Six weeks later, on the 7th August, 1641, Parliament turned its attention toward the matter of ship money. On that date it passed an “Act for the declaring unlawful and void the late proceedings touching Ship-Money, and for the vacating of all records and process concerning the same.”[374] The act cites the Hampden Case and others of a similar nature and outlines the plea of the royal prerogative as given in the extra-judicial opinion of the judges. It condemns “all which writs and proceedings” as being “utterly against the law of the land.” In greater detail it enacts “that the said charge imposed upon the subject for the providing and furnishing of ships commonly called ship money, and the said extra-judicial opinion of the said justices ... and the said judgment against John Hampden, were and are contrary to and against the laws and statutes of this realm, the right of property, the liberty of the subjects, former resolutions in Parliament and the Petition of Right.” The act also provided that all particulars desired in the Petition of Right should be “strictly holden and observed as in the same Petition they are prayed and expressed.” The ship writs and the Hampden judgment are specifically annulled.[375] Thus came to an end the long chain of statutes which Parliament from its inception had been forging to fetter the arms of the king straining toward the prize of arbitrary taxation. The virtue of the Long Parliament is thus commented upon by Hallam: “In the first place,” he says, “it will appear ... that they made scarce any material change in our constitution, such as it had been established and recognized under the house of Plantagenet.... Thus in by far the greater part of the enactments of 1641, the monarchy lost nothing that it anciently possessed; and the balance of our constitution might seem rather to have been restored to its former equipoise, than to have undergone any change.... It is to be observed in the second place, that by these salutary restrictions, and some new retrenchments of pernicious or abused prerogative the Long Parliament formed our constitution such nearly as it now exists.”[376] The legislation of 1641 in effect restored to Parliament what power it nominally held two centuries before. [The Grand Remonstrance, 1st December, 1641]