190 History of the English Landed Interest. 



lation.^ The ancient owners of tlie land, the men who never 

 quite got rid of the old seignorial instincts in their comprehen- 

 sion of the new ideas about landed proprietorship, and who still 

 looked upon the agricultural labourer as a fighting unit of the 

 feudal polity, would never have had the heart to have depopu- 

 lated the manor in this wholesale fashion. Some of the com- 

 monest names on the estate were to them stirring memories of 

 a time when blood, blue and puddle, had been mingled in a 

 common cause. But what had the new landlords to do with 

 associations which dated back to the days of the feudal battle- 

 fields, men whose fathers had been trade apprentices and their 

 fathers before them absconding villeins ? So they did just what 

 they thought fit in their own eyes, and the great grass farms 

 grew and grew in spite of restrictive legislation and constitu- 

 tional bribes held out to corn husbandry. English statesmen, 

 however, could not regard with indifference any process such 

 as this, which, by depopulating the rural districts, deteriorated 

 the chief recruiting ground for the national arm}^ As Lord 

 Bacon, in his History of the Life of Henry VII., tells us, " That 

 king seeing the effects of inclosures in the decay of towns, 

 churches, tithes, etc., and the diminution of his subsidies and 

 taxes, adopted a course so as to prevent depopulation, not so 

 much by direct prohibition as by consequence. Inclosures he 

 would not forbid, for that had been to forbid the improvement 

 of the patrimony of the kingdom ; nor tillage he would not 

 compel, for that was to strive with nature and utiUty." 



His remedy was to frame an ordinance whereby all houses 

 of husbandry that were used with twenty acres of land and 

 upwards should be maintained and kept up for ever.^ The Act 

 of 7 Hen. VHI. c. 1 endeavoured to put a stop to the destruc- 

 tion of rural dwellings ; that of 25 Hen. VIII. c. 13 set limits 

 on the individual's possessions in flocks of sheep ; that of 31 



' The case of the Manor of Stretton Baskerville, though it occurred 

 earlier than the Reformation, is an illustration of this fact. John de 

 Twyford, the ancient owner, dies, and the estates fall into the hands of a 

 certain Mr. Smith, who depopulates the whole district for the sake of 

 sheep farming. —Cunningham's Groicth of Industry and Commerce, part i. 

 p. 399, Ed. 1890. 



2 4 Hen. VII. c. 19. Appendix 23, vol. 342. 



