70 DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN ENGLAND 



With regard to the poorer counties, but little change is 

 effected in their position. The counties on the northern 

 border and Lancashire were the poorest, and in 1636 Lanca- 

 shire is poorer than Westmorland, and only a little better 

 off than Cumberland, which, except in 1341, is at the bottom 

 of the list. York is in nearly the same relative place. No 

 material movement has yet been made in that direction which 

 has made Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire the 

 most prosperous parts of England. 



Now I make no doubt that the ship-money assessment was 

 intended to be equitable 1 . But I am equally sure that the 

 assessment was a guess, made from the best materials avail- 

 able, but without any adequate information as to the relative 

 resources of the contributing counties. There had, in fact, 

 been no bona fide valuation for more than a century. 



The next valuation is taken four or five years later. By 

 1 6 Car. I. cap. 32, a grant of .400,000, to be applied to the 

 purpose of ' repressing the rebellion in Ireland,' is made, and 

 the counties are again assessed. Here the guessing is even 

 wilder, by far the most grotesque valuation having been that 

 of Devonshire, which is put sixth in the list of contributories, 

 its natural or ordinary place being from the twenty-fourth to 

 the twenty-eighth. Rutland, again, is greatly under-assessed. 

 But there is no intentional unfairness, for those counties which 

 were most resolutely on the Parliament's side, and which 

 became the seven associated counties, the nucleus of the 

 Commonwealth and the recruiting-ground for Cromwell, were 

 as a rule put at too high rates. 



No general assessment was possible during the course of 

 the Civil War, for the Parliament could levy direct taxes in 

 those counties only which were in the occupation of their 

 forces. Thus on October 27, 1643, the Parliament determined 

 to make their Scottish allies a grant of 100,000 marks, to be 

 derived from an assessment. By far the largest part of this 



1 It was alleged to have been by Parliament in 1660, and clearly the counsellors 

 of Charles could not have wished to aggravate illegality by unfairness. 



