3IO History of the English Landed Interest. 



price. Farm rents rose generallj' in the reign of Henry VIII. ^ 

 an event which cannot be better illustrated than by relating 

 the personal experience cited by Latimer in one of his sermons. 

 The preacher's father, who as a 3'eoman, though possessing no 

 land of his own, held at a rent under £4 per annum, a farm 

 containing sufficient land to employ six men, and carry a 

 hundred sheep and thirty cows. He sends his son to school 

 and college, dowers his daughters with £5 each on their 

 marriage, provides the king a horse and man, entertains his 

 neighbours and supports the local poor out of the proceeds of 

 cultivation. His son succeeds to the same tenancy at about 

 the same time as Henry VIII. did to the throne. He pays four 

 times as much rent, and his profits are hardl}' sufficient to 

 obtain for him the bare necessaries of life. Latimer cites his 

 own case as typical of his class, and goes on to speak in still 

 more despondent tones of the j-eoman cottager, who had been 

 so hard pushed by the new fashion of enclosing fields as to- 

 have looked more to his profits as a day labourer for subsist- 

 ence, than to the small holding which was henceforth to be- 

 the sole equivalent for his former common rights. And 3'et 

 Fitzherbert was right when he advocated the system, as is 

 evidenced b}- W. S. Gentleman's treatise,^ written sixty years- 

 after, in 1581, in which he proves that Essex, Kent, North- 

 amptonshire, and other counties are most prosperous b}' reason 

 of their more numerous enclosures. 



The general picture that may be drav/n of the Tudor landed 

 classes from all that has been just said cannot be a very happy 

 one. The conflict between the two interests had been em- 

 bittered by the litigious propensities of the fresh owners. It is 

 true that the rise in wages had considerably ameliorated the con- 

 dition of the labouring communitj'", but the small farmers and 

 landowners were greatly impoverished. The former, we have 

 shown, resorted to hired labour in order to eke out their pre- 

 carious existence on the farm, and the latter converted their 

 arable lands into pasture, and went into London chambers in 



' A (-'ompondious or liriof Kxamincdioii of corfaiii ordinary compla/iita 

 of d/rers of our Cuuntrymen in f/icsc our days. By W. S. Qcntleiuau- 

 1581. 



