Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/520

 supplied the backbone of English armies and the great majority of students at English Universities, were depressed into vagabonds or hired labourers. As indirect results, schools and universities declined; and foreign mercenaries took the place of English soldiers; for " shepherds " wrote a contemporary "be but ill archers."

These evils had not passed without notice from statesmen and writers in the previous reign. Wolsey, inspired perhaps by Sir Thomas More, had in 1517 made a vigorous effort to check enclosures; and More himself had sympathetically pourtrayed the grievances of the population in the pages of his Utopia. Later in the reign of Henry VIII remedial measures had been warmly urged by conservatives like Thomas Lupset and Thomas Starkey, and by more radical thinkers like Brynkelow and Robert Crowley. But the King and his ministers were absorbed in the task of averting foreign complications and effecting a religious revolution, while courtiers and ordinary members of Parliament were not concerned to check a movement from which they reaped substantial profit. After the accession of Edward VI the constant aggravation of the evil and the sympathy it was known to evoke in high quarters brought the question more prominently forward. The Protector himself denounced with more warmth than prudence the misdeeds of new lords "sprung from the dunghill." Latimer inveighed against them in eloquent sermons preached at Court; Scory told the young King that his subjects had become "more like the slavery and peasantry of France than the ancient and godly yeomanry of England." Cranmer, Lever, and other reforming divines held similar opinions, but the most earnest and active member of the party, which came to be known as the " Commonwealth's men," was John Hales, whose Discourse of the Common Weal is one of the most informing documents of the age.

The existence of this party alarmed the official class, but the Protector more or less openly adopted its social programme; and it was doubtless with his connivance that various remedial measures were introduced into Parliament in December, 1547. One bill " for bringing up poor men's children " was apparently based on a suggestion made by Brynkelow in the previous reign that a certain number of the poorest children in each town should be brought up at the expense of the community; another bill sought to give farmers and lessees security of tenure; and a third provided against the decay of tillage and husbandry. None of these bills got beyond a second reading, and the only measure which found favour with Parliament was an Act which provided that a weekly collection in churches should be made for the impotent poor, and that confirmed vagabonds might be sold into slavery.

The failure of Parliament to find adequate remedies was the signal for agrarian disturbances in Hertfordshire and other counties in the spring of 1548; and the Protector, moved thereto by divers supplications, some of which are extant, now determined to take action