to prohibit people from eating anything but fish in Lent, entitled “An Acte to encourage the Seamen of England to take Fishe, wherebie they may encrease to furnishe the Navie of England.”  There was an act for the relief of skinners, and a charter given by Queen Elizabeth in the twenty-first year of her reign to the Eastland merchants for a monopoly of trade in those countries; it would be interesting could these early corporation charters and monopoly grants be printed, for they are not usually found in the statutes of the realm.  In 1605 stage players are forbidden from swearing on the stage.  In 1606 is an elaborate act for the regulation of the spinning, weaving, dyeing, and width of woollen cloth, and the same year is an act for “repressinge the odious and loathsome synne of Drunckennes,” imposing a penalty or fine and the stocks.  In 1609 an act of Edward IV is revived, forbidding the sale of English horns unwrought, that people of strange lands do come in and carry the same over the sea and there work them, one of the latest statutes against the export of raw material.  In the last year of his reign comes the great Statute of Monopolies noted in the last chapter, and an act extending the benefit of clergy to women convicted of small felonies, for which they had previously suffered death, and another act for the repression of drunkenness.  And the last statute we shall note, like the first, is concerned with regrating and engrossing; that is to say, it re-enacts the Statute of Edward VI prohibiting the engrossing of butter and cheese, and prohibiting middlemen.  Thus restraint of trade and freedom of labor begin and end as the most usual subjects of English popular law-making.

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A few words upon Cromwell’s legislation may be of interest; for though it was all repealed and left no vestige in the laws of England, it had some effect upon the legislation of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  Under the Commonwealth there was but one legislative chamber, and over that the protector exercised far more control than had been ventured by the maddest Stuart or Tudor.  One would suppose that a period which represented the supremacy of the common people would be marked by a mass of popular legislation.  Quite the contrary is the fact.  In the first place, the Instrument of Government, prepared by the so-called Barebones Parliament, was supposed to be a sort of constitution; as a symbol of the change from absolute personal government to constitutional government under this Instrument, Cromwell exchanged his military sword for the civil common sword carried by General Lambert, who was at the head of the deputation praying the Lord General to accept the office of protector.  It vested the supreme power in him, acting with the advice of the Council, with whose consent alone he could make war, and that Council was to choose future protectors.  The legislative power resided in a single chamber,