to serve by the year in husbandry.  The masters may not dismiss, nor the servants unduly depart; nor leave the city or parish of their service without a testimonial; that is to say, a certificate of due cause under the seal of the town or constable and two honest householders.  The hours of labor are still fixed from 5 A.M. to 7 P.M., between March and September, with two and one-half hours for meal times, drink times, and sleep.  From September to May, from dawn to sunset, and sleep times only allowed from May to August.  A penalty of one month’s imprisonment and fine is imposed on artificers and laborers leaving their work unfinished.  Wages are still to be fixed by the justices of the peace, and it is made a penal offence to give or receive higher wages than the lawful rate, and all contracts for higher wages are void.  Unmarried women between twelve and forty may be compelled to serve in like manner, and everybody has to work at harvest time, that is to say, artificers as well as laborers.  The elaborate law of apprenticeship dates also from this great statute, and no one can use a manual art who has not been apprenticed to the same for seven years.  One journeyman shall be kept for each three apprentices; disputes are to be settled by the justices of the peace, and indeed the whole labor contract is regulated as carefully as the most statute-mad of modern labor leaders could desire, though hardly, perhaps, then, in the sole interest of the workingman.  If this statute was ever repealed, it was in very recent times.

(1571) The year of the statute against fraudulent conveyances, and of another poor law, with provisions for the punishment of “rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars,” who are defined to include those going about the country “using sybtyll craftye and unlawfull Games or Playes ...  Palmestrye ... or fantasticall Imaginacons....  Fencers Bearewardes and Common Players,” and the penalty for harboring such vagabonds was twenty shillings.  We are a long time from the knighting of Sir Henry Irving.  In 1575 comes another act for setting the poor to work, and the punishing of tramps and beggars.

In 1571 also is the first formal complaint of monopolies by the Commons.  Coal, oil, salt, vinegar, starch, iron, glass, and many other commodities were all farmed out to individuals and monopolies; coal, mentioned first, is still, to-day, the subject of our greatest monopoly; while oil, mentioned fourth, is probably the subject of our second greatest monopoly; and iron, mentioned seventh, is probably the third.  Conditions have not changed.  The only reason we don’t have salt still a monopoly is on account of the numerous sources and processes for obtaining it from mines and from the sea; Fugger, the John D. Rockefeller of the sixteenth century (whose portrait in Munich strongly resembles him), had a monopoly of the salt mines of all Germany.  The conditions have maintained themselves, even as to the very articles.  This grievance was first mooted in Parliament in 1571 by