Among the many difficulties that those responsible for the preservation of the peace had to contend with, one of the most complicated was how best to deal with the lawless aggression of the Lowland Scots without involving the two nationalities in actual war. Henry VIII. endeavoured to solve the problem by the creation of a special local authority called "The Council of the North," but this was only a temporary measure, and not very successful, nor were the expedients adopted by Elizabeth any more effectual. Throughout the whole of the seventeenth century, the northern counties were continually overrun by predatory bands, called Moss-troopers, who taking advantage of the almost perennial hostility existing between the English and the Scots, harried the country-side, murdering, marauding, and lifting cattle: in case of pursuit, or after an unusually successful expedition, they had only to cross the border to avoid capture. According to Fuller,[138] their numbers amounted at one time to some thousands of men, who scoured the country in troops and exacted an annual tribute from the inhabitants of the valleys between the Solent and the North Sea. Although Fuller's was assuredly an exaggerated estimate, these enterprising freebooters were without question a most formidable fraternity. The Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland deprived them, it is true, of the international pretext they had traded upon in the past, but their depredations continued just the same as before. With the hope of putting an end to these raids, a local police force was established in 1672,[139] and afterwards kept alive by successive Acts of Parliament. The Justices of the Peace for the northern counties were empowered by virtue of this Statute to make a charge of £500 against Northumberland, and of £200 against Cumberland, for the payment and support of a body of men, forty-two strong (viz., thirty Northumbrians and twelve Cumbrians), whose duty it was to "search out, discover, pursue, apprehend, and bring to trial by law,"--the raiders. In strict justice, the task of suppressing the Moss-troopers should not have been left to a local force, but the political relations between the two countries were already strained almost to breaking point, and the employment of troops on the borderland might, and probably would, have induced a rupture. Under the circumstances, therefore, the government of the day was probably justified in the course pursued, but on no account should the whole expense have been borne by the very counties which had already principally suffered through the inroads of the raiders.