Chris Berg > Quotes

“Tories were more likely to support the king and a conservative position. The description also originated as an insult, from the Irish word for a bandit, ‘toraighe’.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“When Napoleon said ‘England is a nation of shopkeepers’ he actually didn’t mean it as an insult. He recognised England’s wealth was a product of its trade, not its population or the extent of its territory.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“In England, individuals owned the land, and they could buy and sell land as they wished—all property was purchasable—a premise contrary to law in nearly every other part of the world.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“There will always be taxpayers who disagree with the purposes for which taxes are raised. But John’s purposes were so radically distant from the wishes of his barons that it sparked a civil war.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“The U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that ‘taxes are what we pay for civilized society’. But John, Henry III, and Charles I were not buying a civilised society. John and Henry III were trying to buy back an empire, and Charles I was playing geopolitics.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“The Long Parliament was revolutionary. It was literally ‘revolutionary’ because the members of the Long Parliament helped make up the parliamentary army that would go to war against the king.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“But whenever there was a requirement for additional finances gained from taxes, the monarch had to resort to parliament. In the 1600s the question of precisely which financial exactions levied by the crown required parliamentary approval would be one of the causes of the English Civil War.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“The Peasants’ Revolt has long been an interest and focus of economic and Marxist historians, while political historians have focused on the Magna Carta.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“Jews were also able to avoid the Church’s ban on usury, as for the most part canon law did not apply to Jews.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“Knights’ service was grudgingly tendered and the forty day limit meant that the king was constantly negotiating to replenish his forces. The solution was to introduce a payment that could be made as a substitute for service. With these funds the king could hire mercenaries instead.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“The English preferred to reform their administration rather than revolutionise it.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“Parliament proclaimed ‘the liberties, franchises, privileges and jurisdictions of parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England’ and that the body had every right to debate and discuss anything concerning ‘the king, state and defence of the realm’. James’ response was to dissolve the parliament once more.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“Coke and his contemporaries identified the Magna Carta as the source of the idea that a person could only be imprisoned by the judgement of his peers and by the law of the land. In fact this reading of the Magna Carta was quite wrong. The Magna Carta had been written in a time when King John would take hostages from a baron’s family to ensure their loyalty or as security for the payment of taxes.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“while it was intended to punish John, the interdict turned out to be extremely profitable for English revenues. It may have even postponed John’s day of reckoning, relieving the fiscal burden on the barons for as long as church revenues could be expropriated.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“Samuel was right, of course, and the Israelite kings made extensive use of forced labour for building and agricultural labour.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“Over time, the more taxes John imposed, the less money they raised.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“Historians today argue that John was a highly skilled administrator. But that was of little interest to chroniclers. What mattered in a king was his military virtues, not his bureaucratic ones.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“It has been estimated that of the approximately 200 barons in England in 1215, 40 were in rebellion against John, 40 were supporters of John, and the remaining 120 were undeclared.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“By the time the 1629 parliament was dissolved, Charles had repudiated the principles of the Petition of Right. Like its ancestor the Magna Carta, the Petition of Right was initially a failure, unable to prevent the breakdown of the relationship between the king and his magnates.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“In the context of late seventeenth century politics Locke’s hopes for a new liberal political order rested on the evolution of the ideas of the Magna Carta.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“Beardmore ensured he was arrested in his home while teaching his son about the Magna Carta. The event was captured in a popular and widely published engraving.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“When Charles imprisoned the Five Knights for refusing to pay the forced loan of 1627, he violated the Magna Carta. Charles had used arbitrary imprisonment as a punishment for tax evasion. The establishment of a statutory common law right to habeas corpus comes from parliament’s resentment over the coercive nature of the monarch’s revenue raising system.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“On a purely practical level, the most obvious evidence that contemporaries could see for the Magna Carta’s failure was the fact that the rebels neither disarmed nor relinquished London. Robert Fitzwalter even kept up his title as Marshal of the Army of God. England remained on the brink of civil war.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“John mistreated many of the powerful and prominent nobles he had captured. Twenty-two of them died. In thirteenth century Europe, this was seen as well beyond the rules of war. The true barbarity was his treatment of Arthur. John was not as willing to tolerate rivals.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“When the Saladin Tithe was levied in France it sparked such serious protests from the clergy it had to be rescinded by King Philip. Outrage was somewhat less overt in England, but the Saladin Tithe was still a bitterly resented tax.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“The access of merchants to England was governed by Chapter 41, which not only allowed their ‘safe and secure exit from England, and entre to England’ but protected them from the ‘evil tolls’ that John had imposed in his desperate revenue raising.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“The abuse the barons were seeking to overcome was the practice of John to inflict punishments on his opponents without recourse to any legal process. To avoid being inflicted with the arbitrary punishments of the king, his intended victims paid him bribes.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“The seeking of permission to levy taxation had evolved into a constitutional norm. Any future attempts to levy taxes without the counsel of the realm would be vigorously opposed. And the Church supported the document as well. Any person who violated the charter was threatened with excommunication.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“The purpose of making multiple engrossments was to have them distributed throughout the country.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty

“The position of sheriff was often sold to the highest bidder. The sheriff promised to pay the king an exact amount (a ‘farm’) and anything received above that (the ‘increment’) could be kept by the sheriff for himself. The Magna Carta attempted to put an end to the ever-growing increments taken by the sheriff.”
― Chris Berg, Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt that Gave Us Liberty