“A penalty of 40s. is imposed on the Lords, Owners, and Fermers of all parks and grounds enclosed, as is above rehearsed, who shall willingly suffer any of the said mares to be covered or kept with any Stoned Horse under the stature of 14 handfuls.” This Act applied only to enclosed areas, and therefore would not affect the wild ponies in any appreciable degree: but six years later another Act was passed (32 Henry VIII., c. 13) which provided that— “No person shall put in any forest, chase, moor, heath, common, or waste (where mares and fillies are used to be kept) any stoned horse above the age of two years, not being fifteen hands high within the Shires and territories of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, Buckingham, Huntingdon, Essex, Kent, South Hampshire, North Wiltshire, Oxford, Berkshire, Worcester, Gloucester, Somerset, South Wales, Bedford, Warwick, Northampton, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Lancashire, Salop, Leicester, Hereford and Lincoln. And furthermore, be it enacted, that if in any of the said drifts there shall be found any mare, filly, foal, or gelding that then shall be thought not to be able nor like to grow to be able to bear foals of reasonable stature or not able nor like to grow to be able to do profitable labours by the discretions of the drivers aforesaid or of the more number of them, then the same driver or drivers shall cause the same unprofitable beasts ... every of them to be killed, and the bodies of them to be buried in the ground, as no annoyance thereby shall come or grow to the people, those near inhabiting or thither resorting.” This enactment was of a more far-reaching character than its forerunner. The “shires and territories” enumerated were those in which greatest attention was paid to the breeding of Great Horses; “profitable labours,” in those times, could only mean military service, agricultural work, and perhaps pack transport, for any of which purposes the woodland ponies were useless. How far the law proved effectual is another matter: laws more nearly affecting the welfare of the subject were less honoured in the observance than the breach in the remoter parts of the kingdom in those times. In 1566, when Elizabeth was on the throne, Thomas Blundeville, of Newton Flotman, wrote a book on _Horses and Riding_; and prefaced it by an “Epistle dedicatorie” to Robert Lord Dudley, Master of the Horse, which begins: “It would be the means that the Queen may not only cause such statutes touching the breeding of Horses upon Commons to be put in execution: but also that all such parks within the Realme as be in Her Highnesse hands and meet for that purpose might not wholly be employed to the keeping of Deer (which is altogether without profit), but partly to the necessary breeding of Horses for service [_i.e._, military service] whereof this Realme of all others at this instant hath greatest need.”