144 LAND REFORM 



order to realize the steady and unswerving manner in 

 which the manorial lords were pursuing their policy. 

 The peasantry and yeomanry could get no help from 

 Parliament, because the legislature was controlled by 

 feudal influence. The king and the best men of his 

 executive were powerless, because the baronial power 

 was too strong. It is true they succeeded in passing 

 laws — some of them severe — to check the evil, but 

 these laws were disobeyed or evaded. As Bishop 

 Latimer preached, " We have good statutes made for 

 the Common-welth as touching comeners, enclosers, 

 etc. but in the end there cometh nothing forth." 

 Numbers of remonstrances were addressed to succes- 

 sive governments, especially by some of the superior 

 clergy. 



We have already referred to Bishop Latimer's fruit- 

 less warnings. Another sermon has been preserved 

 and handed down to us, in which the preacher, in a 

 very pathetic strain of eloquence, boldly describes to 

 the king and his court the crying evils inflicted on 

 the rural population. ^ 



" Be the poor man's cause never so manifest, the 

 rich shall, for money, find six or seven counsellors 

 that shall stand with subtleties and sophisms to cloak 

 an evil matter and hide a known truth. . . . Such 

 boldness have these covetous cormorants that now 

 their robberies, extortion and open oppression have 

 no end nor limits, no banks can keep in their violence. 

 As for turning poor men out of their holdings they 

 take it for no offence, but say their land is their own, 

 and they turn them out of their shrouds like mice. 

 Thousands in England, through such, beg now from 



* Sermon preached in the court at Greenwich before the king, 

 Edward VI, 1552, by Bernard Gilpin. See " Life of Gilpin," by his son 

 William Gilpin, Vicar of Boldre, near Lymington (3rd edition, 1780). 



