war, offered a tempting object to the ambition of Ferdinand and Isabella. Alboacen was at war with his nephew Aboabdeli, who wanted to dethrone him; and Ferdinand aided Aboabdeli, in the view of ruining both; for no sooner was the latter in possession of the crown by the death of Alboacen, than Ferdinand invaded his ally with the whole force of Arragon and Castile. Granada was beseiged in 1491; and after a blockade of eight months, surrendered to the victor. Aboabdeli, by a mean capitulation, saved his life, and purchased a retreat for his countrymen to a mountainous part of the kingdom, where they were suffered to enjoy unmolested their laws and religion. Thus ended the dominion of the Moors in Spain, which had subsisted for 800 years.

5. Ferdinand, from that period, took the title of King of Spain. In 1492, he expelled all the Jews from his dominions, on the absurd ground that they kept in their hands the commerce of the kingdom; and Spain thus lost above 150,000 of the most industrious of her inhabitants. The exiles spread themselves over the other kingdoms of Europe, and were often the victims of a persecution equally inhuman. It would appear that Spain has felt, even to the present times, the effects of this folly, in the slow progress of the arts, and that deplorable inactivity which is the characteristic of her people. Even the discovery of the new world, which happened at this very period, and which stimulated the spirit of enterprise and industry in all the neighbouring kingdoms, produced but a feeble impression on that nation, which might in a great degree have monopolized its benefits. Of that great discovery we shall afterwards treat in a separate section.

SECTION XXX.

HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTEENTH TO THE BEGINNING OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.-CIVIL WARS OF YORK AND LANCASTER.

1. WE have seen France recovered from the English in the early part of the reign of Henry VI., by the talents and prowess of Charles VII. During the minority of Henry, who was a prince of no capacity, England was embroiled by the factious contention for power between his uncles, the Duke of Gloucester and Cardinal Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. The latter, to promote his own views of ambition, married Henry to Margaret of Anjou (1444), daughter of Regné the titular king of Naples, a woman of great mental endowments and singular heroism of character, but whose severity in the persecution of her enemies, alienated a great part of the nobles from their allegiance, and increased the partisans of a rival claimant of the crown.

2. This was Richard duke of York, descended by his mother from Lionel duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III., and elder brother to John of Gaunt duke of Lancaster, the progenitor of Henry VI. The white rose distinguished the faction of York, as the red that of Lancaster. The party of York gained much strength from the incapacity of Henry, who was subject to fits of lunacy; and Richard was appointed lieutenant and protector of the kingdom, 1454. The authority of Henry was now annihilated; but Margaret roused her husband, in an interval of sanity, to assert his right; and the nation was divided in arms between the rival parties. In the battle of St. Alban's* the Lancastrians were beaten, and the king was taken prisoner by the duke of York, May 22, 1454. Yet the parliament, while it confirmed the authority of the protector (until discharged of it by the lords in parliament), maintained its allegiance to the king, [and provided that the duke's office should cease on the prince of Wales becoming of age].

3. The spirit of the queen reanimated the royal party; and the Lancastrians gained such advantage, that the duke of York fled to Ireland, while his cause was secretly maintained in England by Guy, earl of Warwick. In the battle of Northampton (1460) the party of York again prevailed, and Henry once more was brought prisoner to London, while his dauntless queen still nobly exerted herself to retrieve his fortunes. York now claimed the crown in open parliament, but prevailed only to have his right of succession ascertained on Henry's death, to the exclusion of the royal issue.

4. In the next battle, fought near Wakefield, December 30, 1460, the duke of York was slain, and his party defeated; but his son Edward, supported by Warwick, avenged this disaster by a signal victory near Towton, in Yorkshire, in which [there were engaged 60,000 Lancastrians and 40,000 Yorkists, March 29, 1461. In this battle more than one half the Lancastrians perished, as Edward had forbidden his troops to give quarter.] York was proclaimed king by the title of Edward IV., while Margaret, with her dethroned husband and infant son, fled to Flanders.

5. Edward, who owed his crown to Warwick, was ungrateful to his benefactor; and the imprudence and injustice of his conduct forced that nobleman at length to take part with the faction of Lancaster. The consequence was, that, after some struggles, Edward was deposed in 1470, and Henry VI. once more restored to the throne by the hands of Warwick, now known by the epithet of The king-maker. But this change was of no duration: the party of York ultimately prevailed; the Lancastrians were defeated in the battle of Barnet, and the brave Warwick slain in the engagement, April 14, 1471.

