242 History of the English Landed Interest. 



modern income tax. Nor did tiie other two cliarges remain 

 at the same rate for long. Scutage was 20^. one year, two 

 marks another, and very often far higher even than this, if we 

 may for a moment include under this generic term all the 

 heavy charges and fines sustained by the owners of a knight's 

 fee. 



Magna Charta, as we have already said, relieved the tenants 



in chivalry of all but the most moderate fiscal charges ; but 



when we turn to the carucage taxation, otherwise called 



donum or auxilium, we find nothing but the abortive peasant 



rising, recently described, which could have in any way tended 



to check the exactions leved under this head by the class in 



power. Carucage began at two shillings per carucate, it rose 



to five, and it fell again to three ; ^ but, as in the case of scutage, 



it is a generic term, used to cover all those dona, auxilia, and 



Parliamentary grants, which have been discussed in a former 



chapter. The scutage returns had been left very much to the 



voluntary statements of the tenants in chivalry, under much 



the same system as income tax is obtained now ; but not so 



the carucage, which in 1198 was assessed and collected by the 



instrumentality of a jury and sworn evidence, as indeed had 



been the Saladin tithe a few years previously. Afterwards, 



two or more knights out of each hundred came to be specially 



elected, in whose presence the reeve and four chosen men of 



every township assessed the carucage, and probably other 



taxation.^ It might have been supposed that the distinction 



between those who paid scutage and carucage and those who 



paid carucage only would have drawn the line between those 



landed proprietors who sat in Parliament by right of possession, 



and those freeholders who could only be represented there by 



the knights of the shire ; but this was not so, for the smaller 



tenants in chivalry, if not specially summoned by the king, 



could claim no prescriptive right to a seat in his council. The 



many, therefore, who were never thus invited, gravitated down 



to the freeholder class, and entrusted their political interests to 



the representatives of the shire. Besides the taxation levied by 



' StuLbs, Constit. Hist., cli. xiii. 

 2 IcL, Ibid., ch. xii. p. 548. 



