Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/433

] liable in defect of personal attendance, which, however, were assessed by themselves in parliament, they might be called upon by the king or lord paramount for aids, when his eldest son was to be knighted or his eldest daughter married, not to forget the ransom of his own person. The heir, on the death of his ancestor, if of full ago, was plundered of the first emoluments arising from his inheritance by way of relief and primer seizin, and if under age, of the whole of his estate during infancy. Add to this the untimely and expensive honour of knighthood."

But the simple fact is, that these were the natural burdens of these lauds. They were the conditions attending these magnificent grants from the crown of, as he admits, "the greatest part of the lands in these kingdoms." They were, by magna charta, secured to, assessed, and regulated by these landholders themselves in parliament. Burdensome and irritating, therefore, as were many of these conditions, they were not, as a whole, at all disproportionate to the vast benefit given and enjoyed—that of the bulk of their lands of those realms. The annoyances and real hardships of them were capable of being rooted out by act of parliament. But this was not what the aristocracy wanted. They wanted to retain the splendid gift, and get rid of the whole mass of conditions by which it was clogged in the bestowal.

When the people, nowadays, cry out for abolition of tithes and church rates, the aristocracy, and their sons and kinsmen, the clergy, tell us that we have bought our estates subject to these burdens, and that it is nothing but fair and proper that we should bear them. But very different were their feelings and mode of reasoning as to their own natural burdens, the feudal services. These services and payments were, in truth, the reservations made by the crown on giving away the lands, for the maintenance of the crown and government of the country. They were the composition of the aristocracy to the necessary taxation of the realm, or in Blackstone's own words, "were in the nature of a modern land tax." The aristocracy, therefore, wanted neither more nor less than to get rid of their whole land tax, and fling the necessary burden of taxation on the people. They attempted this, it seems, in James I.'s days, and Blackstone tells us that James had, in fact, consented for a proper equivalent, that is, an equivalent tax drawn from the people, to exchange the military tenures for a general fee-farm rent; an expedient, says Blackstone, much better than the hereditary excise. But that scheme with James came to nothing; with Charles they succeeded, for the dissolute and needy monarch was ready to make any terms for money to spend on his mistresses. The bargain was struck, and, to use Blackstone's own words, "the military tenures, with all their heavy appendages, were destroyed at one blow by the statute 12 Car. II. c. 24, which enacts, that the court of wards and liveries, and all wardships, Kveries, primer seizins, and oustre le mains, values and forfeitures of marriages, by reason of any tenure of the king or others, be totally taken away, and that all fines for alienations, tenures by homage, knights' service and escuage, and also aids for marrying the daughter or knighting the son, and all tenures of the king in capite, be likewise taken away, and that all sorts of tenures held of the king or others be turned into free and common exchange, save only in tenures in franklalniagin, copyholds, and the honorary services (without the slavish part) of grand serjeantry. A statute, which was a greater acquisition to the civil property of this kingdom than all magna charta itself, since that only pruned the luxuriances that had grown out of the military tenures, and thereby preserved them in vigour; but the statute of king Charles extirpated the whole, and demolished both root and branches."

Thus did the aristocracy, as our commentator says, "at one blow" abolish the original compact and conditions by which they acquired possession of all their lands, the bulk of the son of England, getting rid at the same time of the heavy rights of purveyance and subsidies on those lands. By this act they established that extraordinary value of their landed property, which has made them at the present day the most astoundingly opulent and powerful aristocracy that ever existed, and has enabled them, by this overwhelming wealth and power, to overthrow the balance of the constitution, and thrust the people out of their rights and their house of representatives. But their selfish proceedings did not stop there. Whilst they freed themselves from their obligations towards their feudal lord, they took care not to free their tenants from their obligations towards them. The copyholders were excepted, and but recently an act, passed to convert copyhold into freehold, shows what a monstrous burden that is, for the cost of freeing about an acre of land, has amounted within our own knowledge to five hundred pounds.

Nor did their selfish proceedings end even there. We shall find that when William III., a stranger and foreigner, came to the throne, they managed to get nearly all his crown lands from him, making him dependent on themselves; and when his wars compelled the imposition of a land tax, they took care that it was a light one, and for the main part falling on personal property. As their lands grew rapidly in value by these exemptions and the industry of the people, this tax would, notwithstanding, have grown to something considerable, and we shall find, as we proceed, that in 1797 they passed an act, declaring that the tax should only be levied on the original assessment of William III. Thus, whilst the land of the aristocracy has been rising to our time to tenfold the value of that period, and the taxation on the public at large has risen from four hundred thousand to upwards of fifty millions sterling a year, the land tax has been stereotyped at two millions thirty-seven thousand six hundred and twenty-seven pounds. At a later day they imposed the corn laws to raise the value of their lands still more at the cost of the people.

It may be said that still the aristocracy bore their share of the taxation thus thrown upon the people. True, but according to their numbers, a very small share in comparison with that from which they exempted themselves. And we have yet to contemplate the greatest of all the changes which this revolution produced. From the moment that the public at large began to pay the taxes, and not the land, the extravagance of government expenditure grew amazingly, and a national debt was commenced. When the people paid, and the aristocracy and their sons and kinsfolk received through government offices, in the army or navy, from that moment the history of our boundless