was no alternative therefore but to hoard wealth, and this explains the lavish expenditure which so astonished the foreign visitor.

Nor was wealth confined to the upper classes. In the earlier part of the time of the Tudors there must have been great comfort of a somewhat rough sort amongst all classes. Prices were very low. Even so late as 1508, half-a-crown appears to have been the price of a calf, little more than a shilling purchased a carcase of mutton, and a round of beef could be bought for ninepence. The Duke of Northumberland's house-book gives the price of sheep at twentypence apiece, lean beeves eight shillings apiece; and twopence was the allowed price for a lean capon, threepence or fourpence for a pig. All sorts of food were cheap in proportion. It must not be supposed that this cheapness was accompanied by a proportionate lowness of wages. In a Statute of the year 1494,2 to settle the amount of labourers' work and wages, with the object no doubt of keeping wages down-for this was the tendency of all legislation at that time—the skilled artificer is allowed fivepence-farthing a day, and the unskilled labourer from threepence to threepence-halfpenny. Two years afterwards this Act was repealed, and wages probably rose a little; sixpence being the regular soldier's pay, which may be supposed to be about the same as that of the artificer. The purchasing power of money was about twelve times what it is now, which would make the ordinary wages thirty-six shillings a week. Such was the comfortable condition of the English at the beginning of the period occupied by the reigns of the Tudors, and before the end of Elizabeth's reign the same general prosperity, or something comparable to it, appears to have again existed. The intervening time was a period of great difficulty and wretchedness. The old state of society was breaking up and seeking new forms. All the conditions of life were undergoing a change, which might almost be called a revolution; and as always Accompanying happens under such circumstances, this change was accompanied with great suffering. In Henry VII.'s reign, and throughout those of his two successors, the crying evil of English society was vagabondage and pauperism. Repeated statutes3 were made to restrain this evil, each one more severe than the last, till the

poverty.

1 Duke of Buckingham's household-book.

2 11 Hen. VII. c. 22.

3 22 Hen. VIII. c. 12: "If any do beg without license, he shall be whipped, or else set in the stocks for three days and three nights, with bread and water only." 27 Hen. VIII. c. 15: "Every sturdy vagabond to be kept in continual labour. . A valiant beggar shall at the first time be whipped, and if he continue his roguish life, he

...

shall have the upper part of the gristle of his right ear cut off, and if he be found after that wandering in idleness, etc., he shall be adjudged and executed as a felon."

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Causes of

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severity culminated in Somerset's Statute,1 reducing able-bodied vagabonds to slavery. As a natural concomitant of vagabondage, came a great amount of crimes of violence and theft. No severity was sufficient to check them. In Henry VII.'s reign, the Venetian narrator observes that it is very easy to get a man apprehended consequent in England: "Such severe measures against criminals crime. ought to keep the English in check, but for all this there is no country in the world where there are so many thieves and robbers in it as in England;" and again, “People are taken up every day by dozens, like birds in a covey, and especially in London; yet for ali this they never cease to rob and murder in the streets : while Perlin, writing of the beginning of Mary's reign, remarks that the justice in England is very cruel, that a man who would in France be whipped would in England be condemned to death; "in truth, there are but two sorts of punishments, to wit, to be hanged or to be beheaded, and thus evildoers gain as much by doing little evil as great ;" and yet he speaks of them as a most turbulent and deceitful people. There were many causes at work which tended to produce this deplorable state of things. The spirit of feudalism had been giving place to the mercantile spirit of modern poverty and times. Edward IV. had himself engaged largely in mercantile speculations. Henry VII. had not thought it undignified to belong to the corporation of Taylors, henceforward called Merchant Taylors. In his reign, a commercial treaty, called the Great Intercourse, had been made between England and the Low Countries. The discoveries of Columbus, Vasco di Gama, Sebastian Cabot, and others, had increased the spirit of adventure, and opened new fields of traffic, although they were as yet but little used. The spirit of enterprise had, however, taken hold of the traders of London, of whom it is said that "they are so diligent in mercantile pursuits that they do not fear to make contracts on usury."" They had thus accumulated considerable wealth, and wealth was now, as feudal influence gave way to that of money, the road to gentility and importance. But that importance was not yet separable from Mercantile the possession of land. Men of wealth, therefore, tried landowners. to acquire land, and the destruction of the nobility during the Wars of the Roses, together with the very numerous forfeitures which attended them, had thrown the land of England largely into new hands, and often into those of the wealthy middle class. The 11 Ed. VI. c. 8. 2 It. Rel. p. 23.

crime.

tone of the whole age was likewise very mercenary;1 and the new possessors of land, whether mercantile or of the new Court nobility, no longer felt the same interest as their predecessors in the number and wellbeing of their tenants. A numerous following of feudal tenants was no longer an object, but the power of wealth was every day increasing. In the eyes of the new holders the land was to be treated like any other investment, so as to produce the best return. With the exception perhaps of tin, the greatest and Pasture farms. most lucrative trade of England was wool. It paid better to feed sheep than to plough the land. It was no doubt better political economy, and in the long run more advantageous to England, thus to employ the land. But at the time the injury inflicted on the poor was very great. Tenants and labourers were driven from their farms and cottages, and the land given up to pasture,2 so that a couple of men could manage a whole farm which had once supported its full supply of ploughmen, labourers, and the like. "For whereas," says Latimer, "have been a great many householders and inhabitants, there is now but a shepherd and his dog."3 This change affected two classes of men, the yeomen farmers and the labourers. Proprietors found no difficulty in taking pasture farms into their own hands, and added farm to farm. Statutes were made to restrain this practice, but were constantly broken, and the quantity of sheep held in single men's hands became so enormous, that they too had to be restricted by statute.* The yeoman farmer thus found himself ousted from his tenancy. The labourer suffered still more. The complete separation from the land which was and still is the marked characteristic of the English labourer, enabled his master to turn him from his employment without difficulty. As the greed for pasture-land increased, his case became still worse. Much of his subsistence was drawn from his rights over common land. His

Diminution of agricultural labour.

