Perplexed

Slightly feverish when I woke up this morning, dreaming about a large and ornate table, in words rather than pictures.

I associate to early modern Russia, say the 17th century. To the Russian exchequer - or whatever they called the tax people at that time. A tax on the rich, based in some obscure way on the table. But a tax they could commute for a money payment, rather as a knight in armour could commute real military service - as opposed to bashing each other about in tournaments - for a money payment. Or have I got the table wrong and it was actually more like the board that Pepys sat at, or the board the barons sat at, to rather good effect, in the Rose's 'Wars of the Roses'. See reference 3, et seq.

I wake up, puzzling mightily about how this tax might have worked.

First step ask Cortana on the telephone, and she turns up a nice potted history of Peter the Great. I learn that he might have been great, but that he retained the capacity for savagery of his forebears, quite near the surface. Perhaps best known to Cortana for his tax on beards, about which she was able to go into considerable detail. Perhaps we should pop this one into the mullahs' suggestion box. But nothing about tables.

Second step ask Cortana on the desktop, where she turns up a different lot of stuff. Perhaps stuff is flagged up as being telephone or desktop friendly. Including a gang called Jstor which offers online access to all kinds of other stuff and of which I happen to be a member. Log in and they turn up 'Problems of Tax Reform in Imperial Russia' by one Robert H. Gorlin in the Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Jun., 1977), pp. 246-265. An excellent guide to tax in late imperial Russia, including the tax table above, a table telling me that tax on hard liquor was around one third of the total. Excellent, but apart from being, in itself, the wrong sort of table, no mention of tables at all.

So where did the dream come from? Did there used to be a scheme, somewhere, sometime, where the nobles had to furnish the monarch with a golden table, every Lady Day? With one noble doing a back leg, another doing a front drawer knob and so on. With commutation for a money payment following later?

Failing here, I switch back to Jstor: I can't remember how I got onto them or who they are. But I do find out that they are part of the family at reference 2. And despite initial appearances, I think they are all for-profit outfits. You get your tasters for free, but they very quickly invite you to get your credit card out.

Maybe it will all come back to me as the morning progresses.

Reference 1: http://www.jstor.org/.

Reference 2: http://ithaka.org/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/part-one-of-three.html.