5. Purveyance and pre-emption, or a right of buying up provisions and other necessaries, for the use of the royal house hold, at an appraised valuation, in prefer ence to all other persons, and even with out the consent of the owner ; also of for cibly impressing carriages and horses for the King's use, at a settled price. The purveyors greatly abused their authority, and were of little advantage to the crown; Charles II. therefore, at his restoration, agreed to resign this prerogative, with the military tenures ; and the Parliament, in lieu thereof, settled on him and his suc cessors for ever, a tax on beer and ale, afterwards commonly called the heredi tary excise.
. 6. Fines and forfeitures of various de scriptions; also fees to the crown, in a variety of legal matters.
7. The right to all shipwrecks ; to trea sure-trove; to royal fish, that is, whales and sturgeons, when thrown, ashore, or caught near the coast; to all mines of sil ver or gold ; to waifi, or goods stolen and thrown away by the thief in his flight; and estrays, or animals found wandering, and the owner unknown; and to deo dands, and forfeitures of lands and goods for offences. These rights, producing lit tle profit, have since been mostly grant ed away to the lords of manors and other liberties.
8. Escheats of lands, upon the defect of heirs to succeed to the inheritance, in which case they reverted to the King.
9. The custody of idiots and lunatics, the profits of whose lands were received by the King, an allowance being made to them for necessaries.
From these sources, the produce of the remaining branches of which is now very insignificant, the Kings of England deriv ed the whole of their ordinary revenue, till commerce raised the produce of the customs into importa'nce, and the Parlia ment ventured to grant the principal part of their produce to the King, for life. Up on extraordinary occasions, Henry II. and some of his successors, had recourse chiefly to scutages, which were a com position by those who held knight's fees, in lieu of the military service to which they were bound, and seem to have been at first mere arbitrary compositions, as the King and the persons liable could agree : hydage, and talliage, were taxes of the same nature, upon other lands, and upon cities and boroughs. Tenths and fifteenths were originally the real tenth or fifteenth of all the moveables belong ing to the subject ; the amount Was un certain, being levied by new assessments on every fresh grant. till the 8 Edward III. wben a new assessment was made and recorded in the Exchequer, which was the real value at that period of every city, borough, and town in the kingdom, and by this the fifteenths were afterwards le vied, according to the specific sums therein stated, which were usually raised in the different places by a common rate on all the inhabitants. Subsidies were a
grant introduced about the time of Rich ard II. and Henry IV.; they were a tax not immediately imposed upon property, but upon persons in respect to their re puted estates, after the nominal rate of four shillings in the pound for lands, and two shillings and eight pence for goods ; aliens paid in a double proportion. This assessment was made according to an an cient valuation, which was so low, that one subsidy, according to Sir Edward Coke, did not amount to more than 70,000/. It was the rule never to grant more than one subsidy and two-fifteenths at a time ; but this rule was broken through on the Spanish invasion in 1588, when the Parliament gave two subsidies and four- fifteenths. This mode of taxa tion fell into disuse during the civil wars in the reign of Charles I. when the Par liament introduced weekly and monthly assessments, at a fixed sum upon each county, which was levied by a pound rate, both upon lands and personal estates. The commonwealth afterward introduced excise duties, and derived some profit from the establishment of the post-office, both of which have been since improved into very productive sources of revenue.
At the period of the revolution, most of the ancient branches of the King's re venue had either been formally relin quished, or had greatly declined in their produce, and the parliamentary grants had for some years past consisted almost entirely of custom and excise duties, with occasional poll-taxes and hearth-money. The total amount of the several branches of which the public revenue then consist ed, will appear by the following state ment, which was formed upon the aver age produce of four years.
This was the whole of the public reve nue, except the small duties of ten shil lings per ton on wine, &c. first granted in 1666, and appropriated for defraying the expenses of coinage ; and a duty of eigh teen pence per chaldron on coals, appro priated for completing St. Paul's Church. This revenue, small as it now appears, must have been at least fully adequate to all the national expenses, if an account laid before the Parliament is to be de pended upon, according to which the an nual expenditure of James H. amounted, at a medium, to only 1,609,365/. 2s. 9d.