in
default of them, heavy fines, were required for encroachments on the
king's forests, whose bounds, by decrees deemed arbitrary, were extended
much beyond what was usual.[****] The bounds of one forest, that
of Rockingham, were increased from six miles to sixty.[v] The same
refractory humor which made the people refuse to the king voluntary
supplies, disposed them, with better reason, to murmur against these
irregular methods of taxation.

Morley was fined ten thousand pounds for reviling, challenging, and
striking, in the court of Whitehall, Sir George Theobald, one of the
king's servants.[v*] This fine was thought exorbitant; but whether it
was compounded, as was usual in fines imposed by the star chamber, we
are not informed.

* See note D, at the end of the volume.

** Rush. vol. ii. p. 270; vol. iii. App. p. 106.

*** Rush. vol. iii. p. 333. Franklyn, p. 478.

**** May, p. 16.

v Strafford's Letters and Despatches, vol. ii. p. 117.

v* Rush. vol. ii. p. 270.

Allison had reported, that the archbishop of York had incurred the
king's displeasure, by asking a limited toleration for the Catholics,
and an allowance to build some churches for the exercise of their
religion. For this slander against the archbishop, he was condemned in
the star chamber to be fined one thousand pounds, to be committed to
prison, to be bound to his good behavior during life, to be whipped,
and to be set on the pillory at Westminster, and in three other towns in
England. Robins, who had been an accomplice in the guilt, was condemned
by a sentence equally severe.[*] Such events are rather to be considered
as rare and detached incidents, collected by the severe scrutiny of
historians, than as proofs of the prevailing genius of the king's
administration which seems to have been more gentle and equitable than,
that of most of his predecessors: there were, on the whole, only five
or six such instances of rigor during the course of fifteen years,
which elapsed before the meeting of the long parliament. And it is also
certain, that scandal against the great, though seldom prosecuted at
present, is, however, in the eye of the law, a great crime, and subjects
the offender to very heavy penalties.

There are other instances of the high respect paid to the nobility and
to the great in that age, when the powers of monarchy, though disputed,
still maintained themselves in their pristine vigor. Clarendon[**] tell