Besides these organized and quasi-seignorial bands, there were ordinary robbers, numerous enough for chantries to have been founded “for the safety of travellers who were in danger from thieves.”[187] Against those people who impeded travelling much more grievously than ever the floods and broken bridges, Edward I had taken, in 1285, special measures in the Statute of Winchester. These men were described there as accustomed to crouch down in the ditches, coppice, or brushwoods near the roads, especially those linking two market towns. This was, of course, the passage-way of many easy victims, richly laden. The king orders therefore that, for a space of two hundred feet, the ground on each side of the road should be cleared in such a manner that there remain neither coppice nor brushwood, nor hollow nor ditch which serve as shelter for malefactors: “où leur peut tapir pur mal fere.” Only large trees such as oaks might be left. The owner of the soil had to do the work; if he neglected it, he would be responsible for robberies and murders, and have to pay a fine to the king. If the road went through a park, the same obligation lay on the lord, unless he consented to close it by a wall or a hedge so thick, or by a ditch so wide and deep, that robbers could not cross them: “qe meffesurs ne pussent passer ne returner pur mal fere.” The king sets the example and orders such clearings to be made at once on the lands belonging to the crown.[188] After which, things continued pretty much as before: “Meanwhile,” writes a chronicler for the years 1303–05, {157} “certain malefactors, bound together, four, six, ten or twenty went in company to fairs and markets, rifled the houses of honest people and were not ashamed to capture through their misdoings the goods of the faithful and rich people.”[189] Worse than that: we find as we progress in the fourteenth century, that these common thieves had improved their methods and increased their profits. They allied themselves, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, to the seignorial bands, and were not henceforward unticketed men for whom no one was responsible. The Commons were aware of the fact, and complained accordingly: “Whereas it is notoriously known _throughout all the shires of England_ that robbers, thieves, and other malefactors on foot and on horseback, go and ride on the highway through all the land in divers places, committing larcenies and robberies: may it please our lord the king to charge the nobility of the land that none such be maintained by them, privately nor openly; but that they help to arrest and take such bad ones.”[190] In the preceding parliament the same complaints had been made, and the king had already promised that he would order “such remedy as should be pleasing to God and man.”[191] But neither God nor man had had apparently cause to be pleased.