Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/686

 630 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE central government. In the country much of the manorial organization had given way to tenants who rented large plots of land on fifty-year leases. The Paston Letters show how in the fifteenth century a family of plebeian origin could gradually amass considerable landed property and hold important political and judicial offices. Both Edward IV and Henry VII legislated in the interest of the com- mercial classes and of the economic welfare of the country. Native English merchants were now getting the foreign trade into their hands. The Tudors themselves were really an upstart Welsh family of middle-class origin, and they understood how to deal with that class, how to bully it and how to please it. They replenished the nobility with other upstarts like themselves, whom for a time they were able to control. When Parliament did meet in the Tudor period, it was generally of one mind with the king. When young Henry VIII succeeded his father in 1509, he found the treasury full and his people devoted to him. The Christian kingdoms of the Spanish peninsula, during the later Middle Ages as before, had many disputed succes- Spain in s * ons anc * f am ^Y quarrels, and intermarried and the later fought with one another continually. France ges and England had interfered in their affairs a good deal during the Hundred Years War, and the Kings of Aragon were much occupied with Sicily. But no great changes in the constitutional institutions of these kingdoms or in their relative size and importance occurred until the second half of the fifteenth century. Meanwhile the Mo- hammedans continued to hold Granada for over two cen- turies after they had lost the rest of the peninsula. But the marriage in 1469 of Ferdinand, who was King of Aragon from 1479 to 1516, with Isabella, Queen of Castile Union of and Leon from 1474 to 1504, and their conquest Ferdinand* °f Granada from the Moors, which was com- and Isabella pleted in 1 492, ended the separate existence of those kingdoms which merged henceforth in one nation and state, since called Spain. Spanish Navarre was annexed to Castile by Ferdinand after Isabella's death, Ferdinand and