Thus Donald Coleman sums up a well-known problem and its usual conclusion. His phrasing is cautious: ‘state action’ must be taken to include the legislation of Parliament, but the possibility that the initiative behind such laws might have come from unofficial quarters is not expressly excluded. Nevertheless, the mention of public order and public revenue does suggest that the author had it in mind here to equate the state with its government. That conviction – that Elizabethan economic legislation originated in official circles and reflected thinking there – is well entrenched in the literature; it goes back at the least to Archdeacon Cunningham, who decided that ‘the more we examine the working of the Elizabethan scheme for the administration of economic affairs, the more do we see that the Council was the pivot of the whole system’, as initiators and executors. The only person who has dared to question the assumption was F. J. Fisher, though even he in the end resigned himself to the concept of government action, called forth in his view not by sovereign planning but by the haphazard pressures of the market and other circumstances.