>>6117669oh, are you referring to the medieval legacy fiscal accounting system of tally sticks, whose incineration led to the burning of the Houses Of Parliament in 1834 (pic related is the Turner painting, there are two versions from different perspectives I believe). I am not too familiar with this historical practice though, hehe
I just mention that Shakespeare / Tudor immiseration / decline in living standards thing because I think it is interesting to evoke the political / economic backdrop sometimes. For example I mentioned in a past qtg, a lot of our genre-defining notions of sci-fi fantasy set by the year 1982 (an astonishing year, which saw the release of Conan Thr Barbarian, Blade Runner, John Carpenter's The Thing, Tron, ET... 1982 was also a recession year (80s Savings And Loans bank crisis, also aftermath of 1979 Iranian revolution / oil shock).
If you play ttrpgs or just read any sci fi fantasy literature in general, you are probably sympathetic to the idea of Readers as travellers "moving across lands belonging to someone else", the notion of interpreting a text for deeper meaning. In fact in French literary criticism there is this "Ecole du soupçon" this "school of suspicion" whose aim is to unravel the deceptions and prevailing conventional meanings of a literary work by interrogating the text for hidden meanings, omissions, contradictions etc, "reading the text against itself" in a way that it was not meant to be read. So for instance if you know the standard story of Hamlet, you probably just remember the ghosts and stabbings and poisonings and weird mother-son-uncle stuff and overlook the strange outcome of Fortinbras regime change, hehe
>>6108667 I just thought that Shakespeare analysis on impoverishment was interesting as without looking at the net national income figures, I always associated the Elizabethan era with wealth and prosperity (the sort of Blackadder Sir Walter Raleigh / Sir Francis Drake cliche stereotype exploration of the New World, galleons and colonies and expanding wealth etc) when the apparent reality seems to have been a severe decline in living standards worse than the preceding medieval era, hehe
The study I read was summarised here
https://monthlyreview.org/2024/10/01/richard-iii-the-tudor-myth-and-the-transition-from-feudalism-to-capitalism/The actual paper is this one
https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Macroagg2009.pdfas with all these long run studies, a lot of assumptions are made (a big one appears to be the modelling assumption of a constant ratio in skilled / unskilled workers over a few centuries). However even if you discount the data series produced, it certainly is interesting to reframe the historical events eg Tudor confiscation of monastery wealth and the Poor Laws / beggar laws etc in this context
