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208 in the hands of the London company, were sold at so high a price that the buyer of the same could not live thereupon—that is to say, could not retail them at a living profit. "By reason whereof," the petition concludes, "all the cities, towns, and boroughs of this realm in effect be fallen into great poverty, ruin, and decay; and now in manner they be without hope of comfort or relief, and the king's customs and subsidies and the navy of the land greatly decreased and minished, and daily they be like more and more to decay, if due reformation be not had in this behalf," Although, however, the act seems to adopt this representation as correct, it does not go the length of putting down the privilege claimed by the London company: the company, it would appear, was too formidable for that; all that was done, therefore, was to limit the fine they should be entitled to exact for the future to the moderate amount of ten marks, or 6l. 13s. 4d. To that extent the act sanctioned the hitherto doubtful and disputed pretensions of the London merchant adventurers, and gave them so far a legal right of control over the whole foreign trade of the country. We shall find that the powers which they thus acquired formed a fertile source of controversy and contention for ages afterwards.

An act of parliament made in 1504, to regulate the importation of foreign silk (19 Hen, VII., c. 21), indicates what branches of the silk manufacture were now established in England, by prohibiting all persons for the future from bringing into the realm to be sold "any manner of silk wrought by itself, or with any other stuff, in any place out of this realm, in ribbons, laces, girdles, corses, cauls, corses of tissues, or points." All these articles of knit silk, "the people of England," as Bacon expresses it, "could then well skill to make." But the importation of "all other manner of silks" was freely permitted; "for that the realm," observes Bacon, "had of them no manufacture in use at that time." The historian praises this law as having the stamp of the king's wisdom and policy; and it "pointed," he says, "at a true principle, that, where foreign materials are but superfluities, foreign manufactures should be prohibited;