Tax

Preston might seem an unlikely source for one of the most famous quotations about tax, but Christopher Bullock's one act comedy 'The Cobbler of Preston' (1716) is the first known written instance of the line: "I say 'tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes."

Benjamin Franklin is more often associated with the phrase, but given he lived in London for some years as a young man (1723 to 1726) it is more than likely that he had seen the play, then in vogue in the capital, and had been struck by that memorable idiom.

If death and taxes are certainties, then what about that fatal combination, the Death Tax? Ugh, let us not go there. Instead, I'm whisking us off to Tsarist Russia, coincidentally in the same time period as above, from the late 17th century and well into the 18th.

Terry Quinn in his Tax blog earlier this week itemised some of the more unusual taxes to have been imposed down the ages, on: clocks, hats, playing cards, urine, wallpaper, windows and beards. That last one pulled me up, as a lifelong beard-wearer. I grew one first in my late teens and have only shaved it off once for a period of a few weeks when I had to appear clean-shaven in a play ('The Threepenny Opera'). I was intrigued and a little disturbed by the notion of a beard tax, and investigated further.

Various rulers had tried to impose such a tax down the ages. The bearded Francis I of France received approval from the pope in 1515 to levy a tax on priests' beards, partly to fund his war with the Holy Roman Empire. This led to a divide between the wealthier court ecclesiastics who could afford it and poorer village priests who could not. 

It is rumoured that the bearded Henry VIII of England also introduced a beard tax in 1535 and that Elizabeth attempted to increase it, but archival evidence is patchy.

By far the most infamous and well-documented imposition of a tax on beards was during the reign of Tsar Peter I of Russia (1672-1725). It started off as an experiment in social engineering. Peter cast his eyes westwards to sophisticated and urbane Europe, where being clean-shaven was the norm, and wanted his great hordes of bearded boyars and hairy-faced Cossacks  to smarten up like western Europeans as part of his ongoing campaign to modernise Russia. He set an example by being clean-shaven himself.

Russian beard tax

Peter's beard tax was first introduced in 1698 and in fact was not officially repealed until the reign of Catherine the Great in 1772. Charges varied, not according to the length or thickness of beard but according to income. It was means tested. The wealthiest merchants were charged 100 roubles per year. Those of lesser standing, along with courtiers, government officials and the military were expected to pay 60 roubles per year. Ordinary townsfolk were charged 30 roubles and bearded peasants in the countryside were charged a kopek each time they entered a city.

Peter empowered the police to forcibly and publicly shave anyone who had not paid their beard tax. Those who had paid were given a metal beard token to carry as proof of payment. A couple of fine examples are shown below. They carried a depiction of a beard on the obverse with the legend 'Money taken', and the royal crest and year of issue on the reverse. Around the edge was inscribed the legend 'The beard is a superfluous burden'.

Obviously, the Tsar's beard tax was not very popular. Resistance to going clean shaven was widespread, with many believing that it was a religious requirement for a man to wear a beard. The Russian Orthodox Church indeed declared that being clean-shaven was blasphemous. 

One might then have expected the majority of male citizens to pay the tax and that it might have proved a nice little earner, something of a silver lining given the failure of the experiment to greatly increase the number of clean-shaven men in Russia. The evidence is to the contrary. Records show that the sums of beard tax collected averaged out at 3,600 roubles per year. Peter had underestimated the ability of the Russian state to administer and collect the beard tax if not many more than 100 men a year were actually paying it. I'm surprised it straggled on for the best part of 75 years!

Russian beard tokens

Personally, I am in favour of taxation as a means of raising money to fund our social infrastructure: schools, hospitals, transport systems, defence, law enforcement, utilities et cetera. I don't think those should be privatised and run for profit for a few shareholders. I also find it reprehensible that people look for ways to avoid or evade even paying the tax they should. My impression is that over the last fifty years or so (since the advent of Thatcherism really), greed and selfishness have somehow become normalised. I'll just leave that there.

Getting back to beards, I took exception to that Russian slogan 'The beard is a superfluous burden' and so I set to writing a new poem in defence of a fine set of whiskers.

A Beard Is Not A Superfluous Burden

You have a handsome face, why hide it?

That was my dear  old mum, back in 1971

when I decided, on leaving school, that

beards were hip and I would grow one.

She didn't like a whiskery kiss, something 

to do with an uncle in her past. More than

that she wouldn't say, and I didn't ask. But

my beard was here to stay, and it felt good.

Looked the part too, a rich chestnut hue. 

Of course the years have faded it through

grey to white, but it's as luxurious and soft

as ever it was, and I'm not hiding anything.

Women have loved to stroke it, some even 

to groom it, but I've never let a barber near.

It gets a Sabatier professional scissoring

when I deem the time is right, and think of

all the hours I've saved not having to shave

every morning of my adult life, just an

occasional trim to neck and cheeks to keep

the sculpture neat. It's not superfluous, it's

part of who I am. And let me tell you one 

more thing: when I worked in Russia and 

it was -30 Celsius of a Moscow winter, a

decent beard was the finest thing to have.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)