It is all the more interesting to note that it was found so intolerable that it was repealed the following year; and little effort since then has been made to regulate the diet or dress or expenditure of Englishmen; it was declared in memorable language that “which was ordained at the last Parliament, of Living and of Apparel, and that no English Merchant should use but one Merchandise” be repealed, and “It is ordained, That all People shall be as free as they were before the said Ordinance,” and “all Merchants, as well Aliens as Denizens, may sell and buy all Manner of Merchandises, and freely carry them out of the Realm ... saving the Victuallers of Fish that fish for Herring and other Fish, and they that bring Fish within the Realm.”  Thus, after trying the opposite, we find triumphantly established in the middle of the fourteenth century the great English principle of freedom of life and trade.  The legislation of this great reign ends with the prohibition of practising lawyers from sitting in Parliament and an ordinance that women might not practise law or “sue in court by way of Maintenance or Reward, especially Alice Perrens,” Alice Perrers or Pierce having become unpopular as the mistress of the elderly king.  Our courts have usually held that there is no common-law principle forbidding women to practise law, but from this ancient statute it would appear that such decisions are erroneous.

(1381) In 5 Richard II is a law absolutely forbidding the sale of sweet wines at retail.  This law, with the testimony of Shakespeare, goes to show that England liked their wines dry (sack), but the act is repealed the following year, only that sweet wines must be sold at the same price as the wines of the Rhine and Gascony; and in the same year, more intelligent than we, is a statute permitting merchants to ship goods in foreign ships when no English ships are to be had.  In 1383, according to Spence, the barons protested that they would never suffer the kingdom to be governed by the Roman law, and the judges prohibited it from being any longer cited in the common-law tribunals.  The rest of the statutes of Richard II are taken up with the important statutes concerning riots and forcible entries, and regulating labor, as set forth in the last chapter.

The troublesome reign of Richard II closes with an interesting attempt to make its legislation permanent, as has sometimes been attempted in our State constitutions.  The last section of the last law of King Richard declares “That the King by the Assent of the said Lords and Knights [note it does not say by consent of the Commons], so assigned by the said Authority of Parliament, will and hath ordained that ... to repeal or to attempt the repeal of any of the said Statutes is declared to be high treason,” and the man so doing shall have execution as a traitor.  Notwithstanding, in the following year the first act of Henry IV repeals the whole Parliament of the 21st of Richard II and all their statutes; that it be “wholly reversed, revoked, voided, undone, repealed, and adnulled for ever”—­so we with the States in rebellion, and so Charles II with the acts of Cromwell.