2yS History of the English Landed Interest. 



reduced to the old kingly fraud of debasing the national 

 coinage.^ 



The eifects, however, of this tyrannous act were neither 

 disastrous to the nation as a whole, nor to the landed interest 

 as a part. Setting aside religious controversy, it may be con- 

 cluded that the foreign drain on the country's resources of 

 papal tributes flowing through monkish channels, which had 

 originated the contemptuous phrase that England had become 

 " the Pope's milch cow," would have ultimately resulted in 

 national exhaustion ; and the stoppage of the leak by means, 

 no matter how drastic, restored that proper circulation of a 

 people's wealth which alone conduces to the general pros- 

 perity. Nor did the change of masters over so vast an area 

 of soil affect the ultimate welfare of the landed interest. It 

 seemed as though the mission of monasticism had been ful- 

 filled, and, like all anachronisms, it must now give way to 

 other systems better adapted to the go-ahead but heretical 

 times of freer thought and more peaceful commerce. 



Throughout the turbulent era of medisevalism the cloister's 

 walls had long preserved, and its inmates constantly repro- 

 duced, the evidences of the Christian faith, the educational 

 treatises of ancient classical authors, and the precious historical 

 records of an otherwise forgotten past. From generation to 

 generation holy fathers had handed down the traditions of 

 refinement and erudition. Out of their minds had flowed all 

 the learning of an era otherwise utterly and superstitiouslj'- 

 ignorant. But now the art of the printer could perform the 

 same offices infinitely more easily and surely. The assiduity 

 of the monks had reclaimed swamps and wastes ; their learn- 

 ing had improved soils, and their shrewd brains had invented 

 schemes which had vastly benefited not only the husbandman, 

 but the proprietor of the land. No doubt then in future the 

 landed gentry might sorely miss that legal acumen which had 

 so often baffled the hostility evinced to their schemes of land 

 monopolisation ; the yeomen might look in vain for their hints 

 on model farming ; the poor might starve for want of their 



' Kogers, Prices and Agriculture, Introduction to vol. iv. 



