In 1603, in answer to the agitation against the great monopolies, an Eastern trading company, known as the Levant Company, surrendered its charter. This company, amongst other privileges, had enjoyed the right of collecting a duty on currants from other merchants trading in them, and paid to the crown in return for the franchise £4,000 a year. When, therefore, the company yielded up its charter, the crown was the loser by £4,000 annually. In order to make up for the loss, the crown itself proceeded to lay a duty on currants.[302] In 1605, the Levant Company again received a charter, but James levied upon it, nevertheless, his duty on currants, the rate being five shillings on the hundred-weight over and above that granted to him by Parliament in its tunnage and poundage bill. It was a merchant of the Levant Company, John Bate, who raised the question of the legality of the imposition. The case was taken to the Court of Exchequer for decision. Had the barons confined themselves to the strict laws of the matter, there would not have been great ground for objection to their decision. Precedent drawn from the time of the Tudors and statutes of the same period, were capable of being brought forward in a fair adjudication of the case, and would have substantiated the contention of the crown, thus returning customs exactions, nearly to the situation of 1300.[303] The fact that the four barons decided the case unanimously against John Bate could not, therefore, be reasonably reprehended. But they permitted themselves to slip off into philosophical generalizations which struck the people as absolutist in tenor. [Opinions of the Barons in the Bate Case] “It seemeth to me strange,” says Baron Clarke in his opinion, “that any subjects would contend with the King in this high point of prerogative.... As it is not a kingdom without subjects and government, so he is not a king without revenues.... The revenue of the Crown is the very essential part of the Crown, and he who rendeth that from the king pulleth also his crown from his head, for it cannot be separated from the crown.” He proceeded to advance the opinion that the Statute of Edward III[304] which prohibited to the crown the right of levying new impositions on wool, woolfells, and leather, and which provided that there be only imposed “the custom and subsidy granted to the king,” had no effect in the present instance, because it extended to Edward III alone, “and shall not bind his successors, for it is a principal part of the Crown of England which the King cannot diminish.”