Non-Statutory Rates to 1601 23 
agricultural community, where every person of ability 
to pay is a farmer, nothing can be more natural than 
that the assessors, in forming their estimate of relative 
ability, should consider the number and quality of the 
acres cultivated by each, and perhaps also the number 
of sheep and cattle pastured. In a town, an equally 
obvious guide as to the substance of the inhabitants 
is afforded by the size or value of the houses occupied. 
When this has once become the settled custom, it is 
supposed by a natural confusion of mind that the 
acres and the houses are taxed, and any attempts to 
carry out the original principle of rating according to 
ability derived from every source are strenuously re- 
sisted by the parties interested. The owner of lands 
or houses which he has let for a rent objects to being 
rated in accordance with his whole substance, on the 
ground that the rates on his lands and houses have 
1 Even the fifteenths and tenths, which were in their origin 
fractions of movable property only, seem to have been assessed 
in accordance with the annual value of tenements occupied before 
they ceased to be granted. The language of Parliament is vague. 
In 1562-3 (by 5 Eliz., c. 31), for example, it grants “two whole 
XVoes and X** to be payd, taken, and levied of the movable 
goods, catalles, and other things usual to such XV** and X*** to be 
contributory and chargeable.” Scattered allusions show that the 
% other things” had long included property occupied. We find, for 
example, in 1377-8, the revocation of a writ which exonerated the 
chancellor and scholars of Cambridge University from tenths and 
fifteenths in respect of their tenements, possessions, and books 
\Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, 1842, vol. i. p. 116). In 1385 the ex- 
emption was re-established, tenements, schools, and books being 
mentioned (ibid., p. 129, ¢f. p. 197). Orders of the city of London 
issued in 1587 (§ 58; see above, p. 20n.) speak of foreigners being 
contributory to the fifteenths “by the rate of their houses.” Ina 
church-rate case heard in 1611, the court talked of “a rate imposed 
according to the value of the land, and that in the nature of a 
fifteen’ (Bulstrode, Reports, 1. 20).