114 ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN ENGLAND, 



might have been highly dangerous in the North. But the king 

 could rely on his accomplices, and up to the wars of the Long 

 Parliament no armed resistance against legal authority has 

 been successful, unless it were headed by the nobles, and has 

 not always been successful then. The monasteries were the 

 inns of the middle ages. They also fulfilled functions to a 

 great extent identical with that of parochial relief. They 

 were unpopular, and were therefore easy landlords. Some of 

 them, as was asserted, were very important factors in the social 

 economy of the time. They supplied students to the Univer- 

 sities. The nuns were often leeches and midwives. The ditch 

 round Godstow nunnery is still full of the aristolochia, which 

 the nuns had introduced, because in the pharmacy of the middle 

 ages it was supposed to assist women in childbirth. But the 

 worst result of the dissolution was the rapidity with which the 

 roads went out of repair. It was the interest of the monastic 

 orders, whose property was often scattered, to keep the means 

 of communication open, and as they were resident landlords, 

 who were consumers of their own and market produce, it was 

 their interest to keep the roads in good repair. My reader will 

 find the proof of what I refer to, when I comment, as I did in 

 my first volumes, on the cost of carriage over known distances, 

 for fixed quantities. 



Quite apart, however, from the uses to which the monks put 

 their lands and their capital, the general employment which 

 their residence among the people afforded, the incidents of 

 their outlay, the obligations . they were under, which they 

 satisfied to a greater or less degree, of aiding distress and 

 obviating the worst results of destitution, the manner in which 

 they must have been a check to population, and the diligence 

 with which they improved their own buildings and the com- 

 munications between their abbeys and their properties, no vast 

 transfer of property from one class to another, especially whei 

 the transfer is from a more or less popular body to a new am 

 needy aristocracy, can be effected without an enormous amount 

 of suffering. It took a long time before the ruin of the Fivnc! 



