Skip to content

OU on the BBC: Breaking the Seal - Programme two - Tax

By: The OpenLearn team (The Open University)
Posted under What's On

A programme summary for Tax, the second programme of the BBC/OU's series Breaking the Seal.

13 Apr
2007
CommentShare to TwitterShare to FacebookPrint
BBC Powder your wig; pay your taxes

If you think paying taxes is hard, spare a thought for monarchs and Parliaments who have struggled for a thousand years to come up with taxes that people can’t avoid. At first they just taxed wealth; in the fourteenth century they tried a Poll Tax and soon had to drop that. Domestic taxes like windows and hearths proved unpopular and not so hard to avoid.

By the eighteenth century practically everything was taxed – from servants to wigs and pets – and out of this lunacy, eventually, inevitably, parliament approved an income tax.

In this second programme, Bettany Hughes gets her hands on real history as she tours the country for the fascinating tales buried in the tons of public records.

Read more in the programme transcript.

Breaking the Seal in more depth:

Rate and share this page:

You haven't rated. Average rating 5 out of 5, based on 1 rating

Share this page:

.

Page Tags:

Sign in or create a free account to add tags to your personal tag cloud usingThe add button

Close

More like this

About the author

The OpenLearn team (The Open University)

So how does all this free learning content make its way to you from the brains of Open University experts? The answer is the OpenLearn team who work with academics to make this website available to the world for free.

More by The OpenLearn team:

Comments

Be the first to post a comment.

Login or Register to post comments

Article Information

Publication details
Monday, 14th February 2000
Friday, 13th April 2007

Copyright information
• Body text - Copyrighted: The Open University
• Image 'Powder your wig; pay your taxes' - Copyrighted: BBC

Article Feeds

If you enjoyed this, why not follow a feed to find out when we have new things like it? Choose an RSS feed from the list below. (Don't know what to do with RSS feeds?)
Remember, you can also make your own, personal feed by combining tags from around OpenLearn.

About OpenLearn

Hide

Explore

Try

Study

OU Courses

Open University

OpenLearn Now

Hide
Modern love considered Creative Commons Image Capt Kodak under CC BY-NC 2.0 licence

Why does love hurt?

Bucking the trends
OU on TV and radio this week

Tag Clouds

Hide

Site Cloud

My Cloud

Discover the latest about your passions - Sign In or Register and start a personal tag cloud.

What are Tag Clouds?
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/flash/tagcloud.swf

Creative Commons License Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, content on this site is made available
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence

/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/