consisted of the custom-duties called tonnage and poundage; the rates of which, however, varied from time to time. In the preceding reign of Richard II. the poundage had been fixed at one shilling, and the tonnage at three; Henry at first demanded only a poundage of seven-pence and a tonnage of two shillings; but, in the fourth year of his reign, the rates were again raised to the amount at which they had stood in the time of his predecessor. Henry on this occasion gave the members of both houses a magnificent entertainment in acknowledgment of their liberality. These customduties, however, were never granted for more than a year at a time during this reign; and one year the usual grant was withheld, the more distinctly to show that they were exigible only under the authority of parliament. Many occasional grants were made to Henry both by the parliament and the clergy under the name of subsidies,t being commonly a tenth or fifteenth (called a disme or quinzime) of the income of each individual, as estimated by commissioners appointed for that purpose in every town and county. By an act passed in 1407 (the 10 Hen. IV. c. 7) it was enacted that all foreigners (that is, apparently, non-residents) having lands, tenements, goods, or chattels, within any town at the day of grant of any tenth or fifteenth, or other tax, although they might afterwards remove their beasts or goods, should contribute their proper share along with the rest of the inhabitants; and authority was given to the collectors "to distrain [for the said share] in every place within the county, as well before that our said lord the king be answered of the whole sums that attain to such towns, as after." These words would seem to throw the liability of payment upon the town or county whenever the individual could not be found. Among the taxes of a more peculiar kind that were collected in the reign of İlenry IV. was one upon places, pensions, and all grants from the crown, which was imposed by the famous Lack-learning Parliament in 1404 it empowered the king to levy one year's profits of all annuities, fees, wages, and revenues whatsoever, granted to any person by the crown since the reign of Edward III. All patents of pensions for life which had been granted since the fortieth year of that king were also made liable to be revoked, if, on examination, they should be found to have been undeservedly bestowed.

Among other shifts by which the parliament sought to evade Henry's constant demands of money was the proposition, which has been already noticed as having been made on more than one occasion, of a seizure of the whole or part of the property of the church. The power of the clergy, however, was yet too mighty to make it safe to venture upon such a measure as this. It was principally by persevering importunity that this king wrung from parliament any extraordinary supplies he did obtain; for that assembly evinced

a perfect understanding of the advantages of the position in which circumstances had placed it, and every disposition to turn them to the best account. Much that was arbitrary was still left in the general character of the government; but the limitations that were imposed upon the royal expenditure were such as would satisfy the most economical and constitutional spirit of modern times. Perhaps the part of Richard II.'s conduct that had excited the greatest popular odium and outcry was the expense and waste of his household. Henry politically began his reign with assurances of his determination to reform this abuse, and restricted the expenditure for the royal household to 10,000/. He afterwards, however, found it necessary to raise the sum to 16,000l. The royal household, it is to be remembered, included at this time, and down to a much later date, the judges of the courts of law and all the other functionaries considered to be the immediate servants of the crown: the sum mentioned was, in fact, the whole allowance for what would in modern times have been called the civil list. Nor did the parliament, when they granted a supply, leave the king to expend the money in any way he pleased. "In two different instances they allowed Henry only 6000/. for his own use; appropriated the remainder of their grant to public services; and appointed their own treasurers, who were answerable for the money they received, and were obliged to give in an account of their disbursements to parliament; and when Henry proposed, anno 1410, that a grant should be given him of a tenth from the clergy, and a fifteenth from the laity, for his life, under the pretence of saving them the trouble of meeting annually for that purpose, the artful and insidious proposal was indignantly rejected."*

A curious record of the royal revenue and of its expenditure in the reign of Henry V. has been preserved in the form of an account rendered to the king by the treasurer for the year ending at Michaelmas, 1421.† According to this statement the total income amounted only to 55,743/. 10s. 101d.;-of which the customs on the export of wool produced 39761. 1s. 2d.; the subsidy on wool, which appears to have been an annual duty, of the nature of what is now called an excise-duty, on all the wool grown within the kingdom, 26,035/. 18s. 8d.; the small customs on the export and import of other goods, 24391. 9s. 1d.; the duty of twelve pennies on the pound of the value of goods (apparently imports and exports rated ad valorem) 82371. 10s. 94d.; and casual payments into the exchequer, consisting of quit-rents, fee-farm rents, escheats, profits of wardship, marriage, &c., 15,066/. 11s. 1d. This income was expended as follows :For the defence of England, 53331. 6s. 8d.; for that of Calais and its marches in time of war, 19,1197. 5s. 10d.; for that of the marches of

