Securing the “financial, administrative and military resources” to preserve social order, enforce religion, and protect the territory and trade of the realm was, according to Michael Braddick, a fundamental activity of the early modern state. Individuals and communities bore a wide array of fiscal and military duties that supported the crown's needs. Parliamentary subsidies, training and outfitting militia bands, supplying soldiers and sailors for the king's forces, customs, privy seal and other prerogative loans, billeting, and Ship Money, among many other exactions, lightened the pockets of the king's subjects and placed an administrative burden on collectors. These were in addition to other duties required by statute, like poor rates, or ordered by the Privy Council, such as collections to relieve plague sufferers or other urgent needs. Communities also had duties toward local government, and corporate towns in particular had the privilege of collecting rates toward purposes within their jurisdiction enshrined in their charters of incorporation. Other responsibilities were still under negotiation as to whether they were national or local, such as piers and havens, fortifications, and defense of merchant shipping. Contributing resources toward the king’s government constituted a basic duty of the subject. Yet the cost of running the state and the proliferation of financial exactions under the early Stuarts raised new questions about these responsibilities. For England's provincial towns, the state's demands tested both pocketbooks and liberties.

The early Stuart state's relative fiscal weakness made royal finance a significant issue and drove much of the crown's policy in the period. Historians have long identified the crown's exactions as contributors to its political woes. Whig narratives emphasized what were seen as the constitutional problems raised by prerogative taxation and the arguments for the liberties of the subject arising out of debates over the Forced Loan and Ship Money. Revisionists also saw the importance of crown finance, but focused more on the practical problems generated by the fiscal weakness of the crown and the unhappiness of ratepayers to pay taxes in general. Conrad Russell identified the poverty of the crown as an important contributor to the civil war, in that it prevented the crown from succeeding at war, among other things. Kevin Sharpe, while acknowledging some tensions between center and locality over Ship Money, concluded that it was largely a success.