I’m not sure why this came into my mind or how the tax collection system works in different countries or even if the national identify card policy is a thing in this case but I’m just curious to know.
In: Economics
That depends a lot on the place in question.
Most taxes back in the day were not income taxes, but property taxes. The tax collection agent would come to your house, look at all of your stuff (particularly your land) and then figure out how much you owed based on what you owned. This of course meant that you could reduce your tax by hiding your stuff. Can’t hide land though, and land is the most important thing in medieval tax collecting, so it worked out OK. Then you send sacks of grain or whatever you were to pay your taxes in (paying in money was rare) to the tax guy. And if you didn’t, then the tax guy’s friend, who owns a very sharp axe, pays you a visit.
Tracking people wasn’t very important back then. If someone didn’t have land, they didn’t have much to contribute in taxes anyway, and if they did have land, then they could easily be found since they would have built their house on that land, or be working the land to make a living – and thus would not stray far from it. People who did not own land but still gained enough wealth to be worth collecting taxes from tended to be well-known members of high society, and would only be able to avoid taxes by fleeing to another society, leaving much of their wealth behind.
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