T
TABELLIONS
. Officials, found especially in northern France, who recorded and preserved the acts of
judicial bodies. For a long time, tabellion was almost a synonym for notary, as those who
recorded judicial acts were called scribes, notaries, or tabellions without much
distinction. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, however, a distinction finally began to
appear. Henceforth, notaries were the ones who transcribed the record of official actions,
while tabellions filled the archival function—preserving the record and delivering
documents when called upon.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: NOTARIES]
TAILLE
. The word taille (“tallage” in English) referred originally to exactions that seigneurs
demanded from people under their power, but it also came to describe a method of
assessment—apportionment among households on the basis of their presumed ability to
pay. The seigneurial taille, from the 11th century on, was arbitrary in nature and thus the
most onerous obligation imposed on peasants. By the 13th century, many began to win
enfranchisement, which eliminated the taille or converted it to a fixed annual payment.
When whole communities, such as towns, became enfranchised, they owed a fixed
taille that they funded by levying taxes of their own choosing on their inhabitants. For the
taxpayers, the taille was now territorial rather than personal. Town governments needed
money for other purposes, such as fortifications, and in the late Middle Ages it was
common to call most municipal taxes tailles. Technically, however, the term applied only
to direct taxes assessed by répartition, that is, apportioned on the basis of ability to pay
(“the strong carrying the weak”).
The word taille began to appear in royal taxation only toward the end of the 14th
century, when it grew out of the fouages, taxes on “hearths” (households), levied in the
years 1364–80. In Languedoc, the towns of a district paid royal taxes as lump sums
apportioned among them mostly on the basis of households and raised through municipal
The Encyclopedia 1701