Page:Landholding in England.djvu/87

 The rebellions in Norfolk, Cornwall and Devon cost £27,000, and when Somerset fell he too left debts.

The practical result of the change was to increase enormously the evils of "engrossing"—against which statutes had been made by Henry VII. and Henry VIII., because it was found that it decreased the number of men fit to bear arms. "Engrossing" meant throwing a number of small holdings into one large one. "Enclosing" at first meant the enclosing of the common pasture, but it now came to mean the enclosing of the "open fields," or "town lands," belonging to every village. Both processes cleared the people off the land. Indeed, it was the deliberate purpose of the new landlords to get rid of them. We always find statutes against vagabonds and statutes against enclosing and engrossing going together. It was never denied that the people were turned off the land, and suffered misery in consequence. But the more they were turned off, the more ferocious the statutes became. We need not suppose that men must be monsters of depravity if when they lose their work and their living they take to evil ways. To demand of thousands of men and women that they shall meekly lie down and die in the nearest ditch that gentlemen may grow rich by selling wool, may possibly be what they ought to do, but we may be quite sure that they will never do it. The framers of the Act 1 Edward VI. c. 3 speak as though their wickedness were phenomenal.

The first Act of the first Parliament of the Reformation was to pass the Act for uniformity in public worship—under pain of imprisonment for life and forfeiture of goods. Its third was the Act "for the punishment of Vagrants, and the Relief of the Poor." Under this innocent title was put forth the most frightful Act ever framed by any government in the world against its own people. If it had been enacted by William the Norman, 500 years before, after a foreign conquest, it would inspire horror, history would ring with it. But it was framed by Englishmen against Englishmen, by robbers against those they had just ruined ; and the Englishmen who framed it boasted that they had newly received the pure light of the Gospel.

The preamble starts by referring to the "godly Statutes" made by the King's "noble progenitors," which statutes have done no good, partly because of "foolish pity and