actice of purchase has admitted to it brewers,
money-lenders, Colonial speculators, and, indeed, anyone who can
furnish the sum required by a woman or a secret party fund. A concrete
example is often of value in the illustration of a general process,
and at the expense of a digression I propose to lay before the reader
as excellent a picture as we have of the way in which the Dissolution
of the monasteries not only emphasised the position of the existing
territorial class, but began to recruit it with elements drawn from
every quarter, and, while it established the squires in power, taught
them to be careless of the origin or of the end of the families
admitted to their rank.

For this purpose I can find no better example than that of the family
of Williams, which by the licence of custom we have come to call
"Cromwell"; the most famous member of this family stands out in
English history as the typical squire who led the Forces of his Order
against the impoverished Monarchy, and so reduced that emblem of
Government to the simulacrum which it still remains.

Putney, by Thames-side, was the home of their very lowly beginnings.

Of the descent of the Williams throughout the Middle Ages nothing is
known. Much later they claimed relationship with certain heads of the
Welsh clans, but the derivation is fantastic. At any rate a certain
Williams was keeping a public-house in Putney in the generation which
saw the first of the Reformers. His name was Morgan, and the "Ap
William" or "Williams" which he added to that name was an affix due to
the Welsh custom of calling a man by his father's name; for surnames
had not yet become a rule in the Principality. He may have come, and
probably did, from Glamorganshire, and that is all we can say about
him; though we must admit some weight in Leland's contemporary
evidence that his son, Richard, was born in the same county, at a
place called Llanishen. Anyhow, there he is, keeping his public-house
in the first years of the sixteenth century by the riverside at
Putney.

There lived in the same hamlet (which was a dependency of the manor of
Wimbledon) a certain Cromwell or Crumwell, who was also called Smith;
but this obscure personage should most probably be known by the first
of these two names, for his humble business was the shoeing of horses,
and the second appellation was very probably a nickname arising from
that trade. He also added beer-selling to his other work, and this
commo