Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/387

1548.] The report of the com mission was sent in, and the result of it was a petition, to be presented in the coming Parliament. The population, the petition stated, was diminished, the farmer and labourer were impoverished, villages were destroyed, towns decayed, and the industrious classes throughout England in a condition of unexampled suffering. The occasion was the conduct of the upper classes. 'Divers of the King's subjects, called to the degree of nobles, knights, or gentlemen, not considering that God had given them their high rank and place that they might be as shepherds to the people, surveyors and overseers to the King's Grace's subjects, and had given them sufficient provision that without bodily labour they might live and attend thereto,' had forgotten their obligations in their pleasures, and supposed that they might live for nothing else but to enjoy themselves, or make money for themselves. The petition requested, therefore, that no person of any degree, in possession of land, with more than a hundred marks a year, should farm any part of it beyond what his household required; that the great farms should be broken up; and that the Act should be enforced which required persons to whom abbey lands had fallen by gift or purchase, to 'keep an honest continual house and household on the same.' Fines were demanded in cases of disobedience; but on the whole the tone of the petition was moderate. The Acts of Henry, which were afterwards put in force by Elizabeth, extended the penalty in such cases to forfeiture. The present petitioners desired a fine only of ten marks a