better for the abbey lands; though the Russells, Seymours, Cavendishes, Pagets, Howards, Wriothesleys, Stanhopes, and the crowd of smaller courtiers and gentry who founded families and fortunes on the abbey lands no doubt were. Let us see what Protestants said all the time. I will take three witnesses—all Reformers.
CHAPTER XI.—THE TESTIMONY OF THE REFORMERS
MY first witness is Henry Brinklow, a bitter partisan of the Reformation; once a Grey Friar, who left his order, married, and became a furious denouncer of the Pope and all his works. He wrote what he calls the "Complaint of Roderick Mors."[1] It was written about 1542, and is a remonstrance to Parliament. He complains of "the inordinate enhancing of rents and taking of unreasonable fines," by "them to whom the King hath given and sold the lands of those imps of Antichrist, abbeys and nunneries." If the former holders had not "led us in a false faith, it had been more profitable, no doubt, for the commonwealth, that they had remained still in their lands. For why? They never enhanced their lands, nor took so cruel fines as do our temporal tyrants.[2] For they cannot
- ↑ In all these quotations I have modernised the spelling, for the convenience of readers not accustomed to the clumsy and uncertain spelling of the time.
- ↑ In France the difference between secular and ecclesiastical landlords was more marked even than in England. Pierre le Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, the friend and protector of Abelard, writing in the twelfth century, said: "It is known to all to what an extent the lay lords oppress their peasants, and their male and female serfs. Not content with the obligations imposed by custom, they claim goods with persons, persons with goods. Besides the usual tax, they pillage at their pleasure, three, four times in the year; they crush the people by innumerable services, and heavy and insupportable charges, till most of them are compelled to abandon the land which belongs to them, and take refuge with strangers. And what is worse still, they are not afraid to sell for vile money those whom Christ redeemed with His precious blood. … The monks do not act like this. They demand of the peasants only what is lawfully due; they do not vex them by exactions, they do not lay on intolerable taxes; when they are in need, they feed them. As for the serfs, they regard them as their brothers and sisters."
