250 History of the English Landed Interest. 



midable tlian carncage, and that more money came out of tlie 

 till than out of the soil. 



So far-reaching and beneficial had been the land legislation 

 of the fourteenth century, that throughout the Tudor period, 

 up to the reign of Henry VIII., very little further was required 

 or enacted. The dangers incident to civil warfare induced the 

 great landowners to make frequent use of the statute De Donis, 

 so that the whole landed interest was very little affected by the 

 confusion that must otherwise have ensued whenever a change 

 of ownership occurred by confiscation or other war casualties. 

 The younger sons alone suffered from the consequences of this 

 rigid adherence to the custom of primogeniture, and they had 

 to resort to other means of livelihood and fields for ambition than 

 those formerly available out of the revenues of their paternal 

 lands. During the reigns of Edward II. and Edward III. the 

 Gothic powers of electing the principal subordinate magis- 

 trates, the sheriffs and conservators of the peace, had been taken 

 from the people, justices of the peace had been substituted, and 

 the separation of the Lords and Commons in Parliament had 

 been brought about. 



While the wars lasted there was little opportunity for legis- 

 lation, if we except a class of laws beginning with that of 

 common recoveries in Edward the Fourth's reign which affected 

 the question of landed possession. The great lords were at first 

 too powerful politically to allow of any alteration being made 

 by Parliament in the law of entails ; but they were vigorously 

 discouraged by the judges whenever devices for new kinds of 

 entail came before the courts of justice. So, though attempts 

 in the reigns of Richard II. and Henr}^ IV. to settle estates 

 with substitutes, whose rights in the estate were to arise as 

 soon as the grantees or their issue should alienate, were frus- 

 trated by the judges before whom such actions were brought, 

 the earlier devices invented to elude the old entails were sus- 

 tained, and that of a common recovery first received indirect 

 legal sanction in the reign of Edward IV. Though originally 

 introduced by the clergy, so as to evade the statutes of Mort- 

 main, it was adopted by the laity in order to bar entails, and 

 was met by the other side (also prompted by clerical invention) 



