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