1. Efforts made by the Government to secure the employment of the clothmakers during the crisis in the cloth trade of 1527-8. 2. Regulations for the supply of the markets with corn, 1527-8. 3. Similar action in regard to corn in 1548 and 1563. 4. Letters of the Privy Council to particular local officials in connection with the relief of the poor. 5. Legislation concerning the relief of the poor during the reign of Henry VIII. 6. The two earlier statutes of Edward VI. 7. Legislation between 1551 and 1569. 8. Summary. [Sidenote: 1. Efforts made by the Government to secure the employment of the clothworkers during the crisis in the cloth trade of 1527-8.] The Privy Council interfered comparatively little on behalf of the poor in this earliest period of the development of the English system of poor relief. However, in 1528 and on several other occasions the Government issued orders similar to those afterwards issued by the authority of the Privy Council. In 1528, however, these orders are said to come from Wolsey or the king, and it only incidentally appears that the Council had also a part in the matter. Possibly the policy, thus initiated, was the creation of Wolsey or of the Duke of Norfolk, but it was precisely the same kind of policy as that afterwards carried out under the authority of the Privy Council during the reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles. The latter part of the year 1527 and the spring of 1528 was a time of great discontent and disorder. At the beginning of the year 1528 England had allied herself with France against the Emperor, and thus the ordinary trade in cloth to the Flemish markets was interrupted, and the Staple was moved to Calais. The English cloth-making industry was already carried on for foreign markets on a fairly large scale. In certain districts the greater number of inhabitants were employed by clothiers, who sold the manufactured cloths to the merchants chiefly for Flemish markets. The declaration of war therefore prevented the usual sale of cloths; consequently when the manufacturers in accordance with the trade regulations then in force brought the cloths to Blackwell Hall, the merchants did not buy as usual and the clothiers ceased to find work for their men. The workers had few other resources and disturbances followed. The Duke of Norfolk was sent into Suffolk to restore order, and persuaded the clothiers to keep their men in employment. He called representative employers before him from every town and told them that the reports concerning the detention of English merchants in Flanders were untrue. "If I had not quenched that bruit," he writes to Wolsey, "I should have had two or three hundred women sueing to me to make the clothiers set their husbands and children to work[97]." The same course was followed in other districts; Lord Sandys writes to Wolsey that he has received letters from both Wolsey and the King, which order him to see that the workpeople are not dismissed.