Counsel on the other side had laid stress on the fact that the liberties and franchises of the City had been often seized or "taken into the king’s hands," adducing instances with which the reader of the earlier pages of this work will be already familiar; and if they could be so seized, they could also be forfeited. The Recorder argued that this conclusion was a wrong one. The effect of the seizure of the City’s liberties in former days had only been to place the government of the city in the hands of a _custos_ or warden. The Corporation continued as before; it might sue and be sued as before; it was neither suspended nor destroyed. How could the king seize a Corporation? Could he himself constitute the mayor, commonalty and citizens of a city, or make anyone else such? No, a Corporation was not, to use a legal phrase, "manurable"; it could not be seized; nor had anyone (he believed) ever imagined such a thing as a dissolution of a corporation by a judgment in law until that day. At the conclusion of his speech the further hearing of the case was adjourned until April. (M786) On the resumption of the hearing (27 April)(1534) Sir Robert Sawyer, the attorney-general, at whose suggestion and by whose authority the writ against the City had been issued, took up the argument, commencing his speech with an attempt to allay the apprehension excited by the prospect of forfeiture of the City’s charter. "It was not the king’s intention," he said, "to demolish at once all their liberties and to lay waste and open the city of London, and to reduce it to the condition of a country village," as some had maliciously reported, but to amend the government of the City "by running off those excesses and exorbitances of power which some men (contrary to their duty and the known laws of the land) have assumed to themselves under colour of their corporate capacity, to the reviling of their prince, the oppression of their fellow subjects and to the infinite disquiet of their fellow citizens."(1535) History had shown that the City had never been better governed than when it was in the king’s hands. Its ancient customs had not been destroyed, but only restrained in subordination to the general government of the kingdom, and therefore the danger now threatened would not prove so fatal to the City as had been suggested. (M787)