In the first year of her reign Elizabeth renewed Henry VIII.'s Act forbidding the export of horses to Scotland. Her next important step was taken in the fourth year of her reign; she issued a Proclamation in which she reminded her subjects that various laws had been made and that the penalties for disobedience would be enforced. The Proclamation announced the creation of machinery to see that her father's statute requiring nobles of prescribed degree to keep a stallion was being obeyed; that his laws[6] concerning the height of mares in parks and enclosed lands, and requiring chases, forests and moors, to be periodically driven, and worthless mares, fillies and geldings found thereon destroyed, should be vigorously enforced. The law of Philip and Mary which obliged people to keep horses or geldings in conformity with the scheme for national defence, was recapitulated at length, and obedience within three months enjoined on penalty of fine. The Queen evidently considered the laws she found on the statute book all that were necessary to ensure attention to the interests of horse-breeding; for she refrained for many years from fresh legislation, contenting herself with Royal Proclamations in which she prescribed limits of time for her subjects to supply themselves with horses according to their legal obligation, and appointed suitable persons to see that her commands were carried out. One of these documents, issued in 1580, announces that the number of horsemen in the country shown by the returns is "much less than she looked for." She made some changes in the existing laws, notably that passed in the thirty-second year of Henry VIII.'s reign, concerning the stature of horses in specified shires. That law applied among other counties to Cambridgeshire, Huntingdon, Northampton, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk; 8 Eliz., c. 8, passed in 1566, exempted the Isle of Ely and "other moors, marshes and fens of Cambridgeshire," and the above-mentioned counties from operation of the Act because "the said moors, of their unfirmness, moysture and wateryshnes" could not bear such big horses without danger of their "mireyng, drowning and peryshinge." She also (31 Eliz. 12) passed another "Acte to avoyde horse stealinge," the chief feature of which was to forbid anyone unknown to the toll-taker to sell a horse in the market unless the would-be seller could produce "one sufficient and credible" witness to vouch for his respectability. The evil had grown to the proportions of a national scandal at this time: Holinshed's account, published eleven years before this Act was passed, shows us that no horse in pasture or stable was safe.