Eel, Apricots and Agates: The Bavarian Toll and Excise Ordinance

Taxes are not a very pleasant topic. Nevertheless, they are an absolutely essential part of any society. No independent state can exist in the long term unless its people are willing to jointly finance projects that benefit everyone. But in order to convince its citizens to accept rather than refuse these taxes, a state requires a tax system that is transparent, easy to understand and, above all, fair.

This is something that the rulers of the Enlightenment were beginning to understand. For that reason, they made a particular effort to ensure that taxpayers were aware of the tolls they planned to collect. The book we’re presenting today bears witness to this. It’s a list of all Bavarian city and road tolls. We acquired it in spring 2021 in an auction held by Munich-based auction house Hartung & Hartung, which specialises in bibliophilic books.

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A Tax System Shaped by the Enlightenment

So, let’s go back to Bavaria in 1765, where Max III Joseph had been in power since 1745. He is one of the lesser-known figures of world history, which is partly due to the fact that he inherited a ruined country from his father. Both his father and his grandfather had grand plans for the House of Wittelsbach. But they both failed and now, thanks to them, Bavaria was in a state of economic ruin. The people, too, were sick of paying high taxes just so that their rulers could adorn themselves with elegant titles.

Max III Joseph therefore had two problems on his hands: he had to pay off the immense debts of his forefathers, while also organising a tax system that would be accepted by his people. The General Toll and Excise Ordinance of 1765 was an essential aspect of this policy. The “excise”, i.e. a sort of internal tariff that applied to all traded commodities, was the country’s most important source of income in the 18^th century. It was therefore crucially important that travelling traders were willing to pay it and did not bypass the state fees by smuggling their goods.

Why It Paid To Be Self-Sufficient

Smuggling was actually just as easy in the 18^th century as it is today. The toll houses were located on the main highways, with each one positioned wherever the road passed through a city wall into a city. There were no bypass roads. This meant that anybody wishing to smuggle their goods past one of these toll houses simply avoided the city; but in doing so, they not only risked detection and punishment but also – if they were travelling by horse and cart, at least – broken axles or worse. As long as the taxes were reasonable, it was therefore a sensible alternative for traders to stay on the roads and pay the relevant fee for themselves, their means of transport and their goods whenever they entered or left the city.

This map, which was included with every copy of the Bavarian Toll and Excise Ordinance, shows all the toll houses. It’s probably rather astonishing to us – we who make a fuss when there’s a traffic jam at the border – to see how often, even in the 18^th century, a traveller would have to stop at a toll house. For example, if you wanted to transport goods from Munich to Augsburg – a journey that, nowadays, would take half an hour via the ICE rail service – you would have to pass through at least three toll houses: at Dachau, Friedberg and Augsburg itself. Each toll house for land traffic is marked on the map with a cross, while each toll house for land and sea traffic is marked with a double cross.

In addition, anybody travelling on the road for a longer distance would have to pay a road toll – much like those imposed on the French motorway today – which was known as the ‘Maut’ toll. This toll was calculated based on the length of the road. Each double line marked on the map represents the location of a small toll house where the road toll was collected.

And that brings us to the subsistence economy. This term refers to a type of economy in which small economic units, such as farms, produce everything they need to exist themselves, in-house. In the past, it was worthwhile for these economic units to produce many everyday goods in-house, such as clothing, crockery and furniture, though a factory could have done so much more quickly and cheaply, even back then. This is because it wasn’t the production costs that really determined the final price of a product, but rather the tolls and transport fees, which increased with every toll house that a trader passed through.

Eel, Apricots and Agates

As mentioned earlier, Max III Joseph wasn’t just concerned about optimising the state’s tax revenue. He also wanted his citizens to accept his taxes. For that reason, he ordered that this tariff be displayed in every local toll station and available for traders to buy. Max III Joseph proudly reported that he had eliminated numerous toll houses through his reform! One dare not even imagine how many such toll houses there might have been BEFORE this tariff of 1765.

Things get rather entertaining when you take a look at the goods that were subject to taxation. Of course, we’re not suggesting that this reflects what ordinary citizens would use as everyday products, but the very fact that these estimated tax rates existed tells us that these goods were being traded and the state wanted a share in the profits.

The tariff carefully distinguishes between fresh and smoked eel, as well as between fresh and dried apples. It lists live eagles, monkeys, swan feathers, pigskins and sealskin. Copper engravings were tax-free, while the toll levied on printing plates was calculated by the hundredweight. With each toll house, the hundredweight of the printing plates became 6 kreuzer more expensive – at least, that’s if they were transported by water: it was 3 kreuzer if the trader was travelling by road. The difference in price is due to the fact that there were more toll houses on land than along the rivers. If a printing plate was sold or exported, the toll was no longer calculated based on its weight, but rather on the selling price. 1 kreuzer from each guilder was retained as the toll.

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Traders therefore not only had to pay city tolls, but also road tolls, which applied both to the goods themselves and to their means of transport. A carriage – empty or loaded – cost 1 kreuzer per hour of travel. A loaded cart cost 2 pfennigs, a price that was reduced to 1 pfennig if the cart was empty. If you wanted to drive a small herd of cattle into the city, you would have to pay a road toll for each individual animal as well as for the horse you were riding. Only those who passed a toll house on their daily route to the field or the pasture were exempt from the road toll.

Before The Days of Department Stores...

Though we may be impressed by the wide variety of goods presented to us in this excise ordinance, we shouldn’t imagine that a citizen would be able to simply go and buy all these products just like that. There weren’t any ‘department stores’ as we know them today. Instead, noble gentlemen employed what were known as ‘factors’, who were based in major trading cities and, with the help of their far-reaching connections, procured everything that a superior household needed. 

Every other consumer had to rely on the fairs. Our copy of the excise ordinance provides us with a list of all the events held in Bavaria. This list tells us that the citizens of small towns would only have got the opportunity to choose from a wider selection of goods around two, three or four times a year.

Nowadays, the idea of not being able to buy anything, all the time, is so foreign to us that we can barely imagine it. Tollgates, too, seem like a relic of a distant past. In this sense, our world as we know it was shaped by the 19^th century. But we should also be aware that free trade, which England pushed for in the 19^th century, ruined many local producers – which had been protected by the toll system of the 18^th century – in favour of the big factories in Manchester and Birmingham. But that’s another story.

By the way, Max III Joseph was not able to pay off his ancestors’ mountain of debt in the 32 years of his reign, but thanks to his careful financial policy, he did manage to reduce it by half. Now that’s impressive, especially in this day and age.

Other Things You Might Be Interested In:

We acquired this work from Munich-based auction house Hartung & Hartung.

You can view the entire ‘Chur-Baierischen Mauth- und Accis-Tarif’ document here.

One of the biggest propaganda campaigns for free trade was the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. In one Bookophile article, we present a report on this event, commissioned by the German Customs Union. Incidentally, this German Customs Union fought for the extensive abolition of customs barriers within Germany.