Consider a man with some L2000 a year travelling through modern Europe.  Prices, in the competition of modern commerce and the ease of modern travel, are levelled up very evenly throughout the area that he traverses.  Yet such a man, should he settle in a village of Spanish peasants, would appear of almost illimitable wealth, because he would have at his command an almost indefinite amount of those simple necessities which form the whole category of their consumable values.  Or again, let such a man settle in a place where the variety of consumable values is large, but where the distribution of wealth is fairly equal, and the small income, therefore, a normal social phenomenon—­as, for instance, among the lower middle class of Paris-there again his L2000 a year would be of much greater effect than in a society where wealth was unequally divided, for it would produce that effect in a medium where the satisfaction of nearly every individual around him was easily reached upon perhaps a tenth of such an income.

When all this is taken into consideration we can begin to see what the great monasteries were at the time of their dissolution.  It is hardly an exaggeration to multiply the list of mere values by 20 to bring it into the terms of modern currency.  A place worth close on L2000 a year (as was, for instance, Ramsey Abbey) meant an income of not far short of L40,000 a year in our money, to go by prices alone.  And that L40,000 a year was spent in an England in which nine-tenths of the luxury of our modern rich was unknown, in which the squire was usually but three or four times richer than one of his farmers, in which great wealth, where it existed, attached rather to an office than to a person.  In general, the multiple of 20 must be further multiplied by a coefficient which is not arithmetically determinable, but which we see I to be very large by a general comparison of the small, poor, and equable society of the early sixteenth century with the complex, huge, wealthy, and wholly iniquitous society of our own day.

Supposing, for instance, we take the high multiple of 20, and say that the revenues of Westminster at its dissolution in the first days of 1540 were some L80,000 a year in our modern money, we are far underestimating the economic position of Westminster in the State.  There are to-day many private men in London who dispose of as great an income, and who, for all their ostentation, are not remarkable; but the income of Westminster in the early sixteenth century, when wealth was far more equally divided than it is now, and when the accumulation of it was far less, was a very different matter to what we mean to-day by L80,000 a year.  It produced more of the effect which we might to-day imagine would be produced by a million.  The fortune of but very few families could so much as compare with it, and the fortunes of individual families, especially of wealthy families, were, during the existence of a strong king, highly perilous, and often cut short; nothing could pretend to equal such an economic power but the Crown, which then was, and which remained until the victory of the aristocracy in the Civil Wars, by far the richest legal personality in Britain.  The temptation to sack Westminster was something like the temptation presented to our financial powers to-day to get at the rubber of the Congo Basin or at the unexploited coal of Northern China.