a pound." … "Then these grasiers, inclosers, and rent-rearers are hinderers of the King's honour. For whereas have been a great many of house-holders and inhabitants, there is now but a shepherd and his dog. … My lords and masters, I say also that all such proceedings … do intend plainly to make the yeomanry slavery and the clergy slavery. … We of the clergy had too much, but that is taken away, and now we have too little." He gives an example of the vicar of a great market town, with divers hamlets, who has only twelve or thirteen marks a year—not enough to buy books, or give his neighbour drink. And then comes the famous passage about his father:
"My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of £3 or £4 by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for 100 sheep, and my mother milked 30 kine. He was able and did find the King an harness, with himself and his horse, while he came to the place that he should receive the King's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness, when he went unto Blackheath field.[1] He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the King's Majesty now. He married my sisters with £5 or 20 nobles a piece, so that he brought them up in godliness, and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours. And some alms he gave to the poor, and all this did he of the said farm. Where he that now hath it, payeth £16 by year or more, and is not able to do anything for his Prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor. Thus all the enhancing and rearing goeth to your private commodity and wealth."
He speaks of the "good statutes" made touching enclosures, "but in the end there cometh nothing forth." But this is the devil's work, and I know his intent. It is by destroying the yeomen to destroy the faith of Christ. "For by yeomen's sons the faith of Christ is and hath been maintained chiefly." Two things comfort me, or I should despair of redress in these matters. One is that when the
- ↑ In 1497, when the Cornish men rebelled against a subsidy, and marched into Kent, as "the freest part of England."
