LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI 



had paid adulation to the great enclosers, but "he failed in so many 

 necessary civilities to the nobility and gentry" that it was clear he 

 was their enemy and the peasants' friend. His visitation articles, in 

 particular, questioned the churchwardens closely concerning en- 

 closures, detentions, inversions, and so on. To have such questions 

 put to them — as a writer complained a few months before Laud's 

 death, when the Archbishop was safely in the Tower — was a "vassal- 

 drie of the gentry of England," who, from the time of the Tudors, 

 had been impropriating wholesale the common property of the 

 people, their common Church, their common lands, and their common 

 free schools. "Many nobles and worthy gentlemen," said the com- 

 plainant, "are curbed and tyrannised over by some base clergy of 

 mean parentage." As Clarendon says,^ "The shame, which they called 

 an insolent triumph over their degree and quality, and a levelling 

 them with the common people, was never forgotten, and they watched 

 for revenge." 



A final instance: from among his injunctions to the Dean and 

 Chapter of Chichester — "Use some means with Mr. Peter Cox" 

 (a land-grabbing alderman of that city) "that the piece of ground 

 called Campus now in his possession be laid open again, that the 

 scholars of your free school may have liberty to play there, as formerly 

 they had. And if he shall refuse, give us notice, or our vicar-general, 

 upon what reason and ground he does it." *^ 



But if some bishops were fighting on- the agrarian front, others 

 were leading the struggle against usur}\^ Lancelot Andrewes, the 

 admirable Bishop of Winchester, preached incessantly against it. He 

 made short work of the settlement of 1571, which had legalised 

 the taking of ten per cent. Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich; John 

 Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, and George Downam ("the hammer of 

 usurers") Bishop of Derry, were all prominent in this work.^ But 

 the merchants persisted ever that "it is not in simple divines to saye 

 what contract is lawfull, and what is not." 



In the end these controversies were not settled except by force 

 of arms. In the civil war, the industrial and commercial cities and 

 areas were in general on the parliamentary side; the agricultural 

 parts of the country, except the Eastern Counties, where puritanism 



^ Clarendon, History of the Rebellion. 



^ See the classical Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by R. H. Tawney (Murray, 

 London, 1926); and also H. M. ^oh^nsoris Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism 

 (Cambridge, 1933). 



^ Cf. Blaxton, The English Usurer (London, 1634). 



77 



