276 History of the English Landed Interest. 



pears, there was nothing to vie with the Anjou peaches, the 

 Orleans plums, and the Poitier figs of France. As for grapes, 

 those of the French were as superior to those cultivated out of 

 doors here as they are nowadays. 



Yet the backward state of the English kitchen garden and 

 orchard neither imputes ignorance to the native ecclesiastic 

 nor impugns the leading position he held in all rural pursuits. 

 Climate, soil, and an insular position are circumstances quite 

 sufficient to account for the difference to which we have 

 alluded above, without seeking it in any such causes as a 

 national dislike to even priestly direction, or that growth of 

 sectarian antipathy to the monastic clergy from whose ranks 

 the ecclesiastical landlord was recruited. For the time had 

 arrived when the landed clergyman must fall ; when the 

 polished and carved pillars of his convent home should no 

 more be darkened by his stately shadow ; when his trim- 

 bordered gardens and " erberes " should be tended by other and 

 less expert fingers ; when the arches of the minster, with their 

 crochets and knobs of gold, should re-echo the admonitions of 

 other lips ; when its painted windows, glorious with coats of 

 arms and merchant's marks, should admit the sunshine on a 

 different ritual, and when the fertile lands should turn over 

 under ploughs guided by stranger hands.^ With the great 

 monastic landowner there went out of the country an import- 

 ant feature of mediaeval land tenure. It is strange how small 

 a gap in the landed interest this upheaval caused. 



The storm had been long brewing ; the monasteries had been 

 threatened with spoliation over and over again. The pro- 

 perty of alien priories had been seized as early as a.d. 1295 ; 

 other Church temporalities had been transferred from one 

 religious order to another ; and more than once in times of 

 danger the Sovereign had been prompted by the Commons to 

 seize ecclesiastical property in order to provide funds for the 

 national defence. In fact for many centuries prior to its dis- 

 solution, the people of Englaml seem to have treated Monastic 

 property as though they regarded it as State property. Mr. 



' See the description of a Dominican monastery in Piers Plowman's 

 Crede. 



