breaker of the law;[*]
yet this, engagement, which we may wonder to see exacted from men of
their rank, was never regarded by them. The commons make continual
complaints of the multitude of robberies, murders, rapes, and other
disorders, which, they say, were become numberless in every part of
the kingdom, and which they always ascribe to the protection that the
criminals received from the great.[**]The king of Cyprus, who paid a
visit to England in this reign, was robbed and stripped on the highway
with his whole retinue.[***] Edward himself contributed to this
dissolution of law, by his facility in granting pardons to felons,
from the solicitation of the courtiers. Laws were made to retrench
this prerogative,[****] and remonstrances of the commons were presented
against the abuse of it;[*****] but to no purpose. The gratifying of
a powerful nobleman continued still to be of more importance than the
protection of the people. The king also granted many franchises, which
interrupted the course of justice and the execution of the laws.[******]

* Cotton, p. 10.

** Cotton, p. 51, 62, 64, 70, 160.

*** Walsing. p. 170.

**** 10 Edward III. cap. 2. 27 Edward III. cap. 2.

***** Cotton, p. 75.

****** Cotton, p. 54.

Commerce and industry were certainly at a very low ebb during this
period. The bad police of the country alone affords a sufficient reason.
The only exports were wool, skins, hides leather, butter, tin, lead,
and such unmanufactured goods, of which wool was by far the most
considerable. Knyghton has asserted, that one hundred thousand sacks of
wool were annually exported, and sold at twenty pounds a sack, money of
that age. But he is widely mistaken both in the quantity exported and
in the value. In 1349, the parliament remonstrate, that the king, by an
illegal imposition of forty shillings on each sack exported, had levied
sixty thousand pounds a year:[*] which reduces the annual exports to
thirty thousand sacks. A sack contained twenty-six stone, and each stone
fourteen pounds;[**] and at a medium was not valued at above five pounds
a sack,[***] that is, fourteen or fifteen pounds of our present money.
Knyghton's computation raises it to sixty pounds, which is near four
times the present price of wool in England.

* Cotton, p. 48, 69.

** 34 Edward III. cap. 5.

*** Cotton, p. 29.

According to this reduced computation, the export of wool brought into