he could not bully the
Abbot of Abingdon, or of Reading. And so long as these small parcels
were sanctioned by the power of the great houses, so long they were
certain to endure in the hands even of the smallest and the humblest
of the tenants. To-day in a modern village where a gentleman possesses
such an island of land, better still where several do, there at once
arises a tendency and an opportunity for the smaller men to acquire
and to retain. The present writer could quote a Sussex village in the
centre of which were to be found, but thirty years ago, more than
half-a-dozen freeholds. They disappeared: in its prosperity "The
Estate" extinguished them. The next heir in his embarrassment has
handed over the whole lump to a Levantine for a loan. Had the Old
Squire spared the small freeholds they would have come in as
purchasers and would have increased their number during the later
years when the principal landlord, his son, was gradually falling into
poverty and drink.

When the monasteries were gone the disappearance of the small men
gradually began. It was hastened by the extinction of that old
tradition which made the Church a customary landlord exacting quit
rents always less than the economic value of the land, and, what with
the security of tenure and the low rental, creating a large tenant
right. This tenant right vested in the lucky dependants of the Church
did indeed create intense local jealousies that help to account for
much of the antagonism to the monastic houses. But the future showed
that the benefits conferred, though irregular and privileged, were
more than the landless men could hope to expect when they had
exchanged the monk for the squire.

Finally, the Dissolution of the religious houses strengthened the
squires in the mere machinery of the constitution. Before that
Dissolution the House of Lords was a clerical house. Had you entered
the Council of Henry VII. when Parliament sat at Westminster you would
have seen a crowd of mitres and of croziers, bishops and abbots of the
great abbeys, among whom, here and there, were some thirty lay lords.
This clerical House of Lords, sprung largely from the populace,
possessed only of life tenure, was a very different thing from the
House of Lords that succeeded the Dissolution. _That_ immediately
became a committee, as it were, of the landed class; and a committee
of the landed class the House of Lords remained until quite the last
few years, when the pr