Throughout Cromwell’s ‘remembrances’ occur countless minor items dealing with miscellaneous questions of internal reform. Memoranda for the building and improvement of roads and highways, for bettering the state of the coast defences, and for the regulation of the rates of wages, are especially numerous. In 1538 he aided Norfolk in suppressing a sort of strike among the Wisbech shoemakers, who had agreed to stop work unless their wages were raised from 15_d._ to 18_d._ per dozen boots sewed[302]. It is perhaps unnecessary to state that this strike was regarded as a revolt against authority, and that the masters gained an easy victory over the men. Among Cromwell’s injunctions to the clergy in 1538 is an order to keep parish registers of births, marriages, and deaths[303]. Apparently this measure was intensely unpopular, especially in the south-west of England, where people seem to have got the notion that ‘some charges more than hath been in time past shall grow to them by this occasion of registering of these things[304].’ Precisely what the immediate object of the injunction was it is difficult to say, though there is little reason to think that the fears it aroused among the people of Cornwall and Devonshire were realized. It has been grudgingly applauded by one writer, and characterized as ‘an inadequate attempt to supply the loss of the registers of various kinds which had been kept by the monks[305]’; but its inadequacy, however great, might well pass unmentioned, in the face of the many benefits which later resulted from it. However unpopular the measure may have been at the time, its author certainly deserves the thanks of posterity for preserving a vast amount of valuable information which would otherwise have been lost.