Banishment was first formally recognised by English law in the reign of Elizabeth (39 Eliz. cap. 4).[41] It was enacted, that "dangerous rogues, and such as will not be reformed of their roguish course of life, may lawfully by the justices in their quarter sessions be banished out of the realm, and all the dominions thereof, and to such parts beyond the seas as shall for that purpose be assigned by the privy council." Return was made felony without benefit of clergy. A brand was affixed upon the shoulder, of the breadth of an English shilling, with a great Roman R upon the iron: "for a perpetual mark upon such rogue, during his or her life."[42] Until commerce had extended the knowledge of distant parts, and the constant publication of correspondence with colonies made their affairs familiar, imagination depicted them as desolate and frightful. The London apprentice and the plough boy, thought of exile as a severe calamity. The love of home was rendered more intense, by the universal wilderness imagined beyond it: thus, loss of country was deemed a penalty fully equal to ordinary offences, and more severe than any domestic form of punishment short of the scaffold. "_Duri est non desiderare patriam. Cari sunt parentes; cari liberi, propinqui, familiares; sed omnes omnium caritates patria una complexa est: pro qua quis bonus dubitet mortem oppetere?_" It is to James I. that the British nation and the colonists owe the policy, whether salutary or baneful, of sending convicts to the plantations: "the good sense of those days justly considered that their labor would be more beneficial to an infant settlement, than their vices could be pernicious."[43] James directed the sheriff to deliver, and the governor and court of Virginia to receive one hundred prisoners, included in the definition of rogues and dangerous persons, and compelled the proprietors of that colony to become agents in their deportation. The Lord Chief Justice Kelyng stated, that about the time of the restoration it became customary for a prisoner within benefit of clergy to procure from the king "a conditional pardon," and to send him beyond the seas to serve five years in some of the king's plantations; there _to have land assigned him, according to the usage_ of those plantations for servants after their time expired.[44] A needless delay of departure, or a return within the period appointed, made the instrument of pardon void. In the reign of Charles II. an act passed (Car. ii. 13, 14. cap. 2. s. 1), "for preventing dangers that may arise from certain persons called quakers," which authorised their transportation beyond the seas. Thus, the practice was not new: after the battle of Worcester, the parliament transported the royalists, and in the mutations of power all parties in their turn transported each other.