CHAPTER XV.— THE LEVELLERS
"The English Poor Law, after all, was the outcome of great crimes committed by Government.
"I can conceive nothing more cruel, I had almost said more insolent, than to condemn a labourer to the lowest possible wages on which life may be sustained, by an act of Parliament, interpreted and enforced by an ubiquitous body of magistrates, whose interest it was to screw the pittance down to the lowest conceivable margin, and to inform the stinted recipient that when he had starved on that pittance during the days of his strength, others must work to maintain him in sickness or old age. Now this was what the Statute of Apprenticeship, supplemented by the Poor Law, did in the days of Elizabeth. And if you go into the streets and alleys of our large towns, and indeed, of many English villages, you may meet the fruit of the wickedness of Henry and the policy of Elizabeth's counsellors in the degradation and helplessness of your countrymen."—Rogers, "Six Centuries of Work and Wages," p. 425 (Edition of 18S4).
JUDGING from my own ideas before I closely studied the subject, I believe the general notion is that the English peasant, since the Reformation, has drifted casually off the land, for one reason or other—inability to make a living out of a small allotment being the first cause; next, dislike to the dulness of a country life, compared with the attractions of the town; and the temptation of higher wages. And it is quite true that as time went on the lot of the husbandman became harder, and that when there opened out to him the prospect of good wages in factories, he flocked into the great manufacturing towns. But this was much later. Long before he left the land, the land had left him. He did not drift off—he was first wrenched off, then weeded off. Wrenched off in the great clearing of the sixteenth century, when the great landowners became great sheep- masters, and when the abbey lands changed hands. Weeded off more slowly, but quite as surely, by the gradual process of enclosure, during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
I will now try to give a slight sketch of this gradual enclosure of public lands.
It proceeded in an irregular fashion. Sometimes, for long periods, we hear little except the stock complaints that tillage and husbandry are declining, to the injury of
