NOTE.--If any further proof were needed of the constant attention given by Parliament to agricultural matters, it would be furnished by the Acts for the destruction of vermin.[204] Our forefathers had no doubt that rooks did more harm than good, yearly destroying a 'wonderfull and marvelous greate quantitie of corne and graine'; and destroying the 'covertures of thatched housery, bernes, rekes, stakkes, and other such like'; so that all persons were to do their best to kill them, 'on pain of a grevous amerciament'. FOOTNOTES: [184] Much the same tendencies were at work in other countries, especially in Germany. [185] Slater, _English Peasantry and Enclosure_, 248. [186] Smyth, _Lives of the Berkeleys_, i. 113. [187] _Cal. Pat. Rolls_, 1331, p. 127. [188] _Lives of the Berkeleys_, i. 141. [189] Ibid. i. 141. [190] _Lives of the Berkeleys_, i. 160. [191] _Historical MSS. Commission, 6th Report_, p. 359. [192] Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i. 379. [193] Ashley, _English Woollen Industry_, pp. 80-1. Broadly speaking, there are four stages in the development of industry--the family system, the guild system, the domestic system, and the factory system. [194] _Hist. Reg. Angl._, p. 120. [195] Gisborne, _Agricultural Essays_, pp. 186-9. [196] _Antiquities of Warwickshire_ 2nd ed., p. 51. [197] Denton, _England in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 135. [198] See Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i. 331; Denton, _England in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 127. [199] 7 Hen. VIII, c. 1. [200] Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i. 489. [201] Dissolution of small monasteries, 1536; of greater, 1539-40. [202] Thorold Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, iv. 129. [203] Dugdale, _Monasticon_, v, 291. [204] 24 Hen. VIII, c. 10; 8 Eliz. c. 15; 14 Eliz. c. 11; 39 Eliz. c. 18. CHAPTER VIII FITZHERBERT.--THE REGULATION OF HOURS AND WAGES