TAXATION AND FINANCE. 155 



duties was collected at the Port of London, and it is clear 

 that with the light craft of that time, with no officials of 

 training and experience to collect the revenue, and with the 

 numberless ports on the south coast, smuggling would have 

 been easily and rapidly developed if the customs had been 

 heavy. In the later part of the period before me, the impo- 

 sition of what we should conceive to be very moderate customs 

 duties by parliamentary authority gave rise to a host of smug- 

 glers, or as they were then called, owlers, and no repressive 

 measures as well as no penalties were sufficient to deter them. 



In 1615, Cranfield, who it is said had been originally in a 

 merchant's office and to have had employment in the Low 

 Countries, was made Surveyor General of the Customs. He 

 was certainly in possession at the time of an estate in Essex, 

 for his father managed it for him ; and a record of produce and 

 sales on it in 1614-15, preserved in the British Museum, has 

 supplied me with a few facts. His abilities seem to have 

 been great, and to have been employed with considerable 

 success in the service of the Crown, for Mr. Dowell states that 

 the customs, which had been 143,074 in 1613, rose to 

 248,000 in 1619. It is said that the experience he had 

 obtained by practising mercantile frauds was now employed to 

 detect and punish them, and that, owing to his skill, the revenue 

 was enhanced. Unfortunately he employed his abilities for his 

 own interest as well as for that of the king, was detected, 

 deserted by his patron Buckingham, impeached, sorely against 

 the king's wish, and deprived of his office. In the last year 

 of the king's reign the customs we are told amounted to 

 323,642. In point of fact trade had greatly increased, and 

 the fact that England was at peace, while nearly all the rest of 

 Europe was engaged in the Thirty Years' War, naturally threw 

 much trade into English hands. 



In the first Parliament of Charles I, the Commons, evidently 

 induced by the experience they had of Cecil's Book of Rates, 

 refused to grant the king the customs for life, and limited 

 their concession to a single year. The Lords rejected the 



