Unable to exercise their vocation in London, the actors travelled into the country, and gave dramatic performances in barns and at fairs, in places where the rigour of the law was diminished, or the edicts rendered of no avail, by the magistrates' want of sympathy with the pleasure-abolishing mania, and the readiness of the majority of the inhabitants to assist at violations of the Acts. In one of his wanderings about the country, Cox, the comedian, shod a horse with so much dexterity, in the drama that was being represented, that the village blacksmith offered him employment in his forge at a rate of remuneration exceeding by a shilling a week the ordinary wages of the craft. The story is a good illustration of the realistic tendencies of the theatre two hundred years ago, especially as the practice which then prevailed of apprenticeship to the stage renders it improbable that Cox had ever learned the art of shoeing a horse with a view to practising it as a craftsman. The provincial perambulations of actors did not, however, owe their beginning to the edicts of the Long Parliament, there being evidence that companies of strolling players existed contemporaneously with the theatres in which Burbage played Richard III. and Shakespeare the Ghost in _Hamlet_. In a prologue which was written for some London apprentices when they played _The Hog hath lost his Pearl_ in 1614, their want of skill in acting and elocution is honestly admitted in the following lines-- "We are not half so skilled as strolling players, Who could not please here as at country fairs." In the household book of the Clifford family, quoted by Dr. Whitaker in his 'History of Craven,' there is an entry in 1633 of the payment of one pound to "certain itinerant players," who seem to have given a private representation, for which they were thus munificently remunerated; and two years later, an entry occurs of the payment of the same amount to "a certain company of roguish players who represented _A New Way to pay Old Debts_," the adjective being used, probably to distinguish this company, as being unlicensed or unrecognized, from the strolling players who had permission to call themselves by the name of some nobleman, and to wear his livery. The Earl of Leicester maintained such a company, and several other nobles of that period did the same, the actors being known as my Lord Leicester's company, or as the case might be, and being allowed to perform elsewhere when their services were not required by their patron.