32 
History of Local Rates 
act, but all the same the practice was to rate the arcas 
in lump sums, and leave them to apportion these 
sums among the inhabitants as they thought fit.! 
An act of a local character (23 Eliz, c. 11), passed 
just fifty years later, shows that in taxing and setting 
each inhabitant to a reasonable aid the justices were 
expected to follow well-known precedents. A dispute 
had broken out between Cardiff and Glamorgan about 
the duty of repairing the bridge at Cardiff. “Such 
doubts and ambiguities,” the preamble of the act says, 
were discovered “touching certain words and sen- 
tences ” in the Statute of Bridges, “that more money 
was like to be spent in the determining and explain- 
ing of the same than haply might have sufficed to 
have re-edified the said bridge.” To put an end to 
this unhappy state of affairs, Parliament declared that 
of right the building of the bridge belonged to the 
town without all doubt or controversy, but at the 
same time it ordered the county to bear five-sixths 
and the town only one-sixth of the cost, in considera- 
tion of “ the poor estate of the said town of Cardiff, and 
the inability thereof to perform so great a charge.” 
To avoid any “doubts and ambiguities” as to the 
method of raising the contributions of the town and 
the county, it went on to enact that the justices in 
the county and the inayor and bailiffs in the town 
were “to rate and assess the county aforesaid, with 
the several hundreds, and every town corporate, 
parish, village, and hamlet within the same, and every 
inhabitant and dweller within every and any of them, 
See, for a Norfolk example in the first half of the seventeenth 
century, Bodleian MS., Tanner, 311, f. 257. The practice seems to 
have been first legalised in 1702 by 1 Ann, ¢. 12, 
{