Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/318

298 but the industrious masses had caught the spirit of the age, and gave the changes cordial welcome. So it had been at Portsmouth; so it was in the towns generally, especially in the towns along the coast, where activity and enterprise shook the minds of men out of the control of routine. So, however, it was not in the country, as events came in time to show. As with the first spread of Christianity, so with the spread of the Reformation, the towns went first, and the country lagged behind reluctantly. The life of towns was a life of change; the life of the country was a life of uniformity, where sons walked in the ways of their fathers, and each day and season brought with it its occupation, its custom, or its ceremony, unaltered for tens of generations. The fall of the abbeys had given the first shock to the stationary spirit, but the crimes of the monks were half forgotten in the sadness of their desolate homes. It was no light thing to the village peasant to see the royal arms staring above the empty socket of the crucifix to which he had prayed, the saints after which he was named in his baptism flung out into the mud, the pictures on the church walls daubed with plaster, over which his eyes had wandered wonderingly in childhood.

Other changes added to his restlessness. The Acts of Parliament which forbade enclosures and the amalgamation of farms were less and less observed; the peasant farmers were more and more declining into labourers, rents were rising, and the necessaries of life were rising, and, in the experience of the agricultural poor, an increase of personal suffering was the chief result of the so-called Reformation.