Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/375

 'towns,' and laying to pasture lands previously in tillage and tittable: church and realm are alike. impoverished by the devastation that is going on; owners of farm-houses, to which a holding of 20 acres is attached, are bound to keep them in repair or forfeit half the profits to the king. The great importance of this matter is the burden of the History of John Rous, the Warwick historian, who does not otherwise add to our knowledge of the reign. These two statutes are of great social significance; signs of the times of which men like Morton and More took heed. Cap. 24, the statute for proclamation of fines, has had a reputation of greater importance than deserves, being supposed formerly to have given the power of alienating entailed lands, and so allowing the great landowners to ruin themselves. This Hallam shows to be a mistake, and the statute accordingly becomes a minor legal detail.

Most of the acts of the year 1491-2 are connected with the expedition to France, which came off in the latter year; the securing of the rights of absentees who took part in it, and a number of restorations from attainder. Those of 1495 have a greater reputation in the law books, and especially cap. 1, which enacts that persons going with the king for the time being to war are not to be attaint of treason therefore; an act passed in a true spirit of equity, but, I fear, quite inadequate to secure its end in critical times. Perhaps as a historical landmark and as enunciating a principle of public law it has its chief importance; anyhow, it shows that the king felt himself so secure that he need not speculate for a fall. Cap. 3 is a law on the disposal of 'vacabunds and beggars,' who are to be sent to their hundreds; if a university man is found begging he must produce a letter of the chancellor identifying his status, or else must go as a 'vacabund.' Cap. 17 forbids the taking of pheasants and partridges on other men's lands, an early definite game law on which I will simply observe that a popular error makes the introduction of pheasants much more modern than it was; the canons of Waltham had pheasants in the eleventh century, by Harold's ordinance, every festival day from Michaelmas to Lent.