Everyone Hates Taxes
Aug. 23rd, 2022 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingWait wait our idea of dirty medieval peasants is based on a *tax aversion scam*??? Please tell me more I need to know this.
https://brunhiddensmusings.tumblr.com/post/170638767425/wait-wait-our-idea-of-dirty-medieval-peasants-is
of course word of these envoys traveled faster then they did, virtually every town they came to had time to claim they had far less taxable wealth then they actually did have by the time the audit arrived. in one of the more over the top cases an entire village pretended to have caught insanity- when the taxmen arrived they saw screaming laughing idiots with underwear on their heads so they left as fast as they could considering at the time insanity was thought to be literally contagious. it would be over five years before anyone tried to audit that town again.
Sounds legit. I think there's also a history writer bias of wanting to make everyone outside the ruling elite seem uncivilized, when really most people in most places in most periods of history are just going to be living their lives in a completely normal way.
One of my favorite microgenres of fantasy is small stories about the quiet everyday lives of normal people - tertiary characters at best - who exist in the same world as epic events. One of my favorite examples of this is the first collected volume of Gotham Central, which is an episodic police procedural. The quality of the series drops after the first volume, and I tend not to be sympathetic toward the police, but I love the idea of normal people doing normal everyday jobs and suddenly there's Batman.
https://brunhiddensmusings.tumblr.com/post/170638767425/wait-wait-our-idea-of-dirty-medieval-peasants-is
of course word of these envoys traveled faster then they did, virtually every town they came to had time to claim they had far less taxable wealth then they actually did have by the time the audit arrived. in one of the more over the top cases an entire village pretended to have caught insanity- when the taxmen arrived they saw screaming laughing idiots with underwear on their heads so they left as fast as they could considering at the time insanity was thought to be literally contagious. it would be over five years before anyone tried to audit that town again.
Sounds legit. I think there's also a history writer bias of wanting to make everyone outside the ruling elite seem uncivilized, when really most people in most places in most periods of history are just going to be living their lives in a completely normal way.
One of my favorite microgenres of fantasy is small stories about the quiet everyday lives of normal people - tertiary characters at best - who exist in the same world as epic events. One of my favorite examples of this is the first collected volume of Gotham Central, which is an episodic police procedural. The quality of the series drops after the first volume, and I tend not to be sympathetic toward the police, but I love the idea of normal people doing normal everyday jobs and suddenly there's Batman.
