Zbc t^u^or period. 



CHAPTER XXI, 



THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH AND THE EFFECTS OF THE FALL 

 OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL LANDLORDS ON THE ENGLISH 

 LANDED INTERESTS. 



In Angevin days the clergy not only owned half the culti- 

 vated lands of this country, but claimed a third of the knights' 

 fees. Indeed, at this period of history the influence of the 

 Church can scarcely be overrated. In Henry I.'s reign Baker, 

 ill his Chronicle, represents all the labour in the kingdom em- 

 ployed in the erection of monasteries ; and Professor Rogers, 

 in his Six Centuries of WorJc mid Wages,^ estimates the ecclesi- 

 astical population, exclusive of the regular clergy and begging 

 friars, as about one in fifty-two of the entire population, male 

 and female, above the age of fourteen. 



Besides the monastic and secular clergy, there was the pro- 

 fessional class, which included architects, lawyers, scribes, 

 physicians and schoolmasters, men who were generally in holy 

 orders. They wrote our books, drew up our wills, planned our 

 houses, invented our laws (often plotted their evasion), farmed 

 our land, practised phlebotomy on us, dispensed drugs to us, 

 taught in our schools, preached in our churches, and begged at 

 our doors. But the clergyman under the twofold guise of land 

 proprietor and farmer is of most interest to a work of this kind. 

 Soils cultivated by Churchmen were remarkable for their fer- 

 tility, because abundant capital and a knowledge of ancient 

 agricultural writings enabled their proprietors to farm them in 

 the best possible way then known to the civilized European. 



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