The London Stationers also took alarm and petitioned the Queen. At first they were merely rebuked for daring to question the royal prerogative but, "approaching her Majesty a second time more humbly than before," the Company was granted a monopoly of both printing and selling psalters, primers, almanacks, _ABC_'s, the little Catechism, and Nowell's English and Latin Catechism. Of all such monopolies the university, by the power given to it in the charter of 1534 to print _omnimodos libros_, had been made nominally independent, and it was therefore inevitable that disputes should arise; furthermore, there being as yet no regularised law of copyright, such disputes were likely to be most violent when there was competition in the sale, as well as in the printing, of a text-book. Thus when John Legate, himself a freeman of the Stationers' Company, printed an edition of Terence for the use of scholars in 1589 and sent copies to be sold in London, the Stationers quickly confiscated them; on their part, the Stationers were at the same time contemplating another pirated edition of Thomas's _Dictionary_. The university made its usual, dignified complaint to Lord Burghley. Again, in 1591, Legate, who had in that year produced the first English bible printed at Cambridge, was accused of infringing the monopoly of Barker and Day, the privileged printers. In their reply to the charge, the Vice-Chancellor and Heads of Houses whilst hinting that the doctrine "that the prince by virtue of prerogative may, by a later grant, either take away or abridge a former" is not only "against the rule of natural equity" but also "dangerous to all degrees, opening a way to the overthrow of all patents and privileges," base their appeal upon an _ad misericordiam_, with a final reminder of the charter and its ratification; in particular, they emphasise the plight of the printer himself: The suit which they [the Stationers] have made unto your lordship for the stay of our printer until the next term, is so prejudicial to the poor man, as if they should prevail therein, it could not but tend to his utter undoing; especially Sturbridge-fair now drawing near; being the chiefest time wherein he hopeth to reap greatest fruit of this his travail[23].