pitality for his poor neighbours, and some
alms he gave to the poor, and all this he did of the same farm, where he
that now hath it payeth sixteen pounds 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."

[Sidenote: Evictions and Enclosures]

Increase of rent ended with such tenants in the relinquishment of their
holdings, but the bitterness of the ejections which the new system of
cultivation necessitated was increased by the iniquitous means that were
often employed to bring them about. The farmers, if we believe More in
1515, were "got rid of either by fraud or force, or tired out with
repeated wrongs into parting with their property." "In this way it comes
to pass that these poor wretches, men, women, husbands, orphans, widows,
parents with little children, households greater in number than in wealth
(for arable farming requires many hands, while one shepherd and herdsman
will suffice for a pasture farm), all these emigrate from their native
fields without knowing where to go." The sale of their scanty household
stuff drove them to wander homeless abroad, to be thrown into prison as
vagabonds, to beg and to steal. Yet in the face of such a spectacle as
this we still find the old complaint of scarcity of labour, and the old
legal remedy for it in a fixed scale of wages. The social disorder, in
fact, baffled the sagacity of English statesmen, and they could find no
better remedy for it than laws against the further extension of
sheep-farms, and a formidable increase of public executions. Both were
alike fruitless. Enclosures and evictions went on as before and swelled
the numbers and the turbulence of the floating labour class. The riots
against "enclosures," of which we first hear in the time of Henry the
Sixth and which became a constant feature of the Tudor period, are
indications not only of a perpetual strife going on in every quarter
between the landowners and the smaller peasant class, but of a mass of
social discontent which was to seek constant outlets in violence and
revolution.

And into this mass of disorder the break-up of the military households and
the return of wounded and disabled soldiers from the wars introduced a
dangerous leaven of outrage and crime. England for the first time saw a
distinct criminal class in the organized gangs of robbers which began to
infest the roads and were always ready to gather round