of his
subjects. By a deliberate act, the breaking up of ecclesiastical
tenure, the Crown offered an opportunity to the wealthier of those
subjects so enormously to increase their revenues as to overshadow
itself; in a little more than a century after the throwing open of the
monastic lands the King is an embarrassed individual, with every issue
of expenditure ear-marked, every source of it controlled, and his very
person, as it were, mortgaged to a plutocracy. The squires had not
only added to their revenues the actual amounts produced by the sites
and estates of the old religious foundations, they had been able by
this sudden accession of wealth to shoot ahead in their competition
with their fellow-citizens. The _counterweight_ to the power of the
local landlord disappeared with the disappearance of the monastery.

To show how the religious houses had furnished a powerful
counterweight by which the Central Government and the populace could
continue to oppose the growing power of the landed oligarchy, we may
take all the southern bank of the Thames from Buscot to Windsor. We
find at the time of the Conquest twelve royal manors and fifteen
religious; only the nine remaining were under private lords. Four and
a half centuries later, at the time of the Dissolution, the royal
manors have passed for the most part into private hands, but the
manors in the hands of the religious houses have actually increased in
number.

At this point it is important to note an economic phenomenon which
appears at first sight accidental, but which, on examination, is found
to spring from calculable political causes. At the moment of the
Dissolution it was apparently in the power of the Crown to have
concentrated the revenues of all these monastic manors into its own
hands, and this typical stretch of country, the Berkshire shore, shows
how economically powerful the Central Government of England might have
become had the property surrendered to the Crown been kept in the
hands of the King.

The modern reader will be tempted to inquire why it was not so kept.

Most certainly Henry intended to keep, if not the whole of it (for he
must reward his servants, and he was accustomed to do things largely),
yet at least the bulk of it in the Royal Treasury, and had he been
able to do so the Central Government of England would have become by
far the strongest thing in Europe. It is conceivable, though in
consideration of the national character doub