vagabonds, and people of vicious living, to the great trouble of your highness and of all your said realm." We need not transcribe the enacting part of the statute; its historical interest, and its value for our present purpose, lie in the above preamble, which furnishes so full and clear an account of the manner in which the commerce of the country was at this time conducted. The evils, or supposed evils, so strongly complained of, were of course attempted to be remedied by all sorts of restrictions on the operations of the foreign dealers—restrictions which were one and all absurd and of mischievous tendency, as well as, fortunately, in their very nature of impracticable enforcement. Their almost avowed object was to check the importation of foreign commodities of all kinds. While shackles, however, are imposed upon the trade in all other commodities, it is interesting to find an exception made in favour of the new-born trade in books, the creation of the great art recently invented of growing them as it were in crops, even as the manifold produce of the corn-fields is raised from the scattered seed. "Provided always," the statute concludes, "that this act, or any part thereof, or any other act made or to be made in this present parliament, in no wise extend or be prejudicial, any let, hurt, or impediment to any artificer or merchant stranger, of what nation or country he be, or shall be of, for bringing into this realm, or selling by retail or otherwise, of any manner books written or imprinted, or for the inhabiting within the said realm for the same intent, or to any writer, limner, binder, or imprinter of such books as he hath, or shall have, to sell by way of merchandise, or for their abode in the same realm, for the exercising of the said occupations, this act or any part thereof notwithstanding."[1]
Two other acts of this parliament continue for ten years longer prohibitions passed in the preceding reign against the importation of a great number of foreign manufactured articles. Intervening between these non-importa-
- ↑ 1 Rich. III. c. 9.
