CHAPTER II 
MISCELLANEOUS STATUTORY RATES TO 1640 
THE unsophisticated mind, which cherishes the delu- 
sion that our financial institutions have been created 
by politicians instead of by the force of circumstances, 
would naturally suppose that as soon as we come to 
rates imposed or regulated by statute, we should find 
no difficulty in discovering how rates were assessed 
and upon whom they were laid. This expectation 
would be disappointed. The early statutes take a 
great deal for granted, and are often least explicit 
just at the point where we most desire information. 
The first of them is the sewers act of 1427 (6 
Hen. VI, c. 5), which authorised the king to appoint 
commissions to supervise works for sea defence 
wherever they might be required. Within their 
several jurisdictions the commissioners were to be 
empowered to inquire by whose default damages had 
arisen, and “who doth hold lands and tenements, or 
hath any common of pasture or fishing in those parts, 
or else in any wise have or may have the defence, 
profit, and safeguard as well in peril nigh as from 
the same far off, by the said walls, ditches, gutters, 
sewers, bridges, causeys, and weirs, and also hurt or 
commodity by the same trenches, and there to dis- 
train all them for the quantity of their lands and 
tenements, either by the number of acres or by their 
ploughlands, for the rate of the portion of thet