Parliament opened on 10 October 1435, and on 23 December 1435, in addition to a fifteenth and tenth, the commons granted a tax on income from freehold lands, rents, annuities, offices and other temporal possessions.

The minimum threshold of liability to pay the tax was a net income of £5 per annum, after which a graduated rate was charged on all forms of taxable income. On annual incomes from £5-100, the rate of taxation was 6d per pound. On annual incomes from £101-399, the first £100 of this income was taxed at a rate of 6d per pound, but the second £300, that is, annual incomes of from £101 to £399, was taxed at a rate of 8d per pound. Incomes of £400 or more were taxed at 2s. per pound on their entire income. The income of the clergy was exempt, except for that received from property purchased or amortized since 20 Edward I.

Commissioners named by the king's council were to be appointed in the various counties to make the assessments, summoning before them all persons whose incomes might prove to be taxable. These commissioners, who were appointed by letters patent on 29 January 1436, were to certify the results into the Exchequer, providing the names also of those who did not appear before them; these defaulters would be summoned before the treasurer and barons to be examined. The commissioners were not empowered to make enquiries about the income of the nobility, however; barons, baronesses and the higher nobility were to be examined before the chancellor and treasurer, and the order from the king's council for a warrant authorising the barons of the Exchequer to assess the nobility was not issued until 12 May 1436. The divergent methods have produced two sets of assessments. While names and assessments of non-baronial contributors were set down county by county, the names, incomes and assessments of lords and ladies, and others examined in Chancery, are listed separately. All those persons who appeared before the treasurer and barons of the Exchequer - both members of the nobility, and persons who had declined to appear before the county commissioners and were subsequently summoned - were listed in schedules which were sewn into one roll (now E 179/240/269). The list of defaulters is annotated with notes about their appearances.

Assessments for sixteen counties, listing the names, incomes and tax due from each person, survive among the E 179 documents, except for the assessment for Northumberland, which, for some reason, was copied onto the enrolled account. Two files of returns for individual members of the nobility (both lay and ecclesiastical), and other prominent individuals who were examined on their incomes before the chancellor and treasurer, exist among the King's Remembrancer's Miscellanea (E 163/7/31 parts 1 and 2). They contain information not only on the landed estates of such persons, but some of these records of examinations also name the annuitants whose fees were allowable deductions from the total assessed income of their lords/ladies. The returns for the nobility and others examined at Westminster were also entered on the enrolled account.

The tax was payable in one instalment on 22 April 1436, and yielded between £8,500 to £9,000. Selected entries from the returns for the counties are printed in the appendix of Gray, 'Incomes from Land in England', and figures for the levels of income of individual members of the nobility are presented and analysed throughout. The London return is printed in Appendix B of S.L. Thrupp, |The Merchant Class of Medieval London| (Chicago, 1948), pp 378-388.

The subject of the income of the nobility based on the assessments for the income tax of 1435 is treated further in T.B. Pugh and C.D. Ross, 'The English Baronage and the Income Tax of 1436', |BIHR|, XXVI (1953), 1-28. Since the publication of these studies, the assessment for Surrey has been located in the Surrey Record Office, Guildford, LM 1719. The accounts for this tax were enrolled with the income taxes of 1404, 1411 and 1450.

(|CFR 1430-1437|, pp 257-262; BL, Cotton MS Cleo. F.VI, fo 219; |Rot. Parl|., IV, pp 481, 486-487; Gray, 'Incomes from Land in England', pp 607-639)

enrolled account: E 359/29, rots 4-7