Scotland and Roxburgh in time of war, 9500l. ;* for that of Ireland (which is said to have been at this time much neglected), 16667. 13s. 4d.; for that of the Castle of Frounsake (Fronsac on the Dordogue, we suppose, near Bordeaux), 666l. 13s. 4d.; for the salaries of the treasurer, keeper of the privy seal, the judges of both benches, the barons of the exchequer, and the other officers of the court, 30021. 17s. 6d. ; for those of the colkctors and comptrollers of the king's customs and subsidies in the several ports of England, 5471.; for pensions or annual allowances to sundry dukes, earls, knights, and esquires, the abbess of Shene, and other persons, 77517. 12s. 7d.; for annuities to sundry persons out of the customs of sundry ports, 4374/. 4s. 3d.; for the salaries of the officers of the customs at the several ports, 274l. 3s. 4d. Thus, adds the statement, there remained only the sum of 3507. 13s. 114d. to defray the charges of the king's and queen's chamber, household, and wardrobe; the building of the new tower at Portsmouth; the clerk of the king's ships; the king's lions and the constable of the Tower; the artillery; the king's prisoners; the ambassadors; messengers, parchment, and other necessaries; and the maintenance of the Duchess of Holland, the famous Jacqueline of Hainault,† to whom it appears, from a document in the Fœdera, that Henry, upon her coming to England this year, had granted a pension of 1007. per month. And besides all these items, there still remained wholly unprovided for, the old debts on account of the towns of Harfleur and Calais, of the royal wardrobe and household, of the clerk of the king's ships, of the clerk of the king's works, the arrears en pensions and salaries, and, lastly, the debts of the late king, and those incurred by Henry V. himself when Prince of Wales. This account has all the appearance of being a complete statement of the royal income and expenditure for the year to which it belongs; all the charges to be defrayed are evidently set down, and also, apparently, all the means of every kind that were available for meeting them. It is probable, therefore, that the tonnage and poundage, which parliament in the third year of his reign granted to Henry V. for his life, are included under the head of some one or other of the various descriptions of custom-duties in the statement of revenue. It is not very clear, however, to which item in the enumeration it ought to be assigned; and it is somewhat unaccountable that the amount of the tonnage or wine-duty should not be specified, as well as that of the duty on wool. The deficiency of income, it would be proposed, we may presume, to supply by an extraordinary parliamentary grant, or what was pro

• The account as printed makes this item 19,5007.; but it appears from the total that there is an error of excess to the amount of 10,000, in some part of the account, and it is most probably in this particular. The Historian of Croyland states that the keeping of Berwick about this time cost about 6600% + See ante, p. 57.

Sir John Sinclair, in transcribing the account, converts the item of the duty of twelve pennies in the pound on goods rated ad valorem into "Subsidy of Tonnage and Poundage."-Hist. of Pub. Rev. i.

147.

perly called a subsidy. Hume computes that all the extraordinary supplies granted by parliament to Henry V. during his reign, so crowded with great and expensive operations, amounted only to seven tenths and fifteenths, producing about 203,000l.; another calculation raises the sum to about 270,0001.* But with an army to maintain of 24,000 archers and 6000 horse, each archer receiving sixpence a-day and each horseman two shillings, which appears to have been the common rate of pay, the whole of the largest of these sums would be exhausted in less than six months. It is very difficult, therefore, to understand by what means a war of several years' duration was supported. There were probably various irregular sources of revenue not taken notice of in the treasurer's account. Henry, however, was often reduced to the greatest difficulties by want of money; he was several times obliged to pawn the crown jewels, and even the crown itself: he borrowed from every one who would lend him; and, after all, he ran in arrears to his army, whose pay was probably much higher nominally than in fact, and was sometimes perhaps derived in great part from sources as irregular as the income of the crown.

Few extraordinary grants were made by parlia ment during the minority of Henry VI, and it was not till the year 1454 (the thirty-first of his reign) that even the tonnage and poundage were granted to him, as they had been to his father, for life. In the meantime, by long mismanagement and profusion, the ordinary income of the crown had been brought down to a lower point than ever. In an account laid before parliament in 1433, and still extant on the rolls, its entire amount is stated at no more than 64,9467. 16s. 4d., while the charges upon it amounted to about 100,000/. Some years after matters were become still worse; in 1450 it was declared in parliament that the entire available income of the crown had been reduced by pensions and other grants to the pittance of 5000l. In this deplorable state of things a resumption was ordered of all grants which had been made since the death of the preceding king; and Henry was also advised by his council to make over all the profits of wards, marriages, reliefs, escheats, and forfeitures, in trust to the Archbishop of Canterbury for defraying the expenses of the royal household. In the following year parliament limited the expenditure on that head to the sum of 12,000l., of which 2000. was to be obtained from the queen's jointure. At this time the king's deots amounted to the immense sum of 372,000l. Part of this money had been borrowed upon parliamentary security, this reign, it is believed, affording the first instance in our history of the adoption of that practice. The preceding kings, and Henry himself for the greater part, were wont to borrow only on their personal

