THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM 57 



quoted sermon, preached (1549) before Edward VI 

 and his Court, spoke plainly on the subject. He 

 charged the nobility (many of them being present) 

 with reducing the yeomanry to slavery for the sake 

 of acquiring private wealth. " These graziers," he 

 said, " enclosers and rent-rearers are hinderers of the 

 King's honour. For wher as have bene a great many 

 of householders and inhabitantes there is now but a 

 shepherd and his dogge. . . . We have good statutes 

 made for the common-welth as touching comeners, 

 enclosers many meetins and sessions but in the end of 

 the matter there cometh nothing forth. "^ 



The monarchs of those times and their advisers 

 were not political economists, the " dismal science " 

 being as yet undiscovered. They held what with 

 many seems now the exploded doctrine that the wealth 

 of a nation lies in its people, and its strength in a 

 prosperous rural population. They, therefore, did not 

 accept the plea of the landlords that inclosures, grass 

 lands, and cattle, were the most profitable to them. 

 Accordingly in successive reigns many ordinances 



their houses or lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines or moneys, after 

 the manner of covetous worldlings, but so let them out that the in- 

 habitants thereof may be able to pay the rents and to live and assist 

 their families and remember the poor. Give them grace also to consider 

 that they are but strangers and pilgrims in this world, having here no 

 dwelling-place but seeking one to come ; that they, remembering the 

 short continuance of this life, may be content with that which is sufficient, 

 and not to join house to house and land to land to the impoverishment 

 of others, but so behave themselves in letting their tenements, lands, and 

 pastures that after this life they may be received into everlasting habita- 

 tion." 



It would be interesting to know why, and by whose authority this 

 appropriate supplication was afterwards omitted from the Common 

 Prayer Book. 



1 " Seven Sermons before King Edward VI," by Hugh Latimer. 

 (Arber's English Reprints.) 



