Non-Statutory Rates to 1601 
1 
as the witness did not fail to point out, there must 
have been reasons for the act of Elizabeth ; and, 
secondly, the act does not, as a matter of fact, say 
you shall be rated in the way you are rated. It says 
that the money required for poor relief in each parish 
shall be raised “by taxation of every inhabitant, 
parson, vicar, or other, and of every occupier of lands, 
houses, tithes impropriate, propriations of tithes, coal- 
mines, or saleable underwoods.”! This surely is far 
from being a correct and adequate description of our 
present poor-rate. It is incorrect, because by no 
means every inhabitant, whether parson, vicar, or 
other, is taxed. It is inadequate, because occupiers of 
lands, houses, tithes, coal-mines, and saleable under- 
woods, are taxed on a peculiar and minutely regulated 
basis—the annual value of the thing occupied — 
whereas the words of the act say nothing about the 
basis of the taxation, and would by themselves cover 
an income-tax, a poll-tax, and many other taxes. 
The reference to the act of 1601 thus takes us a very 
little way. We want to know how and why that act 
came to say what it does say, how and why its words 
have come to be interpreted in the way they are 
interpreted, and how and why all other rates have 
been swallowed up by the particular rate established 
under it. 
A preliminary question has to be answered. What 
isarate? A kind of tax, no doubt; but what kind ? 
From the phrase “rates and taxes,” and the common 
grumble, ~ It isn't the taxes, it’s the rates that I 
1 The words have been misquoted in Bott, Poor- Laws, 1st edition, 
and perhaps elsewhere (see Cowper, Reports, p. 559), ‘‘ other” being 
inserted before ‘‘ occupier,” and the sense thus greatly altered,