Thus the provision of work for the unemployed was made in many different ways. Sometimes materials, teachers and implements were paid for by municipal capital, often workhouses were established, occasionally pressure was put on employers, and the most usual plan of all was to establish a House of Correction, which was used both to punish vagrants and to relieve the poor. But these attempts to provide work, though numerous, were not universal and there is some reason to believe that before 1597 many of these efforts had failed and needed to be revived in the succeeding years. [Sidenote: 3. (3) Methods of raising funds.] The expenses of the organisation for the benefit of the poor were largely a new charge on the public purse, and difficulty was frequently experienced in finding the necessary money. Before 1572 there was no statutory right to make rates for this object, but we have seen that the borough authorities did enforce compulsory payments and levied local rates for this and other purposes. The old methods were continued and new ones tried during the period from 1569 to 1597. Sometimes the basis employed was that used for national taxation. The chief direct national taxes of the time were fifteenths and subsidies. A fifteenth was nominally a tax on moveables, but after 1334 the total amount never altered, and each town had to pay an invariable sum[263] which was apportioned from time to time among the local inhabitants; lists would thus be prepared of how much everyone had to pay, and these furnished a convenient basis of local taxation. Probably the earliest compulsory payment for the poor was the fifteenth levied in 1547 in London, and in 1579 two more fifteenths were imposed there in order to carry out the organisation of that year[264]. At other times fractions of a subsidy were exacted for local objects. In 1585 in order to meet "the charge of the poore" at Ipswich the fourth part of a subsidy was levied "uppon suche as are in the subsidy," while the rest were to be assessed by a Committee "according to their best discretion[265]." At Bury also the subsidy book was utilised for this purpose in 1589 when the House of Correction was founded. Every person whose land was rated "in the subsedy booke" at twenty shillings was to pay sixpence in the pound, and every person "being sett in the subsedye book at 3 _li._ goods to paie IIII^d[266]." [263] Thus a fifteenth at Reading raised "xxiiii_li._ xiii_d._ ob. ut patet per recordum in Scaccario domini Regis inde factum et per veterem compotum per collectores inde similiter factum." _Records of Reading_, I. 87, 1489. [264] See p. 30. See Cannan, _The History of Local Rates_, p. 20. [265] Bacon, _Annals of Ipswich_, 8th Oct. 1585, p. 344. [266] Regulations of a House of Correction at Bury, Suffolk. Eden, Vol. III. Appendix vii.