FIVE MILE ACT: An Act of Parliament passed in 1665, and completing the system of measures intended to repress the non-conformists known as the Clarendon Code. By its provisions no clergyman who had been expelled from his living by the Act of Uniformity of 1662 was to come within five miles of a city or corporate town, or of any parish where he had formally preached, unless he declared that he would not "at any time attempt any alteration of government either in Church or State," under a penalty of forty pounds; and no one who had not taken the oath of passive obedience and conformed was to teach in any school or take pupils in his house. As the Puritan congregations were mainly in the towns, this act cut them off from the ministrations of their chosen leaders and in most cases from even private education, and hastened the decline of Puritanism throughout England.