the said person or persons shall choose one farmhold at his pleasure, and the remnant of his leases shall be utterly void.'[1]
An Act, tyrannical in form, was singularly justified by its consequences. The farms were rebuilt, the lands reploughed, the island repeopled; and in 1546, when a French army of sixty thousand men attempted to effect a landing at St Helen's, they were defeated and driven off by the militia of the island and a few levies transported from Hampshire and the adjoining counties.[2] The money-making spirit, however, lay too deep to be checked so readily. The trading classes were growing rich under the strong rule of the Tudors. Increasing numbers of them were buying or renting land; and the symptoms complained of broke out in the following reign in many parts of England. They could not choose but break out indeed; for they were the outward marks of a vital change, which was undermining the feudal constitution, and would by and by revolutionize and destroy it. Such symptoms it was impossible to extinguish; but the Government wrestled long and powerfully to hold down the new spirit; and they fought against it successfully, till the old order of things had finished its work, and the time was come for it to depart. By the 1st of the 7th of Henry VIII., the laws of feudal tenure were put in force against the landed traders. Wherever lands were converted from
- ↑ 4 Hen. VII. cap. 16. By the same Parliament these provisions were extended to the rest of England. 4 Hen. VII. cap. 19.
- ↑ Hall, p. 863; and see vol. iv. of this work, chap. xxii.
