the proprietor of no fewer than thirty monasteries, CHAP chiefly in Lincolnshire and Warwickshire." VI Such an enumeration of a few of those who profited by the dissolution of the monasteries reveals something of the rapacity which accompanied this national tragedy. If the new owners of the estates had endeavoured to promote in any degree the religious objects for which they had originally been intended, some excuses might have been offered for them, and their good deeds would have stood, perhaps, in the light of a condonation for what, if it was not sacrilege, was the very nearest approach possible to that crime. But no good deeds are to be told of these None of men. They simply tried to build for themselves owners did houses out of the property once dedicated to God's good with service and if God's service was neglected any- wealth where it was upon the estates thus acquired. The original grantees of the lands seldom, indeed, prospered, and their estates either passed into other families or to distant branches of their own. Cromwell's property was wasted by his son; the Duke of Suffolk's last heirs died, not long after himself, both 8 The absolute inalienableness the new their CHAP in one day; the Russell family has been notorious for VI its misfortunes; as was, for a long time, that of the Dukes of Norfolk; while the great estates of How ill it the Northumberland house have passed from one their fa- branch to another, ever begging an heir from the milies female line, and very rarely continuing the inheritance by a direct line of sons. fared with Some social results solutions It is only within the limits of the present generation that the ancient Church lands confiscated by Henry VIII. have again begun to bear any important share in Church duties: but in the restitutions that are being made of their revenues to sacred objects— tardy and comparatively small as those restitutions. are-lies the best ground of hope that the cloud which hangs over their possession is passing away. It may be that the nineteenth century may yet wash away the stains which came upon those lands by the bloodshed and profane lawlessness which attended their alienation from the Church in the sixteenth. The social results which followed up so great a of the dis- convulsion as the suppression of 1100 monasteries in a population not much over three millions, were too important not to be noticed. Most conspicuous of all such results were the increase of poverty, and the decay of learning; both of which are witnessed by bold contemporaries such as Latimer, and by the less partial of historical writers who lived near the time. Increase of mendicancy The impoverishment first of the bishops and parochial clergy, and afterwards the total ruin of the monks, created a vast number of beggars, partly through drying up the springs from which charity had hitherto flowed, and partly by throwing many labourers and artizans out of work. The monastic VI of labour work establishments maintained a large number of ser- CHAP vants, labourers, workmen, and tradesmen, all of whom would be partly, and some wholly deprived of their accustomed industry and its reward. The effect on many districts was the same in its degree as if all the colleges in Oxford or Cambridge were to be suddenly ruined, the fellows and undergraduates turned adrift without money or goods, and the buildings half-destroyed. A large monastery was a Numbers market for much produce, and an employer of labour ers thrown in many necessary branches of industry. Although out of it was the rule of all monks that labour should accompany prayer, their labours were most frequently (at least in later times) the labours of the cloister, not those of the workshop and the field. They studied much, supplied the country with books when printing was yet unknown, composed laborious works on Holy Scripture, theological and secular treatises, and spent their time generally in that kind of brain work which the ignorant put down as unproductive idleness. Many a modern artizan or tradesman, moving in a narrow circle, and used to much muscular exertion, would certainly set down the work of writing these pages as little better than idleness, and claim for themselves the special designation of "working-men." Such was, doubtless, the foundation of those charges of idleness brought against a studious, brain-working class of monks: and it was not considered that they who thus held large endowments were by that very brain-work providing manual Monks labourers with the employment which brought them made bread. The brain workers were scattered to the beggars winds without books, money, or means of carrying on their work; and the manual workers who had themselves VI CHAP hitherto supplied their wants were no longer required. Thus it is fair to think that if only half the monks were students, and the other half a kind of cloistered labourers, even fifty thousand gentlemen of some means and refinement cast into sudden beggary must have dragged down with them not a few thousands of those who had provided for their needs. The cruel vagrant followed As a fact, it is found that the vagrant laws, which laws that form so conspicuous a feature of Henry's reign, were exactly contemporaneous with the impoverishment of the secular and regular clergy: and a few words on these acts will not be out of place here. dicants to The first of them [22 Hen. VIII. c. 12] was passed in 1531, and the second [27 Hen. VIII. c. 25] in 1536; and there is good reason to think that, like some other acts of this reign, they were principally drawn up by the King's own hand. In the first of these justices of the peace, mayors, &c., are enjoined to make diligent search and inquiry of all aged, poor, and impotent persons which live, or of necessity be compelled to live, by alms of the charity of Aged men- the people." All such persons are to be licensed to be licensed beg within certain appointed districts, and if found begging in any other place than that to which they strictions are licensed, they are to be punished by imprisonment in the stocks for two days and two nights, receiving only bread and water for their sustenance during that time. This is severe enough treatment for "aged, poor, and impotent persons;" but if any such were found begging without a license "he shall be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and whipped within the town in which he be found, or within some other town, as it shall seem good. Or, if it be not convenient so to punish him"-if he was with se vere re VI too aged and impotent perhaps, then-" he shall be CHAP set in the stocks by the space of three days and three nights.' mendi cants to be For beggars who were able to work, but were found living on alms, a far more severe punishment was ordered. Any such beggar when detected was to be brought before the justice of the peace, high constable, or other officer, and by him to be sent "to the next market-town or other place, and there to Sturdy be tied to the end of a cart, naked, and to be beaten with whips throughout the same town, till his body whipped be bloody by reason of such whipping." Then he was to be sent to the place where his settlement might be with orders to work, "and if he do not accomplish the order to him appointed by the said letter, then to be eftsoons taken and whipped, and so often as there be fault found in him, to be whipped till he has his body put to labour for his living, or otherwise truly get his living, so long as he is able to do so.' If such unlicensed sturdy beggars - they must have been sturdy to stand all these beatings, and yet be able to work-happened to be scholars of Oxford or Cambridge, shipwrecked men, proctors, pardoners, quack doctors, or fortune-tellers, they were to be punished by "whipping at two days together after the manner before rehearsed. And if pilloried they eftsoons offend in the same or any like offence, tilated to be scourged two days, and the third day to be put upon the pillory, from nine o'clock till eleven the forenoon of the same day, and to have the right ear cut off; and if they offend the third time, to have like punishment with whipping, and the pillory, and to have the other ear cut off." and mu |