tions, it remains certain that the absorption of the small farms, the enclosure system, and the increase of grazing farms had assumed proportions mischievous and dangerous. Leases as they fell in could not obtain renewal; the copyholder whose farm had been held by his forefathers so long that custom seemed to have made it his own, found his fines or his rent quadrupled, or himself without alternative expelled. The Act against the pulling down farm-houses had been evaded by the repair of a room which might be occupied by a shepherd; a single furrow would be driven across a meadow of a hundred acres, to prove that it was still under the plough. The great cattle owners, to escape the sheep statutes, held their stock in the names of their sons or servants; the highways and the villages were covered in consequence with forlorn and outcast families, now reduced to beggary, who had been the occupiers of comfortable holdings; and thousands of dispossessed tenants made their way to London, clamouring in the midst of their starving children at the doors of the courts of law for redress which they could not obtain.[1]
- ↑ For authorities, see Becon's Jewel of Joy; Discourse of Bernard Gilpin, printed in Strype's Memorials; Instructions to the Commissioners of Enclosures, Ibid.; Address of Mr Hales, Ibid.; and a Draft of an Act of Parliament presented to the House of Commons in 1548, MS. Domestic, Edward VI. State Paper Office. The suffering of the innocent was a shield for the vagabond. Lever, the preacher, exclaims, 'Oh, merciful Lord, what a number of poor, feeble, blind, halt, lame, sickly,—yea, with idle vagabonds and dissembling caitiffs mixed with them—lie and creep begging in the miry streets of London and Westminster. It is the common custom with covetous landlords to let their housing so decay, that the farmers shall be fain for
