CHAPTER XII.— THE STATUTE OF VAGABONDS
"If the impotent creatures perish for lack of necessaries, you are the murderers, for you have their inheritance. … If the sturdy fall to stealing, robbing, and revenge, then are you the causers thereof, for you dig in, enclose, and withhold from them the earth out of the which they should dig and plow their living."—An Informacion and Petition against the Oppressors of the Poor Commons, Robert Crowley, afterwards Archdeacon of Hertford.
"Oh ! what a lamentable thing it is to consider, that there are not at this day ten plows, whereas were wont to be forty or fifty. Whereas your Majesties progenitors had an hundred men to serve them in time of peace and in time of wars, with their strength, policy, goods, and bodies, your Majesty have now scant half so many. And yet a great number of them are so pined and famished by the reason of the great scarcity and dearth of all kind of victuals, that the grete shepe-masters have brought into this noble realm, that they are become more like the slavery and paisantry of France than the ancient and goodly yeomanry of England."—Bishop Scory's Letter to Edward VI., printed in Strype's "Ecclesiastical Memoirs," Vol. II. Part ii. 492.
WE thus learn, from the Reformers themselves, that the seizure of the Church lands instantly drove out the smaller holders, or enormously enhanced their rents. Henry had given or sold (more often sold) the abbey lands to his creatures of the new nobility. Most of the lands were granted to be held in capite, subject to all the burdens of fines which this implied. The Court of Wards was erected — that most profitable business of trafficking in the marriages of orphan heirs.
The new race of landowners did not want small tenants—they were rather an encumbrance than otherwise; larger holders, of more substance, would pay more rent; and from this time forth landlords thought only of how much rent their land would bring them in. Sheep-farms—large in extent, and requiring few labourers — had been increased in the first place by the dearth of labour after the Black Death. Henry VII., who grew rich by fining great lords for keeping retainers, gave it another impetus—the great landowners became as anxious to get rid of their villeins as a little while before they had been to keep them. And as soon as enclosure increased, we find statutes against vagabondage instead of statutes of labourers. These
