II.: Customs and Tolls.

“Consuetudines” is in this passage used in its narrower, financial sense, relating to those duties on imports and exports still called “customs” at the present day, and to various local dues as well. “Tolls,” when not stigmatized as “evil tolls” would seem to be practically synonymous with these customs. The Crown had at first taken whatever it thought fit. Practice soon established rules as to the normal rates considered fair in various circumstances. When a ship–load of foreign wine arrived, the normal toll was “one cask from a cargo of ten up to twenty casks, and two casks from a cargo of twenty or more.” From other merchandise a share was claimed of a fifteenth or sometimes a tenth of the whole. Such tolls, if originally a species of ransom, had in John’s day come to be regarded as a legitimate branch of royal revenue. Any arbitrary increase, however, was condemned by public opinion, and ultimately by Magna Carta as a “mala tolta.”

The King was not the only one who exacted tolls. Every town in England, and many feudal magnates, by prescriptive usage or royal grant, levied payments on goods bought or sold at fairs and markets, or that entered the city gates, or were unloaded at river wharves, or traversed certain roads. The ambition of every borough was to increase its own franchises at the expense of its neighbours. The free customs of Bristol, for example, meant not only that the men of that city should have freedom from tolls inflicted by others, but that they should have the right to inflict tolls upon those others. A whole network of such customs and restrictions impeded the free exchange of commodities in every part of England. Magna Carta had no intention of sweeping these away, so far as they were “just and ancient”; and it is probable that the prohibition against arbitrary increase of tolls was directed only against the Crown.