Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/371

 entire tenth from each; the tenth of the Southern province was about £10,000 and that of York about £3,000, I think. In 1489, when the estates, as we have just seen, proposed separate grants, the share of the Canterbury clergy was fixed at £35,000, about the same sum as that offered by the House of Lords; but it finally took the form of two entire tenths.

Well, the grants of 1491, which extended over a year, proved insufficient for the king's needs, and he had recourse to the exaction of a benevolence; indeed the commissions for the benevolence were issued before the parliament sat, and are. supposed to have been authorised by a Great Council which sat in the June previous. This must have been a very liberal contribution, if the subscriptions of the country bore any proportion to the sum raised in London, which was £9682 17s. 4d. But I am not aware that any exact account of it exists. No doubt the commissions were executed in the usual way, but the authority given to the commissioners is only that they should intimate the king's purpose to the subjects, and move, exhort, and require them to assist him, in contemplation of the war with France. The commission was worked to some purpose, for the short expedition did not cost so much as might have been expected, and it was not until 1495 that the king found it necessary to call a parliament. It is then to this period that we must fix the application of Morton's fork, and to it Lord Bacon assigns the beginning of the penurious or saving habits which later on grew so strong in the king. I will just add that, as it was the subsidy of 1489 that provoked the riot at Thirsk, it was in all probability the subsidy of 1491 and the exaction of the benevolence that caused the struggle at Acworth in 1492.

In the parliament of 1495 no new tax was asked for; the archbishop's sermon was a lecture on law, which he divided into the law of Nature, the law of Nations, the Mosaic, Civil, Evangelic, and Canon law, with an application of the subject to the regulations of trade and commerce. These have a visible outcome in the sixty-five Acts that the parliament passed. For our present point but one of these is important; the tenth statute, on the Benevolence: divers persons have granted