of Regius Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge was a slight compensation. The dispersion of valuable monastic libraries, moreover, was to some extent counteracted by the efforts of Leland, the antiquary, in his tour through England to preserve some of their choicest treasures for the King.
Altogether, no such sweeping changes had been known for centuries. As regards the land some of the results may have been in the end for good. Better husbandry and new modes of farming, no doubt, succeeded in developing more fully the resources of the soil. A check, too, was doubtless placed on indiscriminate charity. But problems were raised which were new in kind. At the beginning of the reign the chief evils felt/were depopulation, vagrancy, and thieves. Economic laws, of course, were not understood; and attempts were made by legislation to prevent husbandmen's dwellings being thrown down by landlords, who found it profitable to devote arable land to pasture to increase the growth of wool. The frequent repetition of these Acts only shows how ineffective they were in practice; and in the beginning of the seventeenth century they had become so complicated that Coke rejoiced at their repeal. But the evils of vagrancy and poverty assumed new forms. The precise effect of the fall of the monasteries upon pauperism is not altogether easy to estimate; but the statement of Chapuys removes all doubt that it was the immediate cause of bitter penury. The evidence of the Statute-book on this point requires careful interpretation; for it was only in a later age that law was invoked to do the duty of charity. Down to the middle of Henry VIII's reign repeated Acts had been passed for the punishment of sturdy beggars and vagabonds; but it gradually came to be perceived that this problem could not be dealt with apart from relief of the deserving poor. In 1536 the same session of Parliament which dissolved the smaller monasteries passed an Act for the systematic maintenance of paupers by charitable collections; and, in the first year of Edward VI, Parliament for the first time attempted to deal with the two problems together, with penalties of atrocious severity against vagabonds. But severity was futile; the Act was speedily repealed, and under Elizabeth a regular system of Poor Law relief was established.
From the beginning of his reign Henry had been profuse in his expenditure. His tastes were luxurious and he gratified them to a large extent at the cost of others. He made Wolsey present him with Hampton Court, after the Cardinal's fall he took York Place and called it Whitehall; he purchased from Eton College the Hospital of St James, made it into a palace, and laid out St James' Park; he built Nonsuch and made another large park in the neighbourhood. Before he had been many years King, the enormous wealth left him by his father must have been nearly all dissipated. Yet the subsidies he required from Parliament were very moderate till 1523, when, as we have seen, unprecedented