The Paston Letters, written immediately after this affair, state that only six score were killed, whilst 5000 is the number given by the chroniclers.

6. The intrepid Margaret, whose spirit was superior to every change of fortune, prepared to strike a last blow for the crown of England in the battle of Tewkesbury. The event was fatal to her hopes: victory declared for Edward, May 4, 1471. Margaret was sent prisoner to the tower of London; and the prince her son, a youth of high spirit, when brought into the presence of his conqueror, having nobly dared to justify his enterprise to the face of his rival, was barbarously murdered by the dukes of Gloucester and Clarence. Edward returned victorious to London, and on the evening of that day, the 22d of May, Henry VI. was privately put to death in the Tower. The heroic Margaret, ransomed by Louis XI. of France, died in 1482. [This finished the wars of the two roses, which, it is said, cost the lives of one million men and eighty princes of the blood. They were simply wars of dynasty: the people only changed masters; but the power of the feudal nobility having been broken by extermination and extensive confiscations during these wars, property in land came to be much more subdivided, which led to the change in the state of society that arose in the subsequent reigns.]

7. Edward IV., thus secured on the throne by the death of all his competitors, abandoned himself without reserve to the indulgence of a vicious and tyrannical nature. He put to death, on the most frivilous pretence, his brother Clarence; and, preparing to gratify his subjects by a war with France, he died suddenly in the 41st year of his age, and 21st of his reign; poisoned, as was suspected, by his brother, Richard duke of Gloucester, April 9, 1483.

8. Edward left two sons, the elder, Edward V., a boy of thirteen years of age. Richard duke of Gloucester, named Protector in the minority of his nephew, hired, by means of Buckingham, a mob of the dregs of the populace to declare their wish for his assumption of the crown. He yielded, with affected reluctance, to this voice of the nation, and was proclaimed king by the title of Richard III., June 26, 1483. Edward V. (after a reign of two months), together with his brother the duke of York, were, by command of the usurper, smothered while asleep, and privately buried in the Tower.

9. These atrocious crimes found an avenger in Henry earl of Richmond, the surviving heir of the house of Lancaster, who, aided by Charles VIII. of France, landed in England, and revived the spirits of a party almost extinguished in the kingdom. He gave battle to Richard in the field of Bosworth, and entirely defeated the army of the usurper, who was slain while fighting with the most desperate courage, August 22, 1485. The crown

he wore in the engagement was immediately placed on the head of the conqueror. This auspicious day put an end to the civil wars of York and Lancaster. Henry VII.* united the rights of

Grandson of Owen Tudor, by the widow of Henry V., and son of Edmund, earl of Richmond, by Margaret, daughter of the duke of Somerset, representative of the house of Lancaster through an illegitimate son of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and third son of Edward III.

both families by his marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV.

10. The reign of Henry VII. was of twenty-four years' duration; and under his wise and politic government, the kingdom recovered all the wounds it had sustained in those unhappy contests. Industry, good order, and perfect subordination, were the fruit of the excellent laws passed in this reign; though the temper of the sovereign was despotic, and his avarice, in the latter part of his reign, prompted to the most oppressive exactions.

11. The government of Henry was disturbed by two very singular enterprises; the attempt of Lambert Simnel, the son of a baker, to counterfeit the person of the earl of Warwick, son of the duke of Clarence; and the similar attempt of Perkin Warbeck, son of a Flemish Jew, to counterfeit the duke of York, who had been smothered in the Tower by Richard III. Both imposters found considerable support, but were finally defeated. Simnel, after being crowned at Dublin king of England and Ireland, ended his days in a menial office of Henry's household. Perkin for five years supported his cause by force of arms, and was aided by a great proportion of the English nobility. Overpowered at length, he surrendered to Henry, who condemned him to perpetual imprisonment; but his ambitious spirit meditating a new insurrection, he was put to death as a traitor. Henry VII. died April 21, 1509, in the fifty-third year of his age, and twenty-fourth of his reign.

THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND FROM THE DEATH OF KING JOHN TO THE

DEATH OF HENRY VII., 1216 TO 1509.

