Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/185

FINANCE 175 capital, the collectors of rents succeeded to similar duties with those of the more ancient bailiffs. The sheriffs collected the customary charges which were imposed on the counties, and the extraordinary receipts of the crown, making audit of their liabilities twice a year, and receiving a quittance when those liabilities were discharged. Care ful search was made into the estates of deceased tenants of the crown, and the antiquary or genealogist has derived the largest amount of his information as to family and local history from the numerous and exact inquisitions jwst mortem which were taken by the proper authorities. As certain offences involved a forfeiture, and as all offences might be condoned by the payment of mulcts, the atten tion of the royal officials was stimulated to all such cases of misconduct, and except in matters of petty police, adjudicated in the manorial courts, the royal tribunals rapidly superseded private jurisdictions. In England these private jurisdictions disappear in the middle of the 14th century ; in Scotland they survived till they were abolished after the insurrection in 1745; in France they existed till the eve of the Revolution. Nothing has tended so much to develop English nationality, and to consolidate the authority of the crown, as the royal tribunals, working through and for the machinery of the exchequer. As the King s Bench dealt with pleas of the crown, when the king s peace was broken, and the exchequer hunted up and punished offences against the revenue, and through both agencies assisted the revenue, so a further source of royal income was derived from the fees levied for the administra tion of justice between subject and subject. There are many forms of conveyance known to those who are curious in legal antiquities. But the court of Common Pleas competed against them, by recognizing a form of conveyance transacted in court, recorded, and thereupon protected by valid evidence of title. "No assurances," said Clarendon, when, in the full tide of revived loyalty, the cavaliers of the Restoration strove to reverse or make void disadvantageous or forced sales made by themselves during the course of the civil wars, " are equal in validity to titles created by fines," as these kinds of conveyances were called. " There is no precedent of their being vacated by judgment or Act of Parliament, or othervise, without the consent of the parties." So conclusive was this form of conveyance, that when Viscount Purbeck surrendered his title to the king by the process of a fine, the Lords, though they protested against the act, did not venture on demanding that it should be void. This form of con veyance also supplied a revenue to the crown. The exchequer, in short, was ubiquitous, constantly searching after means by which the finances of the crown could be recruited or enlarged, and sometimes offering very solid advantages to the subject in return for business of which the law courts, centred in the exchequer, took cognizance. Besides these revenues, the crown derived an income from the corporations whose charters were granted in lieu of annual payments, and were renewed on further payments. Sometimes the accession of a new sovereign was made the ground for fresh demands on the re-grant of charters, and payment was always expected for the concession of new rights. All these receipts, from whatever sources derived, were entered in the annual registers, the great rolls of the Pipe, a series of documents still preserved, and extending without break from early in the reign of Henry II. down to the reign of William IV., when offices, long obsolete, and already mere sinecures, were abolished. But for nearly seven centuries the financial history of England is con tained in an unbroken series of public records, carefully made up from year to year, and as carefully audited. And as the receipts of the exchequer were exactly scheduled, so the payments were checked. No mere order, even of the sovereign, was valid for payment, unless it were counter signed by some official originally the treasurer and therefore duly subjected to a formal examination. It is reasonable to conclude that arbitrary taxation was, if not unknown, always unconstitutional in England. The strict definition of the crown s rights in relation to revenue, which Domesday Book defended, and which the exchequer interpreted, naturally suggests that the rights of the subject were equally acknowledged and intelligible. Hence it was a general opinion, pretty freely expressed when the administration was unpopular, that the king should live within that income, in ordinary times at least, which had, under good management, been found sufficient for the dignity of the crown aud the good government of the kingdom. The risk of the crown s impoverishment, and the consequent necessity of grants from the subject, made the English people exceedingly hostile to favourites, and led parliaments to recommend or even insist on a resumption of grants. The improvidence of Henry III. led to the Barons War. The worse improvidence of Henry VI. s administration, when the crown was in abject penury, was a principal stimulant to the party of the duke of York. The last echo of this discontent was the dissatisfaction felt at the grants made by William III. to the Bentincks and the Keppels, grants which had to be revoked in part, and which were only confirmed in part by the adroit manner in which the Whigs proposed to extend the same resumption to the estates bestowed on the numerous illegitimate chil dren of Charles II. One financial expedient, however, adopted, as is sup posed, at the instigation of Becket, and certainly introduced in the middle of the 12th century, had such lasting and peculiar effects on the fiscal and political system of tho country that it should be explained. This was the commuta tion of foreign military service for a fixed money payment. The policy of Henry II. was to strengthen the revenue, and to make it the instrument of government. Beyond his immediate and obvious interests, the warning which he derived from the straits to which his great rival Louis VII. was constantly reduced was enough to make him eager to secure and perpetuate the means for carrying out his own designs. The expedient on which he hit led to three results, two of which had an overwhelming influence on the mediteval history of England and of western Europe, while in the third was contained the solution of the greatest problem with which civilization has had to grapple, which ancient politics failed to grasp, but which is the great victory of modern politics. The commutation of foreign military service for a fixed money payment was, first, the cause why the Norman settler and the subject Englishman rapidly developed a common sentiment against the royal prerogative ; was, secondly, the origin of that irresistible English army before which, till it was rivalled by the Swiss infantry, no feudal levy could hold its ground ; and, thirdly, was the unwilling parent of representative government, of parliamentary control, and finally of scien tific finance. The king, under that system of reciprocal obligation between overlord and tenant which is called, somewhat loosely, feudalism, had a right to the military service of such among his subjects as held lands by military tenure. Sometimes, to be sure, as in France and Germany in the llth and 12th centuries, the suzerain was not in a position to enforce the obligation ; sometimes, as in the kingdom of Jerusalem, the obligation was rendered stringent by the necessity of defence against a common enemy. It would seem that the position of the English king and Norman duke was intermediate to the above. There was no doubt that he could call on his subjects in England to do battle on behalf of interests which were indisputably insular, his