EXTENT (in Scotland). There were no taxes in feudal. times. The king was sup ported by the rents of his property lands, and by the occasional profits of superiority— ward, non-entry, marriage, escheat, and the like—which were known by the general• name of casualties (q.v.). Beyond these, and the expenses which the discharge of his ordinary duties to his superior imposed on him, the vassal was not liable to be taxed. But to this rule there were some exceptions. When it became necessary to redeem the king from captivity, to provide a portion for his eldest daughter, or to defray the expense of making his eldest son a knight, a general contribution was levied. One of these occasions occurred when Alexander III. betrothed his daughter Margaret to Eric, the young king of Norway, and engaged to give her a tocher of 14,000 marks. This sum was far beyond the personal resources of the king, and consequently fell to be levied by a land-tax—land and its fruits being then the only appreciable species of property. But if the tax was to be levied fairly and equally, this could be done only by ascertaining the value of the whole lands in the kingdom, as had been done in Eng hind in the time of Edward I. (4 Edw. I. i. anno 1276). Whether this was the first occasion on which a general valuation of all the lands of Scotland had been made, as lord Eames thought (Law Tracts, tract xiv.). or whether there had been earlier valu ations of the same kind, as others have supposed (Cranston v. Gibson, May 16, 1818, Fac. Coll.), is still a subject of dispute amongst antiquaries. It is certain, however,.
that the valuation here spoken of was long known as the old extent. As such,,it is spoken of in the act of indenture of 15th July, 1336, by which the parliament of Scot land agreed to give to king Robert Bruce the tenth penny of all the rents of the laity during his life. In this latter act it was provided that such lands as had been wasted by the war should be revalued by an inquest before the sheriff, and the retour, or formal verdict, was so trained as to contain a statement both of the present value of the lands, and of what they were worth "in the time of peace." In almost all cases, the new was
considerably under the old valuation, a fact which shows how widespread must have been the devastation of that terrible war. The same deplorable fact is brought out by the E. taken with a view to raise the sum necessary for the ransom of David II. On this occasion, the new E. of the temporal lands scarcely amounted to £25,000, whereas the old E. exceeded £50,000 (Cranston v. Gibson, ut sup.). But this state of matters was reversed when James I. succeeded in restoring peace and prosperity. Indeed, even before the influence of his personal qualities could have been felt, the condition of the country must have improved, because the E. which was Laken iu 1424, for the purpose of redeeming him from captivity, shows in general an advance upon that even of the time of Alexander III. In several later cases (1481, 1488, 1535), in which grants were made to the crown, the assessments were levied from temporal lands by a series of new extents, according to present value. During the minority of Mary, the assessments, which were heavy and numerous, were levied according to an old E., but it is doubtful whether it was the E. of Alexander III., or of David II., or a later one than either. The extents of which we have spoken did not apply to church lands. The share of the subsidies applicable to them was levied according to the value of the benefices as settled by " Bagimont's Roll," which was made up in the time of Alexander III. by Bene mundus de Vicci, vulgarly called Bagimont. Cromwell introduced a more equitable rule of assessment, and fixed precisely the ratio to be laid upon each county; and his system was adhered to, with little variation, after the restoration (act of convention, 93tI January, 1667). The rent fixed by these valuations, commonly called the valued rent, was that according to which the land-tax and most of the other public and pa rochial asssessments were imposed till the passing of the recent valuation acts, 17 and 18 Vict. c. 91, 1854, and 20 and 21 Vict. c. 58, 1857. See VALUATIONS OF LAND.