disturbed by said letters
and nothing done in any of the places of the court of the king or
elsewhere by such letters against right or the law of the land shall
avail.

In 1313 the coming armed to Parliament is forbidden. These were
troublous times and there was little legislation in consequence,
and in 1322 Edward II secured the revocation of the New Ordinances
themselves, but as in all such cases of royal grant and withdrawal
the principles shown are even the more important historically. Of
uncertain period is the Statute of Jewrie forbidding usury to the
Jews, and Christians from living among them, but permitting them
freedom of trade and exempting them from taxation except to the king;
and a statute of the usages and customs of the men of Kent beginning
with the statement that "all the Bodies of Kentishmen be free, as well
as the other free Bodies of England," which dates at least as late as
the early part of the fourteenth century, but still exemplifying the
notion that a statute should only express law or custom previously
existing.

(1327) The Statute of Northampton, at the beginning of the reign of
Edward III, confirms many of the earlier statutes, but abolishes all
staples beyond the sea and on this side, on the ground that they
tended to monopoly, and provided that all merchants, strangers, and
citizens may go and come with their merchandises into England after
the tenor of the great charter (cap. IX). In the next year is another
provision for annual parliaments, and in 1335 the Statute of York
again allows merchants to buy and sell freely except only enemies, and
giving double damages for the disturbance by any one of such freedom
of trade, and the Statute _de Moneta_, forbidding carrying money
abroad; which is notable to the student of economics as showing how
early what we now call the fallacy of the mercantile system appeared.
Our ancestors thought that there was something peculiarly advantageous
in a tariff or system of duties which put all the money into a country
and allowed only goods to go out; and that opinion is perhaps not yet
extinct.

There always seems to have been a notion that there is something
peculiarly sacred about wool. So we find that in 1337 they made it
a felony to carry wool out of England, or to wear cloth made out of
England; and no clothes made beyond the seas were to be brought into
England. That notion that a man ought to dress on home products lies
behind our present McKin