Henry IV. on the death of Glendower effected the reconquest of Wales, and enacted severe laws against the inhabitants. The only result was, however, the organisation of robber bands whose definite object was to plunder and harass more completely their English neighbours. The evil became so intolerable that a special court had to be erected to remove it, and in 1478 was formed the Court of the President and Marches of Wales. By dint of powers of summary jurisdiction over disturbers of the public peace, a diminution was effected in the disorders, and the border lands were able to participate in the increase of trade which was such a marked feature of the fourteenth century. In spite of the temporary shock given to industry by the Reformation, the district had, by the latter part of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, quite recovered from the Welsh ravages, and its prosperity at this time was very remarkable. The fertility of the district brought wealth to the market towns, and provided a wide area of comfortable purchasers for the products of their industries. The expansion of the Welsh cloth trade gave rise to a twofold struggle. There was firstly a strenuous effort of the border towns to keep it to themselves, and secondly a private quarrel as to which of them should engross the market. Shrewsbury eventually secured the monopoly after an arduous contest, and the importance of the town was thus considerably enhanced. [Sidenote: _Its later prosperity._] The internal history of its Gilds will show how peculiarly the state of Shrewsbury illustrates the period of quiet prosperity before the introduction of machinery broke in upon the comfortable life of provincial England. The county towns then possessed an importance of which they have since been shorn by various causes[3]. Each was the capital of its district, filling the part of a distant metropolis to which neither the country gentleman nor the wealthy burgess could expect to go more than once or twice in a lifetime. Shrewsbury, in particular, was possessed of features which serve not only to make it especially typical of the social habits of the period, but which at the same time give it an interest exceptionally its own[4]. [Sidenote: _Its stationary condition in recent times._]