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 its behalf. Nor must it be supposed that no supervision of the proceedings of the company was exercised by the High Commission itself. We find that body writing to the Company to uphold a patent in 1560. It was upon its motion in 1566 that the Privy Council made a Star Chamber order calling attention to irregularities which had taken place, and directing the master and wardens to search for the offenders. And its authority, concurrent with that of the Privy Council itself, to license books, is confirmed by a letter of the Council to the company in 1570. So much for the period before 1586. Another thing which Lambe and Kingston do not tell us, and which the register, if it can be trusted, does, is that the effective change introduced by the Star Chamber of that year was only one of degree and not of kind. It is true that an increasing number of books came, after one set-back, to be submitted to correctors; that the clerk begins to lay emphasis in his wording upon entrance rather than upon licence; that there are some hints that the direct responsibility of the wardens was for a kind of 'allowance' distinct from and supplementary to that of censorship. But it does not appear to be true that, then or at any later time, they wholly refused to enter any book except after taking cognizance of an authority beyond their own.

In fact the register, from the very beginning, was not purely, or perhaps even primarily, one of allowances. It had two other functions, even more important from the point of view of the internal economy of the Company. It was a fee-book, subsidiary to the annual accounts of the wardens, and showing the details of sums which they had to return in those accounts. And it was a register of copyrights. A stationerCommissioners for cawses ecclesyastical there at London'.]