de in his reign, as that for population, those against
retainers, and that for alienations.

By the statute of population, all houses of husbandry that were used
with twenty acres of ground and upward, were to be maintained and kept
up forever with a competent proportion of land laid to them, and in no
wise, as appears by a subsequent statute, to be severed. By which means
the houses being kept up, did of necessity enforce dwellers; and the
proportion of land to be tilled being kept up, did of necessity enforce
the dweller not to be a beggar or cottager, but a man of some substance,
that might keep hinds and servants and set the plough a-going. This
did mightily concern, says the historian of that prince, the might and
manhood of the kingdom, and in effect amortize a great part of the lands
to the hold and possession of the yeomanry or middle people, who living
not in a servile or indigent fashion, were much unlinked from dependence
upon their lords, and living in a free and plentiful manner, became
a more excellent infantry, but such a one upon which the lords had so
little power, that from henceforth they may be computed to have been
disarmed.

And as they had lost their infantry after this manner, so their cavalry
and commanders were cut off by the statute of retainers; for whereas it
was the custom of the nobility to have younger brothers of good houses,
mettled fellows, and such as were knowing in the feats of arms about
them, they who were longer followed with so dangerous a train, escaped
not such punishments as made them take up.

Henceforth the country lives and great tables of the nobility, which
no longer nourished veins that would bleed for them, were fruitless and
loathsome till they changed the air, and of princes became courtiers;
where their revenues, never to have been exhausted by beef and mutton,
were found narrow, whence followed racking of rents, and at length sale
of lands, the riddance through the statute of alienations being rendered
far more quick and facile than formerly it had been through the new
invention of entails.

To this it happened that Coraunus, the successor of that King,
dissolving the abbeys, brought, with the declining state of the
nobility, so vast a prey to the industry of the people, that the balance
of the commonwealth was too apparently in the popular party to be
unseen by the wise Council of Queen Parthenia, who, converting her reign
through the perpetual love tricks tha