burnt for Anabaptist opinions. East Anglia, from its traditional connection with the Low Countries, was exactly the place to which they were most likely to come, and the poor disinherited sons of toil would be just the men to whom they would communicate their message, and by whom it would be received.
The immediate result of this insurrection and of those in other parts of England was the repeal of the atrocious law against so-called vagabonds and their children, passed in the first year of Edward VI., and a return to the more gentle legislation of which Henry VIII. was himself the author.[1]
What that tenderness was may be judged from the fact that Harrison in his description of England tells us that during Henry the Eighth's reign 72,000 great and petty thieves were put to death! This heroic surgery, however, did not extirpate the disease. It recommenced and became worse than ever. The same Chronicle tells us that in Elizabeth's reign rogues were trussed up apace, and there was not one year commonly wherein 300 or 400 of them were not devoured and eaten up by the gallows in one place or another. Adding to these numbers those who suffered under the reigns of Henry VII., Edward VI., and Mary, there can hardly have been less than 100,000 persons sent to the gallows under the Tudors. How many were whipped until their backs streamed with blood, how many were branded with the red-hot iron, or had their ears cropped, how many rotted in prison, how many died on the galleys in the Thames, how many were enslaved, no historian has told us; but it is evident these draconian laws engendered their own prey, for work them as they would the prisons were so full that to make room for fresh comers quantities of desperate persons were set free at each assize.
Such numbers had taken to this bandit life that there were not sufficient labourers to do the ordinary tillage of the land. What with rack rents, what with the competition of men who had made money in towns, what with the scarcity of labourers, what with the necessity of watching their flocks day and night, what with the
- ↑ Branding, however, was reintroduced by the 2 Jac. I., c. i, but then on the left shoulder instead of the breast or forehead, and with the letter R instead of an F.
