of Labourers, and the JPs were now empowered to treat as felons at
least those who called such assemblies, but only to imprison those who
attended the meetings until they made ‘fine and ransom, at the will of
the king’.^274 In 1824 when combinations of workmen were at last
exempted from proscription as conspiracies, thirty-three English, Irish,
and Scottish acts had to be repealed, of which the second was this
statute of 1425, the first the ordinance of 1305 ‘entitled Who be con-
spirators and who be champertors’ in so far as it related ‘to combina-
tions or conspiracies of masters, manufacturers or other persons, to
lower or fix the rate of wages’ (which, of course, it had not done at
all).^275
The statutory enforcement of what could still be called in Elizabeth’s
reign ‘God’s peace and the Queen’s’ was extended in the sixteenth
century to the suppression of other sorts of covins and conjurations of
the people which in the middle ages had been the concern of the Church.
In France the first witchcraft ordinance of 1490 ordered civil magis-
trates to be diligent in hunting out and handing over to their bishops
‘enchanters, diviners, invokers of evil spirits, magicians and all others
using wicked arts and knowledge forbidden by the church’.^276 By com-
parison the first English witchcraft law (cap. 8 of a statute of 1542)
made felons at common law of persons who ‘devised and practised
invocations and conjurations of spirits, pretending by such means to
understand and get knowledge for their own lucre in what place
treasure of gold and silver should or might be found or had in the earth
or other secret places, and also have used and occupied witchcrafts,
enchantments and sorceries to the destruction of their neighbours’
persons or goods’ or ‘to provoke any person to unlawful love’. Such
‘fantastical practises’ were to be prosecuted in the king’s courts, because
they were committed to the ‘hurt and damage of the king’s subjects’ and
‘disquietness of the realm’—though as felonies rather than trespasses
perhaps because they were also ‘to the great dishonour of God’ and ‘the
loss of the souls of such offenders’. The chapters preceding and
succeeding this one give half of a monetary penalty to the party who
prosecuted (‘by bill, plaint or information’) anyone conveying brass,
latten, or bell metal over the sea, and prohibit ‘unlawful games’ detract-
ing from ‘the maintenance of artillery’. In England the prosecution of
witchcraft found a place in the law of economic misdemeanours and of
250 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^274) Harding, ‘The Revolt against the Justices’, 191–3; id., ‘The Origins of the Crime of
Conspiracy’, 98, 103–8; The Eyre of London, ed. H. M. Cam, Selden Soc. 85 (London, 1968),
pp. xxv, cxi–cxiii, 16, 27, 40–2, 44–53; RPi. 202a (no. 66), 216b, 286a, 370b; ii. 265b, 350b,
374–5; iii. 142a, 331a; iv. 75a, 292a.
(^275) 5 Geo. 4, c. 95.
(^276) Ordonnances des Roys de France, xx. 252–3.