treme want; so that you need not fear that those well-
shaped and strong men (for it is only such that noblemen love to keep
about them till they spoil them), who now grow feeble with ease and are
softened with their effeminate manner of life, would be less fit for
action if they were well bred and well employed. And it seems very
unreasonable that, for the prospect of a war, which you need never have
but when you please, you should maintain so many idle men, as will always
disturb you in time of peace, which is ever to be more considered than
war. But I do not think that this necessity of stealing arises only from
hence; there is another cause of it, more peculiar to England.' 'What is
that?' said the Cardinal: 'The increase of pasture,' said I, 'by which
your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be
said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for
wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer
wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy
men, the dobots! not contented with the old rents which their farms
yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no
good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the
course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the
churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As
if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those
worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitudes; for when
an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose
many thousand acres of ground, the owners, as well as tenants, are turned
out of their possessions by trick or by main force, or, being wearied out
by ill usage, they are forced to sell them; by which means those
miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and
young, with their poor but numerous families (since country business
requires many hands), are all forced to change their seats, not knowing
whither to go; and they must sell, almost for nothing, their household
stuff, which could not bring them much money, even though they might stay
for a buyer. When that little money is at an end (for it will be soon
spent), what is left for them to do but either to steal, and so to be
hanged (God knows how justly!), or to go about and beg? and if they do
this they are put in prison as idle vagabonds, while t