In May of the following year there were twenty-three printers with fifty-three presses among them, and during the next two years the number appears to have increased so considerably as to call for that sweeping enactment, the Star Chamber decree of 1586. This famous measure prohibits all presses out of London, except one each at the two Universities, and “tyll the excessive {127} multytude of Prynters havinge presses already sett up be abated,” permits no new press whatsoever to be erected.[211] The Stationers’ Company have authority to inspect all printing offices, “to search take and carry away all presses, letters and other pryntinge instrumentes sett up, used or employed . . contrary to the intent and meaninge hereof; . . . and thereupon shall cause all suche printing presses, or other printing instruments, to be Defaced, melted, sawed in peeces, broken, or battered . . . and the stuffe of the same so defaced, shall redelyver to the owners thereof againe within three monethes next after the takinge or seizinge thereof as aforesayd.”[212] The Company were not slow in making use of their enlarged powers, and the refractory Roger Ward appears to have had considerable experience of the rigours of the new decree. In October 1586 the wardens seized on his premises “3 presses and divers other parcells of pryntinge stuffe,” and ordered them to be defaced and rendered unserviceable, according to the tenor of the decree. In 1590 they made a further visitation, and discovered that “he did kepe and conceale a presse and other pryntinge stuff in a Taylor’s house near adjoyninge to his owne, and did hide his letters in a hen house near St. Sepulchure’s Churche, expressely against the Decrees of the Star Chamber. All the whyche stuff were brought to Stacioners Hall” and duly destroyed. But the dauntless Roger Ward was not thus to be extinguished, and scarcely six months later, at Hammersmith, another press, “with 5 formes of letters of Divers sortes and 3 cases with other printing stuffe,” were impounded and rigorously defaced.