security, although it was common to promise repayment out of the tenths or fifteenths granted by parliament, but not yet collected; the custom, it would appear, being to give each lender a claim upon the portion of the tax raised in the county in which he lived. The sums advanced by individuals in these ancient loans were in many cases extremely small, sometimes ranging to so low a point as a hundred or sixty shillings. Henry, however, did not content himself with raising money by loans; his repeated failure in redeeming his pledges, and the rapid accumulation of his incumbrances, rendered this method at last no longer available, and it became necessary to have recourse to other expedients. One of the chief of these was the demand of money under the name of voluntary contributions, the compulsory character of which, notwithstanding the name, was now avowed more openly than it had ever before been. In every age since the Conquest money had been occasionally raised by the crown under the pretext of an appeal to the liberality of the people, which, however, was enforced nearly in the same manner with the demand for any other tax, and just as little admitted of refusal or evasion; but Henry, under the pressure of his greater necessities, threw away even the outward forms which had hitherto given the show of a voluntary character to the contribution. In the instructions to the commissioners whom he appointed, in the twentieth year of his reign, to make a collection of this kind for the defence of Calais, he called upon every man in the kingdom to contribute the expense of two days' service in the field, on the express ground that, by law, he could, if he pleased, compel all his subjects to attend his wars, and he intimated that those who should refuse to tax themselves in conformity with this rule might depend upon having the amount exacted from them in another way that would be much less agreeable.

Every irregular mode of raising money which had been attempted under the rule of this weak king was put in practice to a still greater extent by his energetic and unscrupulous successor. The triumph of the House of York increased the royal revenue at the accession of Edward IV. by the forfeited estates of no fewer than one hundred and forty of the principal nobility and gentry of England, who had supported the rival family. The wasteful expenditure of Edward, however, profligate and thoroughly selfish as it was, and without the apology of any national or public object, soon reduced him to as great straits as the poorest of his predecessors. Nor was he long relieved by the occasional extraordinary grants of parliament, by yearly poll-taxes imposed upon foreigners (which had also been one of the resources of the last reign), or even by a general resumption of all recent alienations of the crown-lands, to which parliament assented on his suggestion in 1468. In 1475, when about to set out on his expedition against France, he procured a large sum of money by applications of the most direct and importunate

character to great numbers of the more wealthy individuals among his subjects, requesting each of them to make him a present according to their ability. The historian of Croyland speaks of this as a practice till then unheard of, and seems to intimate that the name of a Benevolence was now, for the first time, applied to money so extorted from the subject; but the thing, at least, if not the name, was certainly known from a much earlier date. Its revival in the present age appears also to have been the act, not of Edward, but of his immediate predecessor. Edward, however, seems to have come forward personally in the business in a more shameless manner than had been customary; and he is said to have been indebted, in great part, for his success on the occasion that has just been mentioned to his elegant figure and insinuating address. An anecdote is told of a rich widow to whom he made application, and who, although somewhat advanced in years, was so charmed with his appearance and the manner of his appeal, as to tell him that he should have no less than twenty pounds, for the sake of his handsome face: Edward testified his gratitude by gallantly giving the old lady a kiss; on which she exclaimed that she would double her intended donation. Another of the methods of raising a revenue resorted to by this king was the pursuit of trade. This, indeed, was a usual practice of the sovereigns of that age; but Edward carried it much farther than any of his contemporaries. The historian of Croyland informs us that he owned several vessels, and, "like a man whose living depended upon his merchandise, exported the finest wool, cloth, tin, and the other commodities of the kingdom, to Italy and Greece, and imported their produce in return, by the agency of factors or supercargoes." His subjects, we are told, considered the royal gains acquired in this way as going to relieve themselves, inasmuch as they were thereby saved from some taxes which would otherwise have been necessary for the support of the king's extravagance; but the general foreign commerce of the country must have been very much embarrassed and oppressed by such an interference of a party who traded without paying any customs, and with so many other advantages against which a private individual could not compete.

Richard III., in the course of his short reign, received no subsidy from parliament; but a grant of tonnage and poundage was made to him for life immediately after his seizure of the throne. These duties, indeed, had now come to be considered as a principal part of the ordinary and indispensable revenue of the crown. An act of parliament was also passed in the first year of this reign, prohibiting the imposition of a Benevolence in all time coming. It is described as one of several new and unlawful inventions, "whereby divers years the subjects and commons of this land, against their wills and freedom, have paid great sums of money to their almost utter destruction;' ," "for divers and many worshipful men of this realm," it is added, "by occasion thereof were compelled by necessity