l6o TAXATION AND FINANCE. 



the Thirty Years' War, if regular pay or abundant plunder, a 

 very dangerous resource in civil war, were not available. 



The excise was adopted by the Long Parliament on July 22, 

 1643. It was not in the form in which we know it at present, 

 an internal customs duty to be collected from producers, 

 whose business it was to recover it from consumers by 

 ordinary sales, but a tax levied immediately on consumers at 

 the time of purchase. To explain its action, the Parliament 

 published lists of the price of most excisable articles, with a 

 notification of the sum which the purchaser had to pay in 

 addition to the price at which he bought at the time when the 

 dealer sold it. It was therefore something like a universal 

 octroi on consumers. In time it was extended to other 

 objects, as on cattle and sheep by the head ; and I have found 

 entries in the accounts of corporations of the yearly payments 

 made for excise, and sometimes of the charge at the instant 

 of purchase. The king and the royal party denounced this 

 financial expedient as rapacious and" tyrannical, but soon 

 adopted and enforced it whenever they could. 



The assessments on property were levied by the Parliament 

 on those counties where they could be collected. Thus on 

 October 27, 1643, the House of Commons agreed to give 

 100,000 marks to the Scottish army. The largest contribution 

 comes from the district known as the Bills of Mortality, that 

 is London and Westminster and probably Southwark. The 

 contribution is as follows. 



Bills of Mortality, 26,666 13^. 4^. 







Hertfordshire 3000 Kent 6oco 



Bedfordshire 2000 Surrey 1500 



Middlesex 1000 Cambridgeshire 2000 



Essex 5000 Huntingdonshire 1000 



Suffolk 5000 Northamptonshire 2500 



Norfolk 6000 Rutlandshire 500 



We may infer from this assessment that Parliament at the 



end of the first year of the war could calculate on collecting 



these sums from the counties named, and had no power of 



