if unspecified, might have been passed over as exempt, but to which Henry had no intention of conceding further license. It seems as if, in framing the Act, he had Simon Fish's petition before him, and was commencing at last the rough remedy of the cart's-tail, which Fish had dared to recommend for a very obdurate evil.[1] The friars of the mendicant orders were tolerated for a few years longer; but many other spiritual persons may have suffered seriously under the provisions of the present statute.
'Be it further enacted,' the Act continues, 'that scholars of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, that go about begging, not being authorized under the seal of the said Universities, by the commissary, chancellor, or vice- chancellor of the same; and that all and singular shipmen pretending losses of their ships and goods, going about the country begging without sufficient authority, shall be punished and ordered in manner and form as is above rehearsed of strong beggars; and that all proctors and pardoners, and all other idle persons going about in counties or abiding in any town, city, or borough, some of them using divers subtle, crafty, and unlawful games and plays, and some of them
- ↑ 'Divers of your noble predecessors, kings of this realm, have given lands to monasteries, to give a certain sum of money yearly to the poor people, whereof for the ancienty of the time they never give one penny. Wherefore, if your Grace will build to your poor bedemen a sure hospital that shall never fail, take from them these things.… Tie the holy idle thieves to the cart to be whipped, naked, till they fall to labour, that they by their importunate begging take not away the alms that the good charitable people would give unto us sore, impotent, miserable people, your bedemen.' Fish's Supplication: Foxe, vol. iv. p. 664.
