In 1463 it would appear that cards were well known in England; for, by an act of parliament passed in that year, which was the third of Edward IV, the importation of playing cards was expressly prohibited. This act, according to Anderson, was passed in consequence of the manufacturers and tradesmen of London, and other parts of England, having made heavy complaints against the importation of foreign manufactured wares which greatly obstructed their own employment.[112] If we suppose that cards were included in the prohibition for the above reason, it would follow that card-making was then a regular business in England. Whether cards were home-manufactured or obtained from abroad, they appear about 1484 to have been, as they are at present, a common Christmas game. Margery Paston thus writes to her husband, John Paston, in a letter dated Friday, 24th Dec., 1484: "Right worshipful husband, I recommend me unto you. Please it you to weet that I sent your eldest son John to my Lady Morley, to have knowledge of what sports were used in her house in the Christmas next following after the decease of my lord her husband; and she said that there were none disguisings, nor harpings, nor luting, nor singing, nor none loud disports; but playing at the tables, and chess, and _cards_; such disports she gave her folks leave to play, and none other. Your son did his errand right well, as ye shall hear after this. I sent your younger son to the Lady Stapleton; and she said according to my Lady Morley's saying in that, and as she had seen used in places of worship thereas [where] she hath been."[113] It may not be improper here to caution the reader against confounding "places of worship," with "houses of prayer," and hence inferring that cards were then a common game in churches, with gentlemen's servants, at Christmas time. By "places of worship" are meant the dwelling-places of worshipful persons, such as lords, knights, and justices of the peace: in those days there were no stipendiary police-magistrates, and every Shallow on the bench was "a gentleman born." Whether Richard III, in whose reign the letter above quoted was written, added dicing and card-playing to his other vices, we have no account either in public history which deals, or ought to deal, wholesale, in "great facts," or in private memoirs, which are more especially devoted to the retailing of little facts. His successor, however, Henry VII, was a card player; for Barrington observes that in his privy-purse expenses there are three several entries of money issued for his majesty's losses at cards. Of his winnings there is no entry; though his money-grubbing majesty kept his accounts so exactly as to enter even a six-and-eightpenny bribe, given to propitiate his mercy in favour of a poor criminal,--thus turning a penny by trafficking with his prerogative of pardoning: "To have the power to forgive, Is empire and prerogative."