ding a system
of organized charity and even licensing beggars in towns too poor to
support all their paupers. Side by side with this, however, went the
severe statutes against idlers and vagabonds recited in the last
chapter. The first game laws date from about this period, prohibiting
the snaring of birds and establishing close seasons, and also in 1584
we find the first forestry law for the preservation of timber in the
southern counties. There is no provision for seeding, but the use in
the iron works of wood for fuel is carefully regulated, and in order
to preserve the forests in Sussex, Surrey, and Kent, it is provided
that no new iron mills, furnaces, etc., shall be erected in those
counties, showing the relative value that our forefathers placed upon
these matters. The first incorporation of a trading company seems
also to date from the time of Elizabeth. That is to say, the Muscovy
Company was chartered in 1564, and the Merchant Adventurers for the
discovery of new trades in 1566. In this same year is the celebrated
act of Speaker Onslow, in telling Elizabeth that she is subject to the
common law; from henceforward we are in modern times. In 1534 Henry
VIII declared himself supreme head of the Church of England; five
years later with the dissolution of monasteries came the "Bloody
Statute," whereby he attempted to vindicate his orthodoxy. The act was
entitled "An Act abolishing diversity of opinion on certain articles
concerning the Christian Religion," and insisted upon the sacraments,
celibacy, masses, and confessions, but in 1548 the marriage of priests
was made lawful, and in 1566 the pope forbade attendance at the
English Church. Thus, Roman law was expelled in the first two or
three centuries after the Conquest, the Roman Church in the sixteenth
century, and it remained for the seventeenth to struggle with the
last serious attempt at the Roman or Continental theory of personal
government.

(1602) King James at his accession asserted the divine right, and his
legislation, other than special bills for the restoration of attainted
persons, or the confirmation of titles, is scanty, his reign being
principally occupied with the conflict with Parliament, which he
forbade from meddling with affairs of state. In the first year of his
reign, the Statute of Laborers of Elizabeth was confirmed, as well
as that against rogues and vagabonds; the ninth act of his first
Parliament was "To restraine the inordinate haunti