were only a canal, through which it passed to the royal treasury. And
nothing could be more pleasing and popular than such exactions: the
people rejoiced, when they saw the Jews plundered,--not considering
that they were a sort of agents for the crown, who, in proportion to the
heavy taxes they paid, were obliged to advance the terms and enforce
with greater severity the execution of their usurious contracts. Through
them almost the whole body of the nobility were in 'debt to the king;
and when he thought proper to confiscate the effects of the Jews, the
securities passed into his hands; and by this means he must have
possessed one of the strongest and most terrible instruments of
authority that could possibly be devised, and the best calculated to
keep the people in an abject and slavish dependence.

The last general head of his revenue were the customs, prisages, and
other impositions upon trade. Though the revenue arising from traffic in
this rude period was much limited by the then smallness of its object,
this was compensated by the weight and variety of the exactions levied
by an occasional exertion of arbitrary power, or the more uniform system
of hereditary tyranny. Trade was restrained, or the privilege granted,
on the payment of tolls, passages, paages, pontages, and innumerable
other vexatious imposts, of which, only the barbarous and almost
unintelligible names subsist at this day.

These were the most constant and regular branches of the revenue. But
there were other ways innumerable by which money, or an equivalent in
cattle, poultry, horses, hawks, and dogs, accrued to the exchequer. The
king's interposition in marriages, even where there was no pretence from
tenure, was frequently bought, as well as in other negotiations of less
moment, for composing of quarrels, and the like; and, indeed, some
appear on the records, of so strange and even ludicrous a nature, that