1 "Having no hope of their paternal inheritance, they all become so greedy of gain, that they feel no shame in asking, almost for the love of God, the smallest sum of money, and to this it may be attributed that there is no injury that can be committed against the lower orders which may not be atoned for by money."-It. Rel. p. 26. See also the description of the mercenary marriages contracted by the English.

2 "This town [Bittesby] is long since depopulated, not one house remaining, and converted into sheep pastures."

"Stormesworth hath been an ancient town, but now altogether decayed and converted into sheep pastures."-BURTON'S Leicestershire.

3 First Serm. before Ed. VI.

4 25 Hen. VIII. c. 13: "No man to have above two thousand sheep." The Italian Relation mentions as many as twenty thousand.

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richer neighbours began to enclose this land, and throw it into pasture.1 His means of subsistence was thus cut off in both directions. He was deprived of his employment, and he lost his private means of life. It was this enclosing of common lands which was the great grievance of the Eastern rebels, and which formed the topic of some of Latimer's most vigorous sermons : "But let the preacher preach till his tongue be worn to the stumps, nothing is amended. We have good statutes made for the Commonwealth, as touching commoners and encloses, many meetings and sessions, but in the end of the matter there cometh nothing forth; and Somerset's sympathy with the complaints of those who had lost their common rights, and the commission he issued to inquire into enclosures, have been already mentioned as the causes of his fall. In time the increasing manufactures and other forms of commerce absorbed these hands, and the improvement of agriculture restored the proper balance between arable and pasture. But while the process was going on, as in the case of all economic changes, the suffering was great. To these causes of pauperism must be added the number of discharged retainers whom the decrease of feudal military households threw upon the world, and after the destruction of the monasteries, the discharged Decrease of monks and numerous agricultural servants of the abbeys. dependants. The stringent laws directed against vagabonds were useless. There was for the time a real want of work. Sir Thomas More saw this, and writes, "They be cast into prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not whom no man will set at work, though they never so willingly proffer themselves thereto." That such a mass of unemployed workmen should take to crimes and violence was but natural, more especially as during much of the period any church afforded sanctuary for the evildoer for forty days, besides the great licensed sanctuaries.*

"3

To add to the misery of the people, there was an extremely rapid rise in prices. The chief cause of this was perhaps the Depreciation of natural rise in the value of commodities in comparison the coinage.

1 "This lordship hath been long enclosed, affording large sheep-walks."-BURTON'S Leicestershire.

2 First Serm. before Ed. VI.

8 Utopia.

4 "Loke me now, how few sanctuarie men there be, whom any favourable necessitic compelled to go thither, and then sec what a rabble of thieves, murderers, and malicious haynous traitors there be commonly therein."-MORE's Life of Edward V.

After the Reformation sanctuaries fell into disrepute, but continued to exist. In 1697, an Act was passed for the suppression of the most notorious, and they were finally abolished in the reign of George I., when the Sanctuary of St. Peter's, Westminster, was pulled down. This, and that of St. Martin le Grand, were the two principal in London.

with silver, caused by the introduction of precious metals from America. But besides that, it may be traced to the depreciation of the coinage which was going on during the latter years of Henry VIII. and through most of the reign of Edward. The country was flooded with testons or bad shillings, and private individuals took advantage of the opportunity. Thus Sharington, Master of the Mint at Bristol, coined no less than £12,000 of false money.

Increasing habits of luxury among the wealthy, and that covetousness which has been already mentioned, and which caused a universal raising of the rents, had also much to do with the misery of the people. The Reformation seems to have produced a directly injurious effect upon the morality of the time. Freed from the restraints of the discipline of the Catholic Church, without any very sure belief in the new doctrines, which indeed had been thrust somewhat unceremoniously on the mass of the nation, rich men were inclined to take advantage of the license of the new creeds without accepting their stricter and more spiritual morality. That there was a deterioration is plain :-"In times Lax morality of past men were full of pity and compassion, but now Protestantism. there is no pity. Now charity is waxen cold, none helpeth the scholar nor yet the poor. And in those days what did they when they helped the scholars ? marry, they maintained and gave them livings that were very Papists and professed the Pope's doctrine and now that the knowledge of God's Word is brought to light, now almost no man helpeth to maintain them."1 And again:

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"I full certify you extortioners, violent oppressors, engrossers of tenements and lands, through whose covetousness villages decay and fall down, the King's liege people for lack of sustenance are famished and decayed-they be those which speak against the honour of the King." It was this covetousness and overweening desire for and admiration of wealth which was the crying sin of the time. The honesty even of the Bench was sullied by it :-" "The saying is now, that money is heard everywhere; if he be rich he shall soon have an end of his matter." 2 'Now-a-days the judges be afraid to hear a poor man against the rich insomuch they will either pronounce against him, or so drive off the poor man's suit, that he shall not be able to go through with it." Consequently all proprietors sought to get as much as possible from their land, and the tenant farmers found their rents enormously enhanced. Latimer gives the story of his father's farm, which well shows this increase: "My father was a 1 Latimer's Sermon of the Plough. 2 Latimer's Second Sermon before the King. 3 Third Sermon before the King.