During the Commonwealth we find certain games forbidden, as the “Whimsey Board,” which used to be played in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Persons guilty of playing the virginals in taverns were punished for “living loosely.” Search was continually made for Catholics. There were dissensions in certain City churches about altar rails and other things. The word saint was omitted. Weddings were celebrated by the Alderman of the ward, and banns were published in Leadenhall Market. The hospitals, with revenues greatly diminished, were used for the wounded soldiers. In the same year it was thought necessary to repeat the order for the banishment of priests, and in 1673 Catholic recusants were forbidden to enter the Palace or Park of St. James’s or the precincts of Whitehall. The Catholics, however, continued to flock to the Ambassadors’ chapels. It was therefore ordered that messengers of the Chamber or other officers should be stationed at the approaches to these chapels in order to arrest those proposing to attend service there. In 1679 all Roman Catholics in London were ordered to leave the City and to withdraw at least ten miles from it. The constant repetition of these ordinances proves that they were never enforced save by occasional fits of zeal; the Catholics went away; a week later they returned; no doubt the officers were bribed to shut their eyes. Yet the system was most exasperating; for a Catholic to be compelled to attend a Protestant service was almost as bad as for a Mohammedan to be compelled to eat pig; the Catholic rule about attending heretical services is never relaxed; while a zealous churchwarden, armed with blank warrants, which he could fill up as he pleased in order to arrest and to fine, might make life intolerable. A good many young Catholics went abroad for education, and presently found it expedient to stay there. The Nonconformists, for their part, had no intention of submitting meekly. There were riots and tumults in the City. In 1681 the Middlesex magistrates endeavoured to put in execution the Act of Charles II.:— “Which enacts, that all those who preached in conventicles or meetings, contrary to the statutes of the realm, shall not come within five miles of a corporation; that no person shall teach in any school under the penalty of £40, unless he attend the established church. And that of the 20th year of the same reign, which ordains, that if any person above sixteen years of age attended a religious assembly in a house where more than five others, exclusive of the household, were present, except the rites were according to the established church, any person preaching there should forfeit a certain sum.”