d upon
the subject till directed by an act of the whole parliament, yet no
monied man will scruple to advance to the government any quantity of
ready cash, on the credit of a bare vote of the house of commons,
though no law be yet passed to establish it.

[Footnote z: pag. 163.]

THE taxes, which are raised upon the subject, are either annual or
perpetual. The usual annual taxes are those upon land and malt.

I. THE land tax, in it's modern shape, has superseded all the former
methods of rating either property, or persons in respect of their
property, whether by tenths or fifteenths, subsidies on land, hydages,
scutages, or talliages; a short explication of which will greatly
assist us in understanding our antient laws and history.

TENTHS, and fifteenths[a], were temporary aids issuing out of personal
property, and granted to the king by parliament. They were formerly
the real tenth or fifteenth part of all the moveables belonging to the
subject; when such moveables, or personal estates, were a very
different and a much less considerable thing than what they usually
are at this day. Tenths are said to have been first granted under
Henry the second, who took advantage of the fashionable zeal for
croisades to introduce this new taxation, in order to defray the
expense of a pious expedition to Palestine, which he really or
seemingly had projected against Saladine emperor of the Saracens;
whence it was originally denominated the Saladine tenth[b]. But
afterwards fifteenths were more usually granted than tenths.
Originally the amount of these taxes was uncertain, being levied by
assessments new made at every fresh grant of the commons, a commission
for which is preserved by Matthew Paris[c]: but it was at length
reduced to a certainty in the eighth of Edw. III. when, by virtue of
the king's commission, new taxations were made of every township,
borough, and city in the kingdom, and recorded in the exchequer; which
rate was, at the time, the fifteenth part of the value of every
township, the whole amounting to about 29000_l._ and therefore it
still kept up the name of a fifteenth, when, by the alteration of the
value of money and the encrease of personal property, things came to
be in a very different situation. So that when, of later years, the
commons granted the king a fifteenth, every parish in England
immediately knew their proportion of it; that is, the same identical
sum that was assessed by the same aid in the e