and ruined.  Including the dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of the chantry lands in 1549 by Edward VI, about one-fifteenth of the land of England changed hands at this time.  The transfer of the abbey lands to Henry’s favourites was very prejudicial to farming; it was a source of serious dislocation of agricultural industry, marked by all the inconvenience, injustice, and loss that attends a violent transfer of property.  It is probable also that many of the monastic lands were let on stock and land leases; and the stock was confiscated, with inevitable ruin to the tenant as well as the landlord.[202] And not only was a serious injury wrought to agriculture by the spoliation of a large number of landlords generally noted for their generosity and good farming, but with the religious houses disappeared a large number of consumers of country produce, the amount of which may be gathered from the following list of stores of the great Abbey of Fountains at the dissolution:  2,356 horned cattle, 1,326 sheep, 86 horses, 79 swine, and large quantities of wheat, oats, rye, and malt, with 392 loads of hay.[203] It must indeed have seemed to many as if the poor farmer was never to have any rest; no sooner were the long wars over and pestilences in some sense diminished, than the evils of enclosure and the dissolution of the monasteries came upon him.  Many ills were popularly ascribed to the fall of the monasteries; in an old ballad in Percy’s Reliques one of the characters says, in western dialect:—­

     ’Chill tell the what, good vellowe,
     Before the friers went hence,
     A bushel of the best wheate
     Was zold vor vorteen pence,
     And vorty eggs a penny
     That were both good and newe.’

NOTE.—­If any further proof were needed of the constant attention given by Parliament to agricultural matters, it would be furnished by the Acts for the destruction of vermin.[204] Our forefathers had no doubt that rooks did more harm than good, yearly destroying a ‘wonderfull and marvelous greate quantitie of corne and graine’; and destroying the ’covertures of thatched housery, bernes, rekes, stakkes, and other such like’; so that all persons were to do their best to kill them, ‘on pain of a grevous amerciament’.

FOOTNOTES: 

[184] Much the same tendencies were at work in other countries, especially in Germany.

[185] Slater, English Peasantry and Enclosure, 248.

[186] Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 113.

[187] Cal.  Pat.  Rolls, 1331, p. 127.

[188] Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 141.

[189] Ibid. i. 141.

[190] Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 160.

[191] Historical MSS.  Commission, 6th Report, p. 359.

[192] Cunningham, Industry and Commerce, i. 379.

[193] Ashley, English Woollen Industry, pp. 80-1.  Broadly speaking, there are four stages in the development of industry—­the family system, the guild system, the domestic system, and the factory system.