The poor, it has been noted, are a persistent phenomenon, but there were beginning to be more poor than usual in sixteenth-century England. In spite of the extravagance of the court, and an extravagance in scattering subsidies abroad which made the most lavish domestic amusements seem penny-pinching, taxation was light and the realm prosperous. But prosperity, as usual, failed to distribute itself evenly. Wool prices were especially good and the market for unfinished homespun cloth excellent, so, as the merchants of the Staple chinked Flemish gold and the clothiers began to look for more looms, the country gentry began to keep more sheep, fencing in waste and common, pulling down cottages, stopping plows to provide grassland.
Thus, a thoughtful Englishman noted, “one covetous and insatiable cormorant may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground; the husbandmen to be thrust out of their own, either by coveyn and feud or by violent oppression; they must needs depart, poor, silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and their whole household, small in substance, much in number… Away they trudge, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. What can they do but steal and be hanged, or else go begging and then be cast in prison because they work not, whom no man will set to work? For one shepherd is enough to eat up that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof with husbandry many hands were requisite.”
Source:
Mattingly, Garrett. “Part II: England’s Queen (1509-1527); Chapter Three, Section iii” Catherine of Aragon. New York: Quality Paperback , 1990. 177-78. Print.
Original Source Listed:
More, Utopia, London, 1910, p. 356.
No comments, yet...