To counterbalance the power of the barons, the cities and principal towns of England that were the property of the crown had generally before the death of John obtained charters of privilege which enfranchised the inhabitants, abolished servitude within them, and formed them into corporations or bodies politic, to be governed by magistrates of their own nomination, with liberty to build walls and to form a municipal guard for their protection. In that way a numerous body of the English people became free: industry revived: commerce became an object of attention, and began to flourish : population increased; and wealth was acquired by those who had been before the poor and oppressed. These corporations became so many little republics, and centres of freedom. By one of their privileges, whoever of servile condition resided within them for a year and a day without being claimed, was declared free, and admitted a member of the community. The demand for labour in the free towns, induced the bondmen of the country to flock to them for employment and concealment until the year had expired. Those who had acquired their freedom, assisted others in obtaining it. The transition from villains regardant to freemen was also favoured by the necessities of the barons, which led them to grant charters of privileges to the towns within their domains, and a fixed tenure to their villains for sums of money, particularly to defray the expenses of those who engaged in the crusades. It was probably between 1189 and 1274, that the numerous fee-farm (or free) estates that formerly studded the ancient cultivated districts of England.

came to be detached from their respective manors by those who went to the Holy Land. In law, the villains regardant, or occupiers of land at the will of the lord, were not entitled to possess private property; but, like the former negro slaves in the West Indies, having concealed what they had saved, they purchased with it perpetual leases of the lands they occupied for raising food for the maintenance of themselves and families-continuing, however, bound to perform certain stipulated work for their lords, as ploughing, sowing, and harvesting their fields; but, as at other times they were at liberty to exercise their industry for their own benefit, they soon acquired wealth, and infused a new energy into society. The increasing importance of the free tenantry early excited the jealousy of the barons, and various attempts were made by them to prevent the increase of their number; but it was not until the thirteenth year of the reign of Edward I., 1285, that the further alienation of land, both with respect to the lord and his issue, was prohibited by the celebrated statute de donis conditionalibus. The impolicy of that statute, however, soon being manifest, its evasion was favoured by the king's courts, when a new class of free tenants was created. The demand for labour from the occupiers of free farms having led to the custom of granting permission to villains of manors to work for wages, so long as they performed the customary services to their lords, to prevent disputes, and that the children of the villains might know the extent of the services required of them, these services came to be entered in the books of the manors, and copies thereof given to the villains. This custom being recognised by the courts of law, it was determined that the villain, so long as he performed his customary services, had a right to hold the land in his occupation, "in spite of any determination of the lords' will." By that application of the common law, the villains regardant throughout England became copyholders, and their heirs entitled to hold their lands on the tenure specified in the copy of the courtroll. That decision having rendered the copyholders independent of the manorial lords, the necessities of Edward I. obliged him to grant, in 1289, the statute quia emptores, which prohibited the future erection of copyholds, and limited the right to those then in possession, if held of a mesne lord, and if of a superior lord to those who were in possession before the accession of Edward I., or November 20, 1272.

The great body of the occupiers of land throughout England having now acquired a certainty of tenure, together with the enfranchisement of themselves and their descendants, the condition of the agricultural population rapidly improved. It is probable that the free population was still further greatly increased during the wars of the three first Edwards by the enfranchisement of the villians in gross who joined their standards: every person becoming a freeman who received the king's pay. The insurrection of the bonds under Wat the Tiler, in the reign of Richard II., is a proof, however, that their number was then considerable, and that their condition was miserable, their demand being that they should no longer be held in bondage. The emancipation of the rural population of England was as constantly resisted by the barons, the great landholders, as that of the Negroes by the West India proprietors; and the difficulty they afterwards had to obtain cheap labour, they sought to obviate by the Statutes of Labourers, which were first enacted in 1349-50, to compel the free labourers to work at less than the natural rate of wages. These statutes, so unjust and oppressive in their operation, often led to civil disturbance. They were only repealed in 1813, when the allowance system in aid of wages since 1796, had more effectually reduced the agricultural population to a condition analogous to slavery than all previous interference with them.

At the end of the fourteenth century, French was still the official language in England of all political bodies and high personages whose existence was connected with the Norman conquest. It was spoken by the king, the bishops, the judges, and by the earls and barons; and it was the language which their children learned as soon as they could speak. The first bill of the