Page:The English Peasant.djvu/35

 This property, held in trust by the Church for the Poor, and which by a double right belonged to God, being His primarily, and His again as the gage of the repentance of the covetous and the grasping, was scandalously seized by the authority of Parliament, and being made over to the King, as general trustee of national property, was fraudulently given away by him to his adherents and friends. The satellites of Cromwell and the Catholic Lords who had to be propitiated, got the lion's share; but, in the scramble, city merchants, wool dealers, and manufacturers became landowners.

So now the commercial spirit invaded agriculture. It had for some time past been found more profitable to raise sheep than corn, and arable land was largely turned into pastures. But husbandmen and small yeomen could not make this pay and were obliged therefore to sell their land. A number of little estates in the market, an ever increasing demand for wool, and laws supplying the farmer with labour at much below its real market value: here was a truly golden opportunity for capitalists; and traders of all sorts began to compete for the farms. This raised rents, and numbers of poor yeomen were soon ruined, and they and their families turned into the streets.

"These covetous cormorants," cried Bernard Gilpin, "take it for no offence to turn poor men out of their holds, for they say the land is their own." And not content with doing what they pleased with what they thought "their own," the landholders took what they knew was not and enclosed common land, thus taking from the poor property to which they had a better right than any nobleman to his estate. "They lick," says Harrison, with graphic earnestness, in his "State of England," "the sweat from the poor man's brow."

No one took up the parable against the rapacity of landlords more persistently than old Latimer and Bernard Gilpin; nor were they alone. It is the cry of all the earnest preachers and the greatest thinkers of the age; men like Sir Thomas More and Lord Bacon. But opposed to them were practical economists, such as Fitzherbert, author of The Boke of Husbandrye (1534), and Surveyinge (1539), who argued against the waste involved in the Common Field system, by which a man's rights of property were