The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
on penalty of being tied to the cart's tail, whipped until our bodies were bloody, with the prospect of being hanged if we were so foolhardy as to be caught more than twice loitering in parishes other than our own.
But all the Acts made from the time of Richard II. downwards concerning the returning and departure of labourers from the hundred in which they dwelt were in force, so that any person so wilful as to assert his natural liberty came under the title of vagabond. The refusal of Parliament to pass a general Act of Emancipation, as advised by Richard the Second's Council, had led to hundreds, perhaps thousands defying the law, and being branded as criminals at the outset. The villein who fled from servitude was by that fact a "vagabond and a sturdy rogue." And our feeling concerning these Tudor laws will change considerably when we understand that they are simply such decrees as Pharaoh would have issued against the fugitive Israelites.
To compare the Tudor tyranny to that under which the Hebrews groaned in Egypt is to give an inadequate view of the case. That under which the poor Englishman suffered was far worse because it was practised under the sanction of the religion in which he believed. Never, perhaps, in all history has there been a race of monarchs who attempted so to mould the consciences of their people as did the Tudors. Not content with arranging the national religious services, they ordained both a catechism and a private book of prayers to be used by individuals, and in the latter they prepared a special prayer for labourers; a prayer which strings together all the texts in the New Testament which can be forced into an incentive to work.
Looked at from the position of a man well-to-do in the world, these primers were probably edifying and sometimes elevating. But the faith they undoubtedly possessed was linked in the minds of the poor with profound injustice. The same authority which taught them how to pray, refused them their liberty under terror of the stocks, whipping, and the gibbet, and more, took from them their children to be subjected to the same mingled system of drudgery and catechism, slavery and prayer. By the Act 27 Hen. VIII., c. 27, the children of vagrants over five years of age were to be taken into custody and put out to husbandry and other crafts, and any such children above the age of twelve running away were to be whipped with rods.
The English outlaw has a charm for the curious reader, when his adventures are pictured in a ballad like Robin Hood, or Clym of the Clough; but let it not be forgotten, these are the primeval heroes of the history which was continued by Harry the Eighth's Vagabonds and Sturdy Rogues. Only as the age advances, and the Chivalrous gives place to the Commercial Spirit, these unfortunate pariahs sink from high-spirited banditti—with a certain code of honour—into gangs of wolfish marauders and mean thieves.
And their numbers were vastly increased by an Act, needful no doubt, but performed with the usual injustice to the poor and helpless. The Suppression of Monastic Establishments in 1536 and 1540 turned adrift 50,000 persons, most of whom were incapable of earning their own living. The property taken from these unhappy people, and in which they certainly had a life interest, is calculated to have been worth a rental of £350,000 per annum, which at twenty years' purchase would be £7,000,000, a sum equal in value to-day to the whole annual revenue of Great Britain. Yet all they got was: forty shillings and a gown to the men in priests' orders; a gown simply to the women.
This property, held in trust by the Church for the Poor, and which by a double right belonged to God, being His primarily, and His again as the gage of the repentance of the covetous and the grasping, was scandalously seized by the authority of Parliament, and being made over to the King, as general trustee of national property, was fraudulently given away by him to his adherents and friends. The satellites of Cromwell and the Catholic Lords who had to be propitiated, got the lion's share; but, in the scramble, city merchants, wool dealers, and manufacturers became landowners.
So now the commercial spirit invaded agriculture. It had for some time past been found more profitable to raise sheep than corn, and arable land was largely turned into pastures. But husbandmen and small yeomen could not make this pay and were obliged therefore to sell their land. A number of little estates in the market, an ever increasing demand for wool, and laws supplying the farmer with labour at much below its real market value: here was a truly golden opportunity for capitalists; and traders of all sorts began to compete for the farms. This raised rents, and numbers of poor yeomen were soon ruined, and they and their families turned into the streets.
"These covetous cormorants," cried Bernard Gilpin, "take it for no offence to turn poor men out of their holds, for they say the land is their own." And not content with doing what they pleased with what they thought "their own," the landholders took what they knew was not and enclosed common land, thus taking from the poor property to which they had a better right than any nobleman to his estate. "They lick," says Harrison, with graphic earnestness, in his "State of England," "the sweat from the poor man's brow."
No one took up the parable against the rapacity of landlords more persistently than old Latimer and Bernard Gilpin; nor were they alone. It is the cry of all the earnest preachers and the greatest thinkers of the age; men like Sir Thomas More and Lord Bacon. But opposed to them were practical economists, such as Fitzherbert, author of The Boke of Husbandrye (1534), and Surveyinge (1539), who argued against the waste involved in the Common Field system, by which a man's rights of property were scattered about, so that he was put to a far greater expense in its management than if he had it all compact in one farm. This was perfectly true, and from a merely commercial point of view quite unanswerable; but he forgot that this communistic system was the surest protection that the men not gifted with business ability could have against those that were. Fill men with the idea that the summum bonum of social economy is to get the greatest pecuniary results at the least possible expense, and they will stop at nothing for so great an end.
Bernard Gilpin, preaching before Edward VI., described how Lady Avarice set on the mighty men, and the gentlemen, and all rich men, to rob and despoil the poor, and turn them from their livings and their right, and ever the weakest go to the wall. "And in the meantime these mighty and great men say that the commonalty live too well at ease, and grow every day to be gentlemen and know not themselves; their horns, say they, must be cut shorter by raising their rents and by plucking away their pastures. And hereby the commonalty come to hate the gentry, for they murmur, and grudge, and say that the gentlemen have all; and there were never so many gentlemen and so little gentleness." "Alas! noble Prince," said the preacher, turning to the King, "that the images of your ancestors graven in gold, and yours also, contrary to your mind, are worshipped as gods, and all the poor lively images of Christ perish with hunger."
A still more striking proof of the general impression of the extreme greed of the landlord class is the existence of a prayer for landlords, to be found in the Primmer or Boke of Private Prayer set forth in 1555, two years after this discourse by Gilpin, to be taught, learned, read, and used of the King's loving subjects.
"The earth is Thine, O Lord, and all that is contained therein, notwithstanding Thou hast given possession thereof unto the children of men, to pass the time of their short pilgrimage in this vale of misery. We heartily pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be Thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and their lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes after the manner of covetous worldlings, but so let them out to Others that the inhabitants thereof may be able to pay the rents and also to honestly live, to nourish their families and to relieve the poor; give them grace to consider that they are but strangers and pilgrims in this world, having here no dwelling-place, but seeking one to come; that they, remembering the short continuance of their life, may be content with that which is sufficient and not join house to house, nor couple land to land to the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands, and pastures, that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling-places; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
VII.
Another Struggle for Justice.
"My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions." These words, which Scripture gibbets as the last degree of princely arrogance and folly, exactly symbolize the opening acts of the reign of the most pious, most