(1503) This year there is another important statute against private and illegal by-laws, reciting that "companies corporate by color of rule and governance to them granted and confirmed by charters and letters patent of divers Kings made among themselves many unlawful and unreasonable ordinances as well in price of wares as other things for their own singular profit and to the common hurt and damage of the people," and such by-laws are forbidden unless specially authorized by some official such as the chief governor of the city. The law so far dates from the 15th of Henry VI; but the present act goes on to provide that "no masters, fellowships of crafts or rulers of guilds or fraternities make any acts or ordinances against the common profit of the people but with the examination and approval of the Chancellor and Chief Justice of England, and that there shall never be any by-law to restrain any person from suits in the common-law courts." A Federal statute similar to this was proposed by a late president to apply to all corporations, or at least to all corporations conducting interstate commerce; the approval of their by-laws or other contracts to be by the Federal commissioner of corporations; while the last section forbidding trades-unions to deny to their members the right of suing them or other persons in the ordinary courts is part of our constitutional law to-day and much objected to by the unions themselves, as it was in the time of Henry VII The tendency to create special courts (commerce, patents, etc.) seems to be beginning anew, despite the malign history of the ancient courts of the Constable and Marshal, Star Chamber, Requests, Royal Commissions, etc. (1512) Under Henry VIII the penalty for paying higher wages than the law allowed was removed from the employer and applied only to the employee taking the wage; and in 1514 comes perhaps the most elaborate of all the earlier acts fixing the wages and hours of labor. Their meal times and sleep times are carefully regulated, they are forbidden to take full wages for half-day's work and forbidden to leave a job until it is finished, and the rates of pay of bailiffs, servants, free masons, master carpenters, rough masons, bricklayers, tilers, plumbers, glaziers, carvers, joiners, shipwrights, ship carpenters, calkers, clinchers, agricultural laborers, both men and women, mowers, reapers, carters, shepherds, herdsmen, and possibly others, are again prescribed; this list of trades in the England of the early sixteenth century is interesting. Bailiffs who assault their overseers may be imprisoned for a year, and an exception is made from the act of all miners of lead, iron, silver, tin, or coal, "called See Cole, otherwise called Smythes Coole," or for making of glass, but that part of the act fixing wages was repealed the very next year as to the city of London.