reference to their fellow-citizens, of trading with the dominions of the king of France. Another statute of the same session created a still more comprehensive monopoly in favour of the corporation of the town of Southampton, which was empowered to exclude all persons except its own freemen, and the barons and freemen of the Cinque Ports, from buying or selling anything whatever as merchants within that town. Such restrictions were still generally thought to be necessary or serviceable to the interests of trade, and not injurious to those of the public.
Much more pernicious, however, in their effects, as well as more illegal, or at least unconstitutional, in their origin, than these local and statutory grants, were many patents for the exclusive sale or manufacture of particular commodities, which James took upon him to issue by his mere prerogative to persons who purchased from him such licences to pillage the rest of his subjects. The number of these monopolies had been made matter of strong complaint by the House of Commons towards the close of the preceding reign, and Elizabeth had thereupon issued a proclamation annulling all those then existing. But James was not to be restrained by this concession of his predecessor from the exercise of what he held to be an undoubted part of his prerogative; he soon created so many new monopolies that the public clamour became louder than ever, till at last, in 1609, he deemed it prudent to follow Elizabeth's example by again proclaiming a general revocation. Nevertheless, after the suspension of parliamentary government in 1614, this evil, with many others, soon grew up again in all its old rankness; so that, when circumstances at length compelled the culling of a parliament once more in 1621, the oppression of monopolies formed a principal head in the catalogue of the national grievances which the Commons immediately proceeded to redress. At a conference with the Lords, they offered to prove, Rushworth tells us, "that the patents of gold and silver thread, of inns and alehouses, and of power to compound for obsolete laws, of the price of horse-meat, starch, cords, tobacco-pipes, salt, train-oil, and the rest, were all illegal; howbeit they touched not
