these things, the King's most Royal Majesty intending, like a most virtuous Prince, to provide remedy in the premises; nothing so much coveting as the increase of the Commonwealth of this his Realm, with also the virtuous exercise of his most loving subjects and people, and to avoid that most abominable sin of idleness out of the Realm, hath, by the advice and consent of his Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, ordained and enacted that every person occupying land for tillage, shall for every sixty acres which he hath under the plough, sow one quarter of an acre in flax or hemp.'
This Act was designed immediately to keep the wives and children of the poor in work in their own houses;[1] but it leaves no doubt that manufactures in England had not of themselves that tendency to self-development which would encourage an enlarging population. The woollen manufactures similarly appear, from the many statutes upon them, to have been vigorous at a fixed level, but to have shown no tendency to rise beyond that level. With a fixed market and a fixed demand, production continued uniform.
A few years subsequent, indeed, to the passing of
- ↑ Bishop Latimer, in a sermon at Paul's Cross, suggested another purpose which this Act might answer. One of his audience, writing to the mayor of Plymouth, after describing the exceedingly disrespectful language in which he spoke of the high church dignitaries, continues, 'The king,' quoth he, 'made a marvellous good Act of Parliament that certain men should sow every of them two acres of hemp; but it were all too little were it so much more to hang the thieves that be in England.'—Suppression of the Monasteries, Camden Society's publications, p. 38.
