Ftirther Land Legislation Examined. 259 



with the want of cohesion in the ranks of both nobility and 

 clergy, endued Henry VIII. with powers little short of abso- 

 lutism, which he used to crush the nobility and half annihilate 

 the clergy, but never to bully the people, who therefore seldom 

 grudged him his supplies. Little did this despotic monarch 

 and his daughter Queen Elizabeth foresee that vast transi- 

 tion of landed property from lords to commons which followed 

 the dissolution of entails, the dissipation of church lands, and 

 the alienation of the Crown estates. Could they but have 

 lifted the im23enetrable veil of the future, they might have 

 anticipated and dispersed for ever the dangers which attended 

 the acquisition of supreme political power by the despised 

 commoner. Far better would it have been for the sovereign 

 had he borne an occasional rebuff at the hands of a too haughty 

 baronage, than to have eventually laid his head on the block 

 at the mandate of an insolent democracy. The nobles, too, 

 would have sooner cut off their right hands than their entails, 

 could they but have been brought to believe that the latter 

 process would later on have enabled a parliamentary majority 

 to vote their revered order an unnecessary factor in the national 

 constitution. 



Perhaps no student of English history, unless he has 

 watched closely the economic changes of each period, would 

 suspect how closely connected with the altered views of the 

 Commons was the change that now took place in the national 

 agriculture. Throughout the mediseval period a system of 

 rural polity prevailed which partook as much of the communal 

 economy of a tribal era as of that individualism initiated by 

 the overlord. The inclosure system just now coming into force 

 broke up the English villeinage as a whole, and by throwing 

 every man on his own resources built up in its stead that 

 sturdy class of yeoman farmer whose independence and energy 

 has stamped its impress on the entire nation. No longer tied 

 to one general form of husbandry, or hampered by communal 

 restrictions, or delayed by some individual's remissness, the 

 tenants of the inclosure system could cultivate their fields at 

 their own leisure, and sow them with any crop that individual 

 enterprise or ingenuity could suggest. No wonder then that 



