liams got two foundations handed over to
him--both in Huntingdon, and together amounting in value to about L500
a year.

We have seen on an earlier page how extremely difficult or impossible
it is to estimate exactly in modern money the figures of the
Dissolution. We have agreed that to multiply by twenty for a maximum
is permissible, but that even then we shall not have anything like the
true relation of any particular income to the general standard of
wealth in a time when England was so much smaller than our England of
to-day, and in an England where wealth had been until that moment so
well divided, and especially in an England where the objects both of
luxury and expenditure were so utterly different to our own: where all
textile fabric was, for instance, so much dearer in proportion to food
than it is now, and where yet a man could earn in a few weeks' labour
what would with us be capital enough to stock a small farm.

It is safe to say, however, that when Cromwell had got his young
relation--whatever that relationship was--into possession of the two
foundations in Huntingdon, he had set him up as a considerable local
gentleman, and whether it was the inheritance of the Cromwell blood
through his mother, or something equally unpleasant in the heredity of
his father, Morgan, young Williams ("alias Cromwell") did not stick
there.

Early in 1540 he swallowed bodily the enormous revenues of Ramsey
Abbey.

Now to appreciate what that meant we must return to the case we have
already established in the case of Westminster. Westminster almost
alone of the great foundations remains with a certain splendour
attached to it; we cannot, indeed, see all the dependencies as they
used to stand to the south of the great Abbey. We cannot see the
lively and populous community dependent upon it; still less can we
appreciate what a figure it must have cut in the days when London was
but a large country town, and when this walled monastic community
stood in its full grandeur surrounded by its gardens and farms. But
still, the object lesson afforded by the Abbey yet remains visible to
us. We can see it as it was, and we know that its income must have
represented in the England at that time infinitely more in outward
effect than do to-day the largest private incomes of our English
gentry: a Solomon Joel, for instance, or a Rothschild, does not occupy
so great a place in modern England as did Westminster, at the close of
the Middle