Definition
An official schedule or table enumerating the duties, customs, and tariffs authorized by parliamentary authority for goods imported into or exported from a jurisdiction. The Book of Rates functioned as the operative tariff schedule of the English crown and later Parliament, setting the assessed valuation of specific commodities upon which customs duties were calculated. It was not merely a list of tax rates but a valuation instrument: goods were assessed for duty purposes against the rates stated in the book, regardless of actual market price, making the book itself the legal measure of taxable value.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of English constitutional and fiscal history, largely obsolete in modern legal usage. Researchers will encounter it primarily in sources predating the nineteenth century — treatises on English revenue law, parliamentary histories, and materials on the prerogative powers of the crown.
The Book of Rates carries particular constitutional significance in the English tradition. Before Parliament asserted firm control over customs, the crown claimed authority to set rates by prerogative, a conflict that produced some of the most consequential fiscal disputes of the seventeenth century, including the ship money controversies and the parliamentary struggles over tonnage and poundage. Understanding whether a source refers to a crown-issued Book of Rates or a parliamentarily authorized one matters for situating the document in its constitutional context.
Researchers using Blackstone or Chitty's edition of Blackstone will find the term anchored at 1 Bl. Comm. 316, which is the standard citation across all three source dictionaries. That passage discusses parliamentary authority over customs in the broader context of crown revenue, not a standalone treatment of the book itself. Cross-referencing the Jacob Law Dictionary citation in Bouvier may yield additional period detail.
The term does not carry forward into American law as an operative legal term. American tariff law developed its own statutory framework and vocabulary (schedules, classifications, harmonized codes). A researcher who encounters "book of rates" in an American legal source should treat it as either a direct reference to English legal history or as loose usage meaning a tariff schedule generally.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in close agreement, defining the Book of Rates as an enumeration of duties or tariffs authorized by parliamentary authority, citing the same passage in Blackstone. The differences are minor and editorial: Burrill's characterizes it explicitly as "a table or tariff of duties or customs" and uses Chitty's edition of Blackstone, while Bouvier and Black's rely on the Jacob Law Dictionary as a secondary authority. None of the three entries elaborates on the constitutional history surrounding crown prerogative versus parliamentary control over customs — a significant gap given how much of the term's legal meaning derives from that conflict.
Notably, the Black's entry in the source material contains an apparent transcription artifact: text referring to "a gratuity" and "a premium paid to a grantor or vendor" appears appended to the Book of Rates definition. This language belongs to a different entry and should be disregarded. Researchers relying on digitized historical dictionaries should be alert to this type of cross-contamination between adjacent entries — a common hazard in scanned and OCR-processed legal reference materials.
None of the three dictionaries addresses the pre-parliamentary, royal prerogative phase of the Book of Rates, nor do they distinguish between the valuation function of the book and its rate-setting function. The Wiktionary definition captures the valuation-for-tax-purposes dimension accurately and usefully supplements the historical entries on this point.
Jurisdictional Note
The Book of Rates is an English legal institution with no direct American counterpart. It is relevant to American legal research only in historical and comparative contexts, particularly in colonial-era materials where English customs law applied or where legal arguments drew on English parliamentary authority over trade.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Tax Rates — Graduated Rate Structure (The Law Mind Tax Encyclopedia): relevant for understanding how modern rate schedules function as successors to the valuation-and-rate framework the Book of Rates represented.