From the year 1455 onwards, the Horners seem to have fallen into the background and to have disappeared from the arena of public life. This is not altogether to be wondered at, for, towards the end of the fifteenth century, and for nearly 200 years after, City Crafts or Mysteries were the object of predatory attacks of so deadly a character, that though in 1455 we find forty-eight Crafts openly representing the City, in 1575 only twenty-eight Companies were to be found on whom the assessment for wheat could be placed. What the remaining Mysteries did is difficult to say, but no doubt they attempted to carry on their work unnoticed, either urging prescriptive rights, or claiming none, in order to avoid spoliation. [Sidenote: Horners forced to re-appear.] The once important trade, but now the “little craft of Horners” was evidently in this category, and had it not been for the necessity of fighting for very existence, when the export of horns was making their trade impossible by the increase in price of the raw material, they doubtless would have preferred to keep in the background, even at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. This contention would seem the more reasonable from the fact that had not the previous Charters or Royal grants to the Horners’ Company been of very ancient date, and, consequently, almost forgotten, and had that Craft not been, as it were, keeping from the glare of public observation in order to avoid the cost of “Inspeximus’s,” it is unlikely that the advisers of Queen Elizabeth would have laid her open to the controversy which the grant of letters patent to Furner and Crayford was bound to produce. [Sidenote: 1604. Repeal of Horners’ Act.] [Sidenote: Petition to Parliament, 1610, and revival of Horners’ Act.] It must have been a great blow to the Company when, in the first year of the reign of James I, an Act (c. 25) was passed which repealed the Statute of 4 Edward IV; but in the seventh year of that King’s reign the Horners presented their petition to Parliament, stating, “that by reason of the repeal of the prohibition, the Company had grown so poor and decayed, as in a short time, if remedy be not provided, they and theirs shall be utterly undone;” and the Act is thereby revived except as to the powers of search in Stourbridge and Ely fairs, and a limitation of the price of horns thereby secured. A penalty was imposed of double the value of English horns sold unwrought to any stranger or sent over the sea; one moiety of the penalty to go to the informer and one moiety to the King. [Sidenote: 1627. Letters patent from the King.] Notwithstanding this Statute, the exportation of horns still continued, and Letters Patent were granted by King Charles I, in the third year of his reign, 1627, again prohibiting the exportation of horns until the Company should first have made choice of the best and most convenient number of the horns to supply the necessary occasions of the realm.