NEW BUYERS OF LAND 85 



The prosperity of the rural community was not universal. For 

 many of the smaller gentry, and for day-labourers for hire, times 

 were hard. Landowners, whose income was more or less stationary, 

 suffered from the rise in prices, accompanied, as it was, by a higher 

 standard of luxury. When leases fell in, or lives were renewed, or 

 copyholders were admitted, rents might be increased or fines 

 enhanced. But in an extravagant age, when country gentlemen 

 began to be attracted to London, such opportunities, if the tenants 

 belonged to a healthy stock, might come too rarely or too late. 

 Many owners were compelled to sell their estates. Land was often 

 in the market. Thus two opposing tendencies characterised the 

 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The division of church lands 

 among grantees who already owned estates strengthened the landed 

 aristocracy, while continual sales democratised the ownership of 

 land. It is said that only 330 families can trace their titles to land 

 beyond the dissolution of the monasteries. In the two centuries 

 that followed, few of the gentry retained their hold on their estates, 

 unless they were enriched by wealthy marriages, by trade, or by 

 the practice of the law. The buyers generally belonged to the 

 rising middle classes. Harrison, in his Description of England, 1 

 says that yeomen, " for the most part farmers to gentlemen," by 

 attention to their business " do come to great welth in somuch that 

 manie of them are able and doo buie the lands of unthriftie gentle- 

 men." Fynes Moryson, in his Itinerary 2 (1617) notes that the Eng- 

 lish " doe . . daily sell their patrimonies, and the buyers (except- 

 ing Lawyers) are for the most part Citizens and vulgar Men." Sir 

 Simon Degge 3 (1669), a learned lawyer, declares that in Stafford- 

 shire, during the past sixty years, half the land had passed into 

 the possession of new men. He attributes this change of ownership, 

 partly to divine punishment for the sacrilege of those who were 

 grantees of ecclesiastical property, partly to the extravagance of 

 the country gentry who now took pleasure in spending their estates 

 in London. He makes these comments on Erdeswick's Survey 

 of Staffordshire, drawn up between 1593 and 1603, and goes on to 

 say that there were then in the county only " three citizen owners " 



1 Bk. ii. ch. v. The Description was published in 1577. The same 

 passage occurs in Sir Thomas Smith's De Republica Anglorum, bk. i. ch. xxiii. 

 published in 1583. 



* Part III. bk. iii. ch. iii. 



3 Degge's Letter is printed as a supplement to Erdeswick's Survey of 

 Staffordshire in the edition of 1717. 



