> This is a useful tidbit. How do we know it? Again, though, one > wonders why other livestock, whether edible or otherwise useful, would > not be tabulated, particularly as inventories always indicate > (naturally) that these all had significant value. Why would the tax > man be instructed to ignore them? The "silver plate" rundown called > for in these assessments had far fewer actual entries than we'd expect > to see for hogs, sheep, dairy cattle and oxen. ___________________________ It would be interesting to know how static the "tax list" of taxable items was ... for instance, was the item, "black cattle," on the list for 100 years, or did the list change significantly over time? (Don't laugh or chortle, but when I first read the list as posted here on the list, I thought that perhaps "black cattle" was a garbled line accidentally put together from two lines, one referring to bovine cattle, and another one for those of our ancestors who were treated as human cattle of the day.) One can imagine that the specific items to be tax tablulated at any given point in time might have been influenced by many of the same sorts of sometimes seemingly mysterious forces that shape modern tax policy. Why are some things taxed and others not? Whose ox (or black cow) was being gored in the days of yore presumably was the result of the political process, with outcomes that probably usually made good sense to the government, if not all the time to the taxees. Dave K