That this game flourished in the succeeding century is manifest from the fact that Edward III., in A.D. 1349, found it necessary to forbid it by law. This warlike monarch, who was not quite of the same opinion as a man of at least equally military mind, the Duke of Wellington, sent a formal letter of complaint to the sheriffs of the City of London, that “the skill in shooting with arrows was almost totally laid aside for the purpose of various useless and unlawful games,” and they were thenceforth enjoined to prohibit all such “idle practices” as far as their jurisdiction extended. Football, however, seemed to have sufficient vitality to outlast the pressure of a statute which, like some of those at present directed against gambling and betting, seems to have been more honoured in the breach than in the observance, for we find that in 1389 another Act was passed by Richard II. (12 Ric. ii., cap. 6) for the purpose of encouraging shooting, at the expense of other sports. This Act expressly forbade throughout the kingdom “all playinge at Tennis, Footballe, and other games called corts, dice, casting of the stone, kailes (a kind of skittles), and other such importune games.” How great must have been the moral effect of the statute we see from the fact that it had to be re-enacted by Henry IV. in 1401, and again by Henry VIII. considerably more than a hundred years later; while the last-named monarch also passed an enactment rendering it a penal offence for any person whatever to attempt to make gain by keeping a house or ground for sporting purposes of any kind--an enactment which some of the present managers of “gate-money” meetings for amateurs would be doubtless sorry to see replaced upon the Statute Book. Another clause of the same Act made it a penal offence for an artificer to play at any of the games mentioned above, save at Christmastide. In Scotland also similar measures were pursued for the purpose of separating those canny sportsmen from their well-loved games of golf and football; for in 1458, James III. of Scotland decreed that displays of weapons were to be held four times a year, and that “footballe and golfe be utterly put down.” Two other pieces of evidence show how constant and how vain was the effort made by our sovereigns to suppress a national sport. Twice in the reign of Elizabeth was proclamation made that “no foteballe play be used or suffered within the City of London and the liberties thereof, upon pain of imprisonment,” and twice were entries of the proclamations having been made entered in the books of the Corporation of London, upon Nov. 27th, 1572, and Nov. 7th, 1581, where they can be seen to this day. But in spite of prohibition and threat of fine and imprisonment, the London apprentices and the country labourers were determined to enjoy their football; and the game was probably never so flourishing or so prosperous as it was throughout the sixteenth century.