Talk:Beard tax

Refimprove tag

The citations given cover the whole paragraph to which they are appended. So I am wondering what needs to be improved. Is there are problem with the reliability of the current sources or do you think that more sources are needed? Yworo (talk) 11:08, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Article needs general expansion, but I don't see the point of that particular tag... AnonMoos (talk) 05:05, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

P.S. There should be a Category:Sumptuary laws category... AnonMoos (talk) 05:07, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Contradiction

I've marked the England section as contradictory, in regards to the factuality of Elizabethan beard law. Both claims are cited, however, the contradiction is at best only "explained" by a phrase which should not be used in an encyclopedic article, as it is essentially an editor comment:

In 1535, King Henry VIII of England, who wore a beard himself, introduced a tax on beards. The tax was a graduated tax, varying with the wearer's social position. His daughter, Elizabeth I of England, reintroduced the beard tax, taxing every beard of more than two weeks' growth.

While quotations about this exist on the internet, in the absence of a primary source citation, this should not be taken as fact. The sumptuary law published in Elizabeth's reign makes no mention of beards.

I'm not sure how to resolve this. djr13 (talk) 00:22, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, we don't use primary sources, and we certainly can't use them to "prove" a negative: that's original research. The offending passage (second paragraph) has been removed. We'd need a secondary source that states that there was no beard tax, not OR based on primary sources. Yworo (talk) 04:04, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Good point, I didn't realize until you mentioned it that the source cited in the second orange-marked text was a primary source. Thanks! djr13 (talk) 02:44, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

King Henry

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35997919

Claims online that a beard tax was introduced by Henry VIII in 1535, and again later by his daughter Elizabeth I, do not seem to be backed up by contemporary documents, beard historian Dr Alun Withey says.

172.251.75.106 (talk) 06:34, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

If he did it would have to be in arbitrary circumstances without Parliamentary consent or the tax being put into law through Act of Parliament. The Statute Book would have provided evidence for the tax's existence had he gone that route. (It was in the 17th century after the Ship Money issue that the ability of the monarch to levy taxes without consent of Parliament was ended.)Cloptonson (talk) 09:25, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

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New Jersey Whisker Tax of 1907

I'm still trying to figure out if this was satire or an actual proposal, so in the meantime, I'm of mind to preserve this only on the Talk page Carter (talk) 21:10, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

In 1907, New Jersey state senator Johnston Cornish introduced a measure to tax beards at varying rates based upon length, style, and hair color. The measure, designed to reduce state debt and to secure employment for barbers, did not pass.

References

Mention is conspicuously absent from the moustached Cornish's wiki biography.Cloptonson (talk) 09:28, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Only in Russia

Tcr25, this is silly: "The most well documented beard tax was in place in Russia during the 18th century". And you also removed the stub banner, signaling that this article is at least somewhat representative of the general topic, but the content is the same: there was a beard tax in Russia, and there are cock and bull stories about there having been one in England. That is it. Drmies (talk) 13:52, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Drmies, It's not silly, it's accurate. The England one is clearly marked in the text as disputed. That said, your rewrite of the lede just say Russia (while leaving the England bit in) struck me as making the lede misrepresentative of the full article content. If "most well documented" is what bothers you, be bold and replace it with something like "the only documented beard tax," although I don't think that's completely accurate in that there are questions around the England and the New Jersey one (which seems likely to be satire, but I haven't found anything definitive on that). As for the stub banner, the article is long enough and documented enough to rate as a start in my mind. If you disagree, go ahead and reassess it. --Carter (talk) 14:04, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Tcr25, if the only "documented" beard tax is in Russia, then how can you write a lead that claims it's a general thing, worldwide, when there is absolutely no evidence for it? Drmies (talk) 14:14, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Drmies, That's why I went with "most well documented." The evidence around the English one is disputed at best, but it has mentions in WP:RS, unclear though they may be. I'd rather lean towards including the ambiguity where it exists than state something in wikivoice that feels too definitive to me. As I put it, the lede gives a simple definition of "beard tax" in the first sentence and sets up the bulk of the article (Peter I's 18th century beard tax) in the second. --Carter (talk) 14:22, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

But our article now suggests there were beard taxes all over the place, and "most well documented" (or "best documented"...) is really deceitful: it's the only example. Drmies (talk) 16:23, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't take that understanding ("suggests there were beard taxes all over the place") at all from the lede as written. There's no deceit; both the lede and the full article make it clear that this was a limited concept. Beyond that "beard tax" as an article title would seem to me to properly be about the idea of taxing beards with examples of where that was done, which this is; if the article were moved to "Russian beard tax of 1698" or something similar, then your point would be completely valid. You may regard the English one as a "cock and bull story," but it is in WP:RS and even the source used here to support the lack of mention of it in the National Archives states "Whether Henry VIII did consider a beard tax may remain a mystery ..." —Carter (talk) 16:42, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

If the English tax existed, it was merely a typical "sumptuary law" to raise revenue. By contrast, the Russian tax was enacted as part of Peter the Great's reforms to drag Russia into Western European style modernity, so it had a serious purpose. AnonMoos (talk) 22:16, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

AnonMoos, likely, but Akelev (2020) argues that the original 1698 decree may have had a modernization intent, but the tax levied starting in 1705 was intended to help offset Russia's mounting costs from the Great Northern War. Beyond that, the German version of this article, de:Bartsteuer, includes mentions of additional beard taxes in ancient Lycia, China in the 1300s and France in the 1500s. This article includes mention of a new (in 1936) tax on clean-shaven men in Yemen, so reverse beard tax of sorts. More recently, in 2016 there was a rather tongue-in-cheek proposal in the U.K. to tax beards. Regardless of the intent in England, Russia, and elsewhere these are all beard taxes. Any article on beard taxes is likely to be 85–95% about Peter I's efforts, and there's room to improve this article, but I think the lede should still cover the general case. I don't think there's enough here to support a WP:SPLIT into articles on the general concept and the specific Russian case. —Carter (talk) 13:34, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

The Taliban in Afghanistan forbade "beard trimming", but I don't think there was a taxation element -- just punishment if you disobeyed. The fact remains that the non-Russian beard taxes are a scattershot miscellany of little overall importance ("sumptuary laws" were some of the most often violated and least enforced laws in medieval and renaissance Europe), and sometimes hard to document, while the Russian beard tax was part of a major reform effort... AnonMoos (talk) 16:06, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, there are other instances, like the Taliban one you mentioned, of punishment for wearing/not wearing beards. It seems that was also Peter I's initial approach. As I stated early, if this article were titled "Russian beard tax of 1705" or something similar, focusing just on Russia would make sense. Since it is just "beard tax," including mention of other beard taxes with WP:RS support makes sense. It benefits the reader to provide as much detail as reasonable about the Russian beard tax, as well as mention of other beard taxes. Do you see something around this that's missing or overstated in the article? —Carter (talk) 16:15, 31 July 2021 (UTC)