DURING THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 91 



quite willing to welcome the expatriated artisans of the Low 

 Countries, and the impulse given by Drake to maritime enter- 

 prise, had much influence on the distribution of wealth in the 

 sixteenth century. But unfortunately it is not possible to 

 follow the history of the English people by the light of public 

 documents, and I am constrained to rely on such inferences 

 as I shall be able to make in my subsequent pages, and on the 

 narrative of prices, particularly those of food and labour. 



In my earlier volumes I commented on the system under 

 which land was held by tenants in knight service, in socage or 

 common freehold, and in villenage. Most of the documents 

 which I referred to were antecedent in date to the great plague. 

 They refer to a social condition which was utterly and perma- 

 nently modified by the occurrence of that calamity. By easy, 

 but by inseparable stages, the upland folk slid from tenants at 

 will and on labour rents, perhaps arbitrary, into tenants of 

 base holdings at fixed labour rents, then into tenants in villen- 

 age at fixed money rents, but at precarious fines on surrender 

 and regrant, then into tenants by copy of court roll, where labour 

 rents, long preserved in form, were really quit rents, and where 

 heriots and fines on alienation or succession were strictly limited 

 by custom and the interpretation of law. It is unimportant to 

 follow these changes, especially as it soon became the case, that 

 the same person was often at once the owner of a freehold and 

 the tenant in villenage, sometimes even the lord of a manor in 

 one parcel of land, and a tenant in villenage in another. 



The document, however, which is printed in Vol. iii. p. 739, 

 is so suggestive that I must call a moment's attention to it. 

 The Manor of Cheltenham had been attached to one of those 

 alien priories which were suppressed by Henry the Fifth, at the 

 beginning of his reign, and had remained in the hands of the 

 crown during the minority of his son. Henry the Sixth as soon, 

 or nearly as soon as he came of age, determined on devoting 

 the estates which he had thus acquired for the crown to 

 educational and religious purposes, and therefore founded 

 King's College, Cambridge, Eton in Bucks, and Sion Abbey in 



