is year (but see
also 1503, above) in a statute complaining of the grant of second
patents of a matter already granted; and avoiding in such cases the
later patent unless the king express that "he hath determined his
pleasure against the first."

The appearance of the gypsies in England is marked by a statute
of 1530, describing them as "outlandish people called Egyptians,"
complaining of their robberies, and requiring them to depart the
realm. In the same year first appeared the celebrated Act for the
punishment of beggars and vagabonds and forbidding beggary, and
requiring them to labor or be whipped. Herbert Spencer states in his
"Descriptive Sociology" that it punishes with loss of an ear the third
conviction for joining a trades-union, which, if true, would justify
much of the bitterness of modern labor unions against the common
law. The provision evidently referred to (22 Henry VIII, chapter 12,
section 4) applies, however, not to guilds, but to "Scolers of the
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge that go about begging not being
authorized under the seal of the said Universities" as well as to
other beggars or vagabonds playing "subtile, crafty and unlawful games
such as physnomye or palmestrye." The same year is an Interesting
statute against foreign artificers exercising handicrafts in England,
not without example in the labor legislation of our modern States;
but exempting beggars, brewers, surgeons, and scriveners as not
handicraftsmen, possibly the origin of the vulgar notion that those
trades are more genteel than skilled labor.

(1535) Another statute against sturdy vagabonds and "rufflers found
idling after being assigned to labor," and already having their ears
so slit, are punishable with death. This year Wales was joined to
England; and we see the first act for the suppression of monasteries;
the next year came the statute extinguishing the authority of the
Bishop of Rome. With the struggle against the Roman Church went
the contest for freedom; _inter arma silent leges_; sociological
legislation came to an end for the rest of the reign and arbitrary
laws passed at the king's desire; in 1536, the act authorizing kings
of England, on arriving at the age of twenty-four, to repeal any act
of Parliament made during their minority, and in 1539 the "Act that
Proclamations made by the King shall be obeyed"--the high-water mark
of executive usurpation in modern times. Proclamations made by the
king and counci