抄録
Historians investigating pre-industrial Britain in a quantitative way have highlighted the seventeenth century as a turning point in attitudes towards numbers and numerical skills. While the theoretical framework of social statistics was gradually established by the first demographers and social scientists, John Graunt, Gregory King, and William Petty, plenty of documents and records, which eventually provided materials for the theorisation, were made for religious investigations and taxation. Our primary concern is to reconfirm that those documents are conducive to understanding society not only for contemporaries but also for modern historians. Particular emphasis will be placed on Poll tax records. Although a variety of direct taxes were implemented in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to wage wars, the Poll tax was unique in the sense that it gave individual names of almost everybody living in a community. Because other direct taxes were mainly levied on real and personal estates, the related documents only show the people who possessed the properties. Thus, subsidy records, for instance, usually only provide the names of household heads and nothing more about his (or infrequently her) household members, whereas Poll tax records allow us to reconstruct each household. Using these valuable documents, a case study on King's Lynn will be presented. As exceptionally detailed poll tax assessments have survived in this town, household size is analysed in relation to occupation and rank, and migration and turnover are examined with more than two assessments. We would like to offer another case study ; a study on tax collectors in London. Tax assessments and collection were a complicated process. As a result, a number of related documents were made, one of which recorded names of tax collectors. Showing that a large number of ordinary people, even those who could be ranked below the middling sort, were involved in the taxation process, it will be suggested that tax collectors seem to have done their best not to disturb the neighbourhood relations of their own local communities, and these implicit arrangements explain the political stability of English society in spite of frequent demands for taxation by central government.
