usury or interest, above the rate of ten per cent., shall be punished by the forfeiture of the whole sum so exacted. It would require dexterous casuistry to demonstrate that, if to take interest at eleven per cent. was a detestable sin, to take interest at ten per cent. was allowable. If there was to be a law against usury at all, however, the penalty here denounced against the said detestable sin was certainly not of objectionable severity, even with the addition made by a subsequent clause, that offenders against the act might be further punished and corrected in the spiritual court. But that provision, in fact, merely went to restrain the spiritual court from proceeding against usury when it did not exceed ten per cent., and was really therefore protective, and not penal.
The most important measure that was taken in relation to the foreign trade of the country by the government of Edward VI. was the abolition of the privileges of the Steelyard Company. We have in the two preceding Chapters given an account of the rise and nature of this famous association of the German or Hanseatic merchants resident in England, and have brought down their history to the treaty of Edward IV. with the Hanse Towns, in 1475. Since that date various causes, and especially the new direction given to European commerce by the discovery of the route by sea to India, had very greatly reduced the eminence of that once powerful confederacy. Antwerp had now far distanced Lubeck, and Hamburgh, and Dantzic, in the race of commercial activity and prosperity; other trading associations had arisen in various countries, to share what was once almost the monopoly of the Hanseatic League; and, as order and good government had become everywhere better established, even individual merchants, in many cases, carried on their operations as successfully as any company. In England, however, the Hanse merchants of the Steelyard, from the privileges which they enjoyed under their ancient charters and more recent treaties, continued almost to monopolise certain branches of trade in which they were exempted from duties payable by other traders, and from their superior combination and capital were even some-
