They should reside fifty miles from any dockyard

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 75.

By the late eighteenth century every European sea power had evolved its own basic designs for warships and the construction practices required to build them and was generally loath to deviate from what had been found through trial and error to yield a workable if often uninspiring result. Conservatism was built into the process. All the pressures of government policy and practice worked to standardize designs to minimize costs and risks—and to preserve the deeply vested interests of workers and suppliers, nowhere more so than in the Royal Navy’s long-established shipyards, with their long-established traditions. Royal Navy officials regularly railed against the stranglehold the artisans held on the craft and against the corruption that drove up costs and stifled improvements, but nothing changed. One ancient privilege allowed shipwrights to take home “chips,” supposedly small scraps of leftover wood good only for burning but in practice extending to substantial pieces of sawn timber that went out the door every day, a steady stream of legalized pilfering. Captain Thomas Troubridge, a lord of the Admiralty from 1801 to 1804, thought “all the master shipwrights should be hanged, every one of them, without exception.” Lord St. Vincent, first lord of the Admiralty in the same period, more mildly proposed that all dockyard artisans be given a pension—on the condition that “they should reside fifty miles from any dockyard.”