their Land, and this they get by flaying the skin off the poor. Seldom the third generation can call these inclosed grounds his own. … Every one trembles to set his hand first to them."
The last words refer to the deep-rooted belief that lands unjustly come by cause the dying out of the family of the robber. It seems that these Leicestershire enclosers tried to cheat the vengeance of God by signing their names in a round-robin to the document empowering them to enclose. Thus no man by signing first marked himself out as the leader in the business.
There can be no doubt that the lands these people were enclosing were in great part the "town-lands"—the "open field" which lay around every village from time immemorial, and was assigned in strips by lot each year to the families in that village. In ancient times the villeins had these lands and were called customary tenants; they lived off them, and, by way of rent, performed soccage. All such tenants were at once cleared off the monastery lands at the dissolution; but, in many parts, the "customary tenants" still remained on lands which did not change hands. The enclosers of the first half of the seventeenth century seem to have stopped at taking commons, coppices, etc. Now the town-lands themselves were seized upon.[1]
Enclosure, eviction, destitution, vagabondage. This is the dismal sequence.
CHAPTER XVII.—THE END OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM
THE feudal system had been slowly dying for a hundred and fifty years. Henry VII. struck at the very fife of its life when he forbade tenants to wear their lords' liveries, The new race of landlords, sprung up after the seizure of the Church lands, held their new possessions with none of that saving grace of reciprocal rights—rights balanced and tempered by duties—which was the central idea of feudality. The growing ascendency of the Crown,
- ↑ Villages are called "towns," and the places we call towns were then frequently called "markets" or "corporations," according as they were corporate or only market towns.
