upon this, Antwerp was made the staple. But, although the power of naming the place, and also of changing it, was thus conferred upon the society, this part of the charter seems to have been very soon disregarded. In subsequent times the interferences of the king and the legislature with regard to the staple were incessant. In 1326 it was, by the royal order, removed altogether from the continent, and fixed at certain places within the kingdom. Cardiff, in Wales, a town belonging to Hugh Despenser, is the only one of these new English staples the name of which has been preserved. It may be noted, also, that tin is now mentioned as one of the staple commodities. In 1328 (by the statute 2 Edw. III. c. 9) it was enacted, "that the staples beyond the sea and on this side, ordained by kings in times past, and the pains thereupon provided, shall cease, and that all merchant strangers and privy (that is, foreigners and natives) may go and come with their merchandizes into England, after the tenor of the Great Charter." In 1332, however, we find the king ordaining, in the face of this act, that staples should be held in various places within the kingdom. Acts of parliament, indeed, on all kinds of subjects were as yet accustomed to be regarded by all degrees of people as little more than a sort of moral declarations or preachments on the part of the legislature—expressions of its sentiments—but scarcely as laws which were compulsory like the older laws of the kingdom. Most of them were habitually broken, until they had been repeated over and over again; and this repetition, rather than the exaction of the penalty, appears to have been the recognized mode of enforcing or establishing the law. In many cases, indeed, such a way of viewing the statute was justified by the principle on which it was evidently passed; it was often manifestly, if not avowedly, intended by its authors themselves as only a tentative or experimental enactment, the ultimate enforcement of which was to depend upon the manner in which it was found to work. The act of parliament was frequently entitled, not a statute, but an ordinance; and in that case it seems to have been merely proposed as an interim regulation.
