Henry V's reputation as manager of the crown's resources stands higher in the current generation of historians than perhaps ever before, and the king's strengths in this area are now routinely regarded as an essential element, alongside the more sensational achievements in war, of the second Lancastrian king's claims to greatness. A strong tradition of scholarship from Ramsay and Steele to McFarlane and Harriss has engaged in detail with two aspects of Henry's gift for finance: his management of parliaments and convocations to effect one of the most intense bouts of taxation experienced in England over the course of the Hundred Years War; and his equally impressive control of the expenditure of those taxes, which ensured, almost uniquely in the Middle Ages, a successful balance between income and expenditure. But a good deal less attention has been given to two other important aspects of the tax history of Henry's reign. How was taxation experienced on the ground by the tens of thousands of ordinary taxpayers who were called upon regularly to open their purses? And how sustainable was the tax system on which Henry built his conquest of Normandy and his ambitions for the settlement of France? By addressing the fiscal history of Henry's reign from the perspective of the taxpayer, we may usefully test the current powerful orthodoxy about the functionality of the Lancastrian fiscal state.