(1562) From the reign of Elizabeth dates the great Poor Law, enacted and re-enacted in 1562, 1572, and finally in 1601, recognizing fully the duty of the parishes to support their poor, but providing a system of organized charity and even licensing beggars in towns too poor to support all their paupers.  Side by side with this, however, went the severe statutes against idlers and vagabonds recited in the last chapter.  The first game laws date from about this period, prohibiting the snaring of birds and establishing close seasons, and also in 1584 we find the first forestry law for the preservation of timber in the southern counties.  There is no provision for seeding, but the use in the iron works of wood for fuel is carefully regulated, and in order to preserve the forests in Sussex, Surrey, and Kent, it is provided that no new iron mills, furnaces, etc., shall be erected in those counties, showing the relative value that our forefathers placed upon these matters.  The first incorporation of a trading company seems also to date from the time of Elizabeth.  That is to say, the Muscovy Company was chartered in 1564, and the Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of new trades in 1566.  In this same year is the celebrated act of Speaker Onslow, in telling Elizabeth that she is subject to the common law; from henceforward we are in modern times.  In 1534 Henry VIII declared himself supreme head of the Church of England; five years later with the dissolution of monasteries came the “Bloody Statute,” whereby he attempted to vindicate his orthodoxy.  The act was entitled “An Act abolishing diversity of opinion on certain articles concerning the Christian Religion,” and insisted upon the sacraments, celibacy, masses, and confessions, but in 1548 the marriage of priests was made lawful, and in 1566 the pope forbade attendance at the English Church.  Thus, Roman law was expelled in the first two or three centuries after the Conquest, the Roman Church in the sixteenth century, and it remained for the seventeenth to struggle with the last serious attempt at the Roman or Continental theory of personal government.

(1602) King James at his accession asserted the divine right, and his legislation, other than special bills for the restoration of attainted persons, or the confirmation of titles, is scanty, his reign being principally occupied with the conflict with Parliament, which he forbade from meddling with affairs of state.  In the first year of his reign, the Statute of Laborers of Elizabeth was confirmed, as well as that against rogues and vagabonds; the ninth act of his first Parliament was “To restraine the inordinate hauntinge and tiplinge in Innes and Alehouses,” and, indeed, much of his legislation is aimed at what should properly be called “sins” rather than “crimes”; the next act after this was one to restrain “all persons from Marriage until their former Wyves and former Husbandes be deade.”  And next came a statute against witchcraft.  In 1603 is an act