ally authorized by
some official such as the chief governor of the city. The law so
far dates from the 15th of Henry VI; but the present act goes on to
provide that "no masters, fellowships of crafts or rulers of guilds or
fraternities make any acts or ordinances against the common profit of
the people but with the examination and approval of the Chancellor and
Chief Justice of England, and that there shall never be any by-law to
restrain any person from suits in the common-law courts." A Federal
statute similar to this was proposed by a late president to apply
to all corporations, or at least to all corporations conducting
interstate commerce; the approval of their by-laws or other contracts
to be by the Federal commissioner of corporations; while the last
section forbidding trades-unions to deny to their members the right
of suing them or other persons in the ordinary courts is part of
our constitutional law to-day and much objected to by the unions
themselves, as it was in the time of Henry VII The tendency to create
special courts (commerce, patents, etc.) seems to be beginning anew,
despite the malign history of the ancient courts of the Constable and
Marshal, Star Chamber, Requests, Royal Commissions, etc.

(1512) Under Henry VIII the penalty for paying higher wages than the
law allowed was removed from the employer and applied only to the
employee taking the wage; and in 1514 comes perhaps the most elaborate
of all the earlier acts fixing the wages and hours of labor. Their
meal times and sleep times are carefully regulated, they are forbidden
to take full wages for half-day's work and forbidden to leave a job
until it is finished, and the rates of pay of bailiffs, servants,
free masons, master carpenters, rough masons, bricklayers, tilers,
plumbers, glaziers, carvers, joiners, shipwrights, ship carpenters,
calkers, clinchers, agricultural laborers, both men and women, mowers,
reapers, carters, shepherds, herdsmen, and possibly others, are again
prescribed; this list of trades in the England of the early sixteenth
century is interesting. Bailiffs who assault their overseers may be
imprisoned for a year, and an exception is made from the act of
all miners of lead, iron, silver, tin, or coal, "called See Cole,
otherwise called Smythes Coole," or for making of glass, but that part
of the act fixing wages was repealed the very next year as to the city
of London.

(1514) The abuse of monopolies begins to be shown th