Wales and the Welsh borderland had long been the refuge of the outlaw, and the fastness of the robber; for whilst the natural features of the country favoured the escape of the fugitive from justice, the division of the principality into independent lordships, from which the king's writ was excluded, still further increased the difficulty of arrest. At one time there were 141 of these lordships, under as many petty chieftains known as Lords-Marchers, who indiscriminately sold charters, and harboured any lawbreaker who would pay for his footing. This kind of home-rule in Wales was incompatible with the maintenance of order in the West of England, and the counties near the border suffered severely for their proximity to this Alsatia. Accordingly in 1536 it was decided to extinguish the separate jurisdiction of the Lords-Marchers, and the whole of Wales was incorporated into England by an Act passed in the 27th year of Henry the Eighth, which provided Justices-of-the-Peace, Justices-of-the-Quorum, and Justices-of-Gaol-delivery for the Welsh counties, armed with the same power and authority that the corresponding Justices in England were possessed of; shortly afterwards (1543)[89] these newly-appointed Justices of the Peace were authorised to select two "substantiall gentlemen, or yeomen, to be chiefe constables of the hundred wherein they inhabite, which two constables in every hundred shall haue a speciall regard to the conseruation of the King's Peace." A somewhat similar state of unrest existed in the neighbourhood of the Scottish border. Here the simple expedient of incorporation by Act of Parliament was of course impossible, so in the following year Henry instituted a Court, called the President and the Council of the North, and empowered it to preserve the peace, in that part of the realm, in the king's name; so that "his true subjects ... have undelayed justice daily administered." Nearer home, Thomas Cromwell, acting for the king, overhauled the administration of police, and amongst other improvements established parochial registers of births, marriages and deaths,[90] but he was too fond of thrusting petty and vexatious regulations down the throats of a people, who, recently freed from their old bondage, were now for the first time beginning to think for themselves; his whole system moreover was vitiated by the frequency with which he employed spies and informers, a method of police control always peculiarly abhorrent to the English.