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which found favour with our ancestors is afforded in an Act
passed in the year 1677, which provided that no corpse should
be buried in any "shirt, shift, sheet, or shroud, or anything
whatsoever made or mingled with flax, hemp, silk, hair, gold,
or silver, or in any stuff or thing other than what is made of
sheep's wool only, or be put in any coffin lined or faced with
any sort of cloth, or stuff, or anything whatsoever that is
made of any material but sheep's wool only," under a penalty
of five pounds. Persons dying from the plague, however,
were exempted from the operations of the Act. The intention
of the Act, no doubt, was to revive the drooping woollen
industry, but it is not clear how the community as a whole
would benefit by being compelled, in the interest of a portion
of the inhabitants, to use woollen goods, although they might
for economical or other reasons prefer linen or some other
material. The principles of free trade, however, were then
not comprehended, and the whole tendency of legislation was
to hedge in manufactures and commerce with artificial restrictions,
under a mistaken idea that they were thereby being
fostered instead of impeded. Even the rate of interest was
prescribed by law, the Act 12, Car. 2, cap. 13 (1660), limiting
the rate to six per cent., as some persons were charging eight
per cent. This last mentioned Act affords a striking proof of
the rapidly increasing wealth of the country, for eighty years
previously, ten per cent. was the statutory rate of interest.
In the year 1685, the date of the formation of the Parish of
St. James, and of the accession of James II., the first statute,
after that providing for his Majesty, was to attaint the Duke
of Monmouth, a natural son of the late monarch, of high
treason. The Duke, it may be remembered, was beheaded on
Tower Hill the same year, amid expressions of grief by the
citizens. Another statute contained three former Acts of
Parliament for the prevention of theft and rapine on the
northern borders of England, thus showing that the internal