been well said, ‘There is no counting the cost of the civil war. The records are too patchy and too ambiguous.’ A full study of the social and economic impact of the war in a frontier county like Warwickshire would, in any case, involve minute study of the development of individual urban and rural communities over much of the century in order to assess the specific importance of Civil War exactions. This section has more modest aims: to show the sort of burdens the Civil War involved for those who paid them, rather than as in earlier chapters, for those who administered them; and to indicate the possible long-term effects.

Something has been said in chapter 5 of the vastly increased burden of taxation brought about by the war. The weekly assessment alone may have cost the county £1,000 per week between 1643 and 1646 but this was one among the many exactions. From 1640 to 1646 six subsidies, the poll money, the contribution to the £400,000, taxes for the British army in Ireland and for the New Model Army all had to be paid to the national treasury. In addition there was an unprecedented purchase tax, the excise, levied on many essential commodities; and the ‘loans’ of a fifth of landed income or a twentieth of personal estate. In Warwickshire, besides the ‘weekly pay’, most parishes contributed to a levy to raise horse for Lord Brooke and many paid a similar levy for the Earl of Denbigh. Villages near the county's many garrisons were frequently called upon for forced labour on fortifications as the inhabitants of Tysoe were for Compton.