ry, who was not the offspring of caprice, had inherited
the mental taint of the Spanish house--and before the last of the
family had died, while still old men were living who, as children, had
seen the monasteries, nearly all this vast treasure had found its way
into the pockets of the squires. In the middle of the seventeenth
century every one of these villages is under a private landlord:
before the close of it even the theoretical link of their feudal
dependence upon the Crown is snapped: and the two centuries between
that time and our own have seen the power of the new landlords
steadily maintained and latterly vastly increased.

Apart from the transfer of the monastic manors there was yet another
way in which the Dissolution of the religious houses helped on the
establishment of the landed oligarchy in the place of the old National
Government. The monasteries had owned not only these full manorial
rights, but also numerous parcels of land scattered up and down in
manors whose lordship was already in private hands. These parcels,
like the small lay freeholds, which they resembled, formed nuclei of
resistance to the increasing power of the squires.

The point is of very considerable importance, though not easy to seize
for anyone unacquainted with the way in which the territorial
oligarchy has been built up or ignorant of the present conditions of
English village life.

At the close of the Middle Ages the lord of a manor in England, though
possessed of a larger proportion of the land than were his colleagues
in other countries, but rarely could claim so much as one half of the
acreage of a parish; the rest was common, in which his rights were
strictly limited and defined, to the advantage of the poor, and also
side by side with common was to be found a number of partially and
wholly independent tenures, over which the squire had little or no
control, from copyholds which did furnish him occasional sums of
money, to freeholds which were practically independent of him.

The monasteries possessed parcels of this sort everywhere. To give but
one example: Chertsey had twenty acres of freehold pasturage in the
Manor of Cobham; but it is useless to give examples of a thing which
was as common as the renting of a house to-day. Now these small
parcels formed a most valuable foundation upon which the independence
of similar lay parcels could repose. The squire might be tempted to
bully a four-acre man out of his land, but