22
into quarries for building materials. Henceforth the people of England had no hold upon their own land; and all the duties which the monks and nuns had filled in the economy of the middle-ages fell into abeyance and were left unperformed. As to the inhabitants of the monasteries, the monks and nuns, friars and sisters who were turned out of their houses, they joined the army of miserable vagrants now yearly increasing on the public highways. With no means of earning a livelihood, they and the discharged retainers, the expropriated yeomen and the discharged hinds, were a never-ceasing source of annoyance to the classes which had driven them out to starve; whilst the very abolition of the monasteries, which intensified the mischief, deprived these poor people of their last hope of succour.
Such was the pressure on the peasantry, owing to the enclosures, the robberies of commons, and the seizure of the Church Lands, that in spite of the infamous atrocities wreaked upon all disturbers of order and upon the wretched vagrants themselves, who were hanged and disembowelled, tortured and flogged in batches, there were a whole series of insurrections after the suppression of the monasteries, some of which were supported by the well-to-do, and even, as in the case of the insurrection of the Northern Earls, by the nobles themselves. The new system of production for profit and constant competition for wages, involving though it did progress, in the sense of producing more wealth with fewer hands, by the division of labour and co-operation, was thus not introduced without a frightful and bloody class struggle on the part of the people to maintain their old individual independence. The risings were put down
