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CAUSES OF POVERTY

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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 Western 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.*

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.

3 Utopia.

4 "Loke me now, how few sanctuarie men there be, whom any favourable necessitie compelled to go thither, and then see 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:

"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." "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.

2

3 Third Sermon before the King.

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yeoman and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pound by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep; and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the King a harness, with himself and his horse, while he came to the place that he should receive the King's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness when he went into Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the King's Majesty now. He married my sisters with five pound or twenty nobles apiece. . . . He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor. And all this he did off the said farm, where he that now hath it payeth sixteen pounds by year or more, and is not able to do anything for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor." Of course, under such circumstances, the prices of agricultural products rose so that "poor men which live of their labour cannot with the sweat of their face have a living, all kind of victuals is so dear; pigs, geese, chickens, capons, eggs, etc. These things, with others, are so unreasonably enhanced; and I think verily that if it thus continue we shall at length be constrained to pay for a pig a pound."

1

The same principles which were producing this change in agricultural products were acting on other branches of trade. There too the wholesale dealer was rising, and in both sermons and statutes the evil is pointed out, that poor men should be unable to purchase small quantities, a wholesale seller being able to keep his stock till he could sell advantageously. Efforts were even made to settle compulsory prices, but this was found quite impossible, as was indeed seen by Mason, one of the ablest statesmen of the time, who writes in 1550 to Cecil :-"Never shall you drive Nature to consent that a pennyworth shall be sold for a farthing."

No doubt this growing tendency to wholesale dealing was in accordance with the rules of political economy. The land was more profitably farmed as pasture than as ploughland. The wool which was thus grown gave employment sooner or later to the manufactures, which would absorb the surplus agricultural population, and capital which was before hoarded found a profitable investment in land. So too the wholesale dealer in other goods was enabled to purchase in cheap markets, and to keep his goods till he could sell them well, thus increasing the national wealth and equalizing prices. But the commencement of the system which is now accepted uni

1 Latimer's First Sermon before Edward VI.

versally, but which then seemed merely the triumph of selfishness, and which could not work fully because attended by many erroneous notions which laid restrictions on the freedom of trade, could not fail to be attended with much misery.

Change in the position of the Church.

Its greatness

under

Henry VII.

But however great the revolution in the constitution of society and in the economical condition of the kingdom may have been, the Great Revolution, which indeed gives its name to the period, is the change in the position of the Church. In the reign of Henry VII. a foreigner could say, and probably truly, "the clergy are they who have the supreme sway over the country, both in peace and war." The amount of their property was enormous. The same author states that of 96,230 knights' fees, 28,015 belonged to the Church. The number of monasteries was very great. At the time of the dissolution there were 645, and the revenues which are said to have passed into the hands of the Crown are computed at £1,600,000. In addition to this the Church had the advantage of being almost the sole repository of learning. It is true there were some few exceptions. But so completely was it the case that the mere power of reading was regarded as a proof of being in orders, that a criminal, charged with even the gravest offences, might, if he could read, claim to be removed for trial to the ecclesiastical courts. This privilege they had enjoyed since the twenty-fifth year of Edward III., and it did not receive any check till the year 1487, when it was enacted that no layman should be allowed benefit of clergy more than once. He was branded for the first offence, and on any future conviction was punished as a layman. Their superior education naturally threw the chief offices in the administration of the kingdom into the hands of Churchmen. The most trusted ministers of Henry VII. were Morton, eventually Archbishop of Canterbury, and Fox, Bishop of Winchester. Warham, who succeeded Morton, was Chancellor of England; but it was Wolsey, a protégé of Fox, who carried the power of the Church to the highest pitch. Under him it rose to authority and splendour scarcely second to that of the King. Nor was it only by their wealth and learning that Churchmen acquired influence. They had the majority of seats in the Upper House. The decayed state of the temporal peerage has been mentioned. The only class which had not suffered in the civil wars was the clergy. The full number of Bishops (nineteen, and two Archbishops) of course still remained, but besides these, mitred Abbots, to

1 Italian Relation of England, p. 34.

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the number of twenty-nine, and two or three Priors,' had seats in the Upper House. The number of spiritual Lords was thus nearly double that of the temporal. In addition to this the Church had a very large portion of the justice of the country in its hands. It could, as we have seen, draw from the King's courts into its own jurisdiction all criminals who could read. It had, moreover, a complete arrangement of courts holding jurisdiction over moral offences, and all the apparatus necessary for exacting dues upon many of the common events of life, such as the making and execution of wills and the burial of the dead.

Nor were these privileges used with a sparing hand. There are several statutes limiting the right of clergy, which show distinctly that it had been much abused. They complain that, contrary to promise, no regular agreement had been entered into as to the penalties to be inflicted upon criminals thus taken from the King's justice, and assert that consequently such criminals were constantly discharged by the ordinary, after merely nominal imprisonment, on the payment of bribes; while the first step of what can be spoken of as Reformation was the Act limiting exorbitant fees upon wills, and the abuse of mortuaries, or presents for the dead. It is in fact true that in the domestic government, by means of their majority in the House; in foreign affairs, because they alone were, generally speaking, fitted for diplomacy; even in war, because of their ability as organizers; in every branch of social life by their wealth, their judicial power, their rights with regard to the common and necessary events of life, and most generally by their claim to spiritual dominion by the confessional, penance and absolution, it is true to say that the Churchmen at the close of the fifteenth century were by far the most influential class in the kingdom.

The case was different when, on the passing of the first Act of Uniformity (1548), not only had the management of Contrast temporal affairs passed from their hands, but points of in 1548. doctrine and religious faith were discussed in Parliament and settled by the laity of England. This great change had taken place in the short period which had elapsed since the fall of Wolsey. He had himself been somewhat answerable for it. He was too great and farseeing a man to admire or tolerate great abuses or great ignorance, and, stickler though he was for the authority of the Church, he did not scruple to form plans of reformation to attempt to improve the general

1 The number of Abbots and Priors somewhat varied, but there were never less than twenty-five Abbots and two Priors.

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