The commerce of England during the reign of Henry VIII. and his immediate successor had been almost wholly monopolised by the two very powerful corporations to which we have already referred. But the association of German merchants having become unpopular, a large portion of their trade soon afterwards fell into the hands of the “Merchant Adventurers.” To this influential fraternity English merchants were admitted on payment of a small fine; the government of the day, in their ignorance of the requirements of trade and navigation, having hitherto divided the commerce so far as practicable between these two companies, attempting at the same time to fix the boundaries of their respective rights by charters. But towards the close of the reign of Edward VI., when the interests of the English merchants greatly predominated, and when a committee which had been specially appointed to inquire discovered that the Steel-Yard traders, though exempted from the alien duties, had largely defrauded the revenue by giving rights of denizenship to foreigners, the Crown deprived them of many of their most valuable privileges, and practically revoked their charter. [Sidenote: Mode of conducting business.] [Sidenote: Mistaken laws.] Nor is it surprising that foreigners should have so long held in their hands the largest share of the maritime commerce of England, though when Henry VIII. ascended the throne there were no reliable accounts of its extent. A sort of haphazard mode of conducting business was then the rule of her merchants, who had then no means of early and accurate information of what their foreign competitors were doing, or of the quantity or quality of merchandise they themselves required; moreover, their commercial laws were so ill defined and so liable to uncertain and extraordinary changes that no dependence could be placed upon them. Hence it was that Henry endeavoured to give consistency to his legislative measures, though even these (as might have been expected) were in most instances far from perfect; as, for instance, when he attempted to regulate the price of labour, and to determine by law what sum each employer should pay to the labourers and others they employed.[106] No doubt there was more pretence for such a system where, as in most parts of England, there were still large ranges of common and unenclosed forest land on which the labourer might feed a cow, where his pigs, ducks, and geese might range, and where he could obtain his fuel without charge. Moreover, in those days labour was not, as now, a marketable commodity, it being then a recognised principle of law to apportion out, so far as seemed possible, the rights of the various classes of society, and to determine the price of such labour, not according to the demand, but according to the presumed cost of the necessaries of life. [Sidenote: The Bridport petition.]