Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/373

1548.], it remains certain that the absorption of the small farms, the enclosure system, and the increase of grazing farms had assumed proportions mischievous and dangerous. Leases as they fell in could not obtain renewal; the copyholder whose farm had been held by his forefathers so long that custom seemed to have made it his own, found his fines or his rent quadrupled, or himself without alternative expelled. The Act against the pulling down farm-houses had been evaded by the repair of a room which might be occupied by a shepherd; a single furrow would be driven across a meadow of a hundred acres, to prove that it was still under the plough. The great cattle owners, to escape the sheep statutes, held their stock in the names of their sons or servants; the highways and the villages were covered in consequence with forlorn and outcast families, now reduced to beggary, who had been the occupiers of comfortable holdings; and thousands of dispossessed tenants made their way to London, clamouring in the midst of their starving children at the doors of the courts of law for redress which they could not obtain.