(1400) Under Henry IV is the first secular law against heresy, making it a capital offence.  Upon conviction by the ordinary the heretic is to be delivered to the secular arm, i.e., burnt.  Note that the trial, however, still remains with the ordinary, i.e., the clerical court.  Under Henry IV also we find a statute banishing all Welshmen and forbidding them to buy land or become freemen in England; and under Henry VI the same law is applied to Irishmen, and in the next reign to Scotchmen as well.  The Irishmen complained of, however, were only those attending the University of Oxford.  In 1402 we find Parliament asserting its right to ratify treaties and to be consulted on wars; matters not without interest to President Roosevelt’s Congress, and in 1407 we find definite recognition of the principle that money bills must originate in the lower house.

For the purpose of his Chicago speech, it is a pity that Mr. Bryan’s attention was never called to the Statute of the 8th of Henry VI, which forbids merchants from compelling payment in gold and from refusing silver, “which Gold they do carry out of the Realm into other strange Countries.”  An enlightened civic spirit is shown in the Statute of 1433, which prohibits any person dwelling at the Stews in Southwark from serving on juries in Surrey, whereby “many Murderers and notorious Thieves have been saved, great Murders and Robberies concealed and not punished.”  And the statute sweepingly declares everybody inhabiting that part of Southwark to be thieves, common women, and other misdoers.  Fortunately, this was before the time that John Harvard took up his residence there.

In 1430 was the first statute imposing a property qualification upon voters.

In 1452 is a curious statute reciting that “Whereas in all Parts of this Realm divers People of great Power, moved with unsatiable Covetousness ... have sought and found new Inventions, and them continually do execute, to the Danger, Trouble and great abusing of all Ladies, Gentlewomen, and having any Substance ... perceiving their great Weakness and Simplicity, will take them by Force, or otherwise come to them seeming to be their great Friends ... and so by great Dissimulation ... get them into their Possession; also they will many Times compell them to be married by them, contrary to their own liking.”  A writ of chancery is given to persons so constrained of their liberty to summon the person complained of, and if he make default be outlawed—­an early example of “government by injunction” applied to other than labor disputes!  I know no example of an American statute to this effect; presumably our women are lacking in “weakness and simplicity.”