Page:The English Peasant.djvu/34

 their people as did the Tudors. Not content with arranging the national religious services, they ordained both a catechism and a private book of prayers to be used by individuals, and in the latter they prepared a special prayer for labourers; a prayer which strings together all the texts in the New Testament which can be forced into an incentive to work.

Looked at from the position of a man well-to-do in the world, these primers were probably edifying and sometimes elevating. But the faith they undoubtedly possessed was linked in the minds of the poor with profound injustice. The same authority which taught them how to pray, refused them their liberty under terror of the stocks, whipping, and the gibbet, and more, took from them their children to be subjected to the same mingled system of drudgery and catechism, slavery and prayer. By the Act 27 Hen. VIII., c. 27, the children of vagrants over five years of age were to be taken into custody and put out to husbandry and other crafts, and any such children above the age of twelve running away were to be whipped with rods.

The English outlaw has a charm for the curious reader, when his adventures are pictured in a ballad like Robin Hood, or Clym of the Clough; but let it not be forgotten, these are the primeval heroes of the history which was continued by Harry the Eighth's Vagabonds and Sturdy Rogues. Only as the age advances, and the Chivalrous gives place to the Commercial Spirit, these unfortunate pariahs sink from high-spirited banditti—with a certain code of honour—into gangs of wolfish marauders and mean thieves.

And their numbers were vastly increased by an Act, needful no doubt, but performed with the usual injustice to the poor and helpless. The Suppression of Monastic Establishments in 1536 and 1540 turned adrift 50,000 persons, most of whom were incapable of earning their own living. The property taken from these unhappy people, and in which they certainly had a life interest, is calculated to have been worth a rental of £350,000 per annum, which at twenty years' purchase would be £7,000,000, a sum equal in value to-day to the whole annual revenue of Great Britain. Yet all they got was: forty shillings and a gown to the men in priests' orders; a gown simply to the women.