* Land Tax records

[Jane]

I am researching a new Family and they occur in the Land Tax records.

What I have been searching for is a way to put the values shown in some sort of context, but I have not been able to find a resource which explains the values shown in relation to the sort of wealth or land of the person being taxed.

So for example Sarah Underhill has a tax value of £6 9s 3d in 1812. A the time I am assuming she is running the farm her late husband was farming.

I would like to get an handle on the size of farm she might have been running.

[ColeValleyGirl]

One possibility is to find the property in the tithe records 20-odd years later -- property boundaries didn't change that much (except when a landlord reclaimed a property and added it to their own -- and even then it often continued to be shown separately).

[laz_gen]

To get a feel for what the 1812 amount was worth it relation to today's values you could try an inflation calculator.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetar ... calculator

This site gives a guide to wages, food prices etc. The end of the page has figures close to the start of the 1800's
http://www.afamilystory.co.uk/history/w ... kly-budget

[AdrianBruce]

A quick Google leads to https://nationalarchives.gov.uk/documen ... 2-1963.pdf

Apparently there was a quota system that, fundamentally, didn't change through history, which might sound promising for working forward or back. However, there's also this warning:

The relationship between Land Tax payments and acreages, because of regional and local variations, make it impossible to compare parishes across the country or even within a county. The amount of tax paid may be for agricultural land either pasture or arable, or for a farmhouse and outbuildings, or in a town for a house, shop or manufactory and it is not possible to say which of these is being taxed. Even land of the same acreage might not be valued and taxed at the same amount, if one piece of land was more productive than the other it may be assessed for more tax.

My emphasis on the last sentence.

That linked article, by the way, explains a bit more about the Land Tax Redemption process, which I'd never understood before...