We need not discuss the very debatable question whether this celebrated law was or was not advantageous to the labouring folk of the time, or whether and to what extent its provisions were actually put in force.[80] But codifying and enacting as it did the fundamental principles of the mediæval social order, we can scarcely be surprised that its adoption by Parliament confirmed the working man in the once universal belief in the essential justice and good policy securing by appropriate legislation “the getting of a competent livelihood” by all those concerned in industry.[81] Exactly the same view prevailed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. We again find the newly established associations of the operatives appealing to the King, to the House of Commons, or to Quarter Sessions against the beating down of their wages by their employers. For the first half of the century the governing classes continued to act on the assumption that the industrious mechanic had a right to the customary earnings of his trade. Thus in 1726 the weavers of Wilts and Somerset combine to petition the King against the harshness and fraud of their employers the clothiers, with the result that a Committee of the Privy Council investigates their grievances, and draws up “Articles of Agreement” for the settlement of the matters in dispute,[82] admonishing the weavers “for the future” not to attempt to help themselves by unlawful combinations, but always “to lay their grievances in a regular way before His Majesty, who would be always ready to grant them relief suitable to the justice of their case.”[83] More often the operatives appealed to the House of Commons. In 1719 the “broad and narrow weavers” of Stroud and places round, petitioned Parliament to put down the tyrannical capitalist clothiers by enforcing the “Act touching Weavers” of 1555.[84] In 1728 the Gloucestershire operatives appealed to the local justices of the peace, and induced them, in spite of protests from the master clothiers, and apparently for the first time, to fix a liberal scale of wages for the weavers of the country.[85] Twenty years later the operatives obtained from Parliament a special prohibition of truck.[86] Finally, in 1756 they persuaded the House of Commons to pass an Act[87] providing for the fixing of piecework prices by the justices, in order that the practice of cutting down rates and underselling might be stopped. “A Table or Scheme for Rates of Wages” was accordingly settled at Quarter Sessions, November 6, 1756, with which the operatives were fairly contented.[88]