"They made laws that all children under fourteen have to be sent to school to be taught and fed - out of the Crown's pocket if nobody closer to home is paying for it - and can't be made to work anymore. They shut down the place I came from when it kept trying to dodge the rules - this was a year or two after I got out, so I didn't get that much out of it, but there were kids my age who did. And I went to school a few times before I got too old. They managed to charm the Duke of Orimere well enough to get a trade agreement that cut the prices of some foods almost in half - I can never remember the list, and it was years ago now, but it was pretty amazing at the time. The Duke of Orimere isn't known to be very charmable. And there was a local baron of a couple of villages and a pond who kept treating his villagers like crap after they kept fining him for it, and they got fed up after the third time around and revoked his title and exiled him."