The same tax in corporate towns was called a tenth; because there it was, at first, a tenth of the movables.

The whole amount of a tenth and a fifteenth throughout the kingdom, or a fifteenth, as it is often more concisely called, was about twenty-nine thousand pounds.[**] The amount of a subsidy was not invariable, like that of a fifteenth.

In the eighth of Elizabeth, a subsidy amounted to one hundred and twenty thousand pounds: in the fortieth, it was not above seventy-eight thousand.[***] It afterwards fell to seventy thousand, and was continually decreasing.[****] The reason is easily collected from the method of levying it.

We may learn from the subsidy bills,[v] that one subsidy was given for four shillings in the pound on land, and two shillings and eightpence on movables throughout the counties; a considerable tax, had it been strictly levied.

But this was only the ancient state of a subsidy.