Tax
lists are a key means of understanding parish life in the 1500s and early
1600s. This collection of 112 records for towns and villages such as Crediton
and Dartmouth is published here for the first time. It reveals those
individuals who were the bedrock of their societies and helps us in
understanding how local society worked in this period. It is through the
study of these documents that we can unravel how differently each parish was
organised in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and see how people
took part in parish life. The name
lists also provide rich material for family and local historians.