"We be determined," said the citizens of London in a petition to the king, "rather to adventure and to commit us to the peril of our lives and jeopardy of death than to live in such thraldom and bondage as we have lived some time heretofore, oppressed and injured by extortions and new impositions against the laws of God and man and the liberty and laws of this realm wherein every Englishman is inherited." Richard met the appeal by convoking Parliament in January 1484, and by sweeping measures of reform.

The practice of extorting money by benevolences was declared illegal, while grants of pardons and remissions of forfeitures reversed in some measure the policy of terror by which Edward at once held the country in awe and filled his treasury.
Numerous statutes broke the slumbers of Parliamentary legislation.

A series of mercantile enactments strove to protect the growing interests of English commerce.

The king's love of literature showed itself in a provision that no statutes should act as a hindrance "to any artificer or merchant stranger, of what nation or country he be, for bringing into this realm or selling by retail or otherwise of any manner of books, written or imprinted." His prohibition of the iniquitous seizure of goods before conviction of felony which had prevailed during Edward's reign, his liberation of the bondmen who still remained unenfranchised on the royal domain, and his religious foundations show Richard's keen anxiety to purchase a popularity in which the bloody opening of his reign might be forgotten.
[Sidenote: Bosworth Field] It was doubtless the same wish to render his throne popular which led Richard to revive the schemes of a war with France.

He had strongly remonstrated against his brother's withdrawal and alliance in 1475, and it must have been rather a suspicion of his warlike designs than any horror at the ruthlessness of his ambition which led Lewis the Eleventh on his death-bed to refuse to recognize his accession.