Abolition of Feudal Tenures (1660)

Overview

The Tenures Abolition Act 1660 (12 Cha. 2 c. 24), passed at the Restoration of the English monarchy, abolished feudal military tenure — including knight service and the Crown's associated wardship revenues collected through the Court of Wards and Liveries — and converted almost all remaining tenures to free and common socage.[1] In place of the feudal dues landowners had owed the Crown, the Act compensated the monarch with a fixed annual sum funded by a new excise duty, levied on beer, ale, and other goods and paid by the general public rather than by landowners; the same Act imposed England's first excise duty on tea, coffee, and chocolate.[1] Fred Harrison's Ricardo's Law treats the episode as a hinge point in English fiscal history: the landed aristocracy, having reasserted political control after the Civil War and the Restoration, shed its feudal fiscal obligations and shifted the tax burden from land onto consumption — a shift Harrison reads as the effective privatization of England's land rents, setting a pattern he traces forward through the 1692 Land Tax and Pitt's 1799 income tax to the fight over the 1909 People's Budget.[2]

See Also

• Dissolution of the Monasteries — the earlier Tudor-era event that first put a third of England's land onto a commercial market, setting up the later feudal-to-fiscal shift this Restoration Act completed
• Ricardo's Law (Fred Harrison, 2006) — the discovery source for this reading of the Act
• David Ricardo · Law of Rent
• 1909 People's Budget — the later fight over restoring a land-based revenue base
• Repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) — another landmark in the same English fiscal-political history

Sources

1. "Tenures Abolition Act 1660," UK legislation record and standard legal-history account of the Act's abolition of feudal military tenure and its replacement of Crown revenue with excise duty. legislation.gov.uk · Wikipedia summary — used for the Act's provisions and the excise-duty compensation mechanism (A-claim).
2. Fred Harrison, Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam (Shepheard-Walwyn, 2006), Ch. 7.2 and Ch. 13.2 — used for the "rents privatised" framing and the Act's place in Harrison's longer fiscal-history argument (B-claim; chapter locators from research summary, not yet read in full). Book page