verses. 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