wever parvenu; to show how the whole of their
vast revenues depended upon, and was born from, the destruction of
monastic system, and to show by the example of one Thames-side family
how rapidly and from what sources was derived that economic power of
the squires which, when it came to the issue of arms, utterly
destroyed what was left of the national monarchy.

The new _regime_ had, however, other features about it which must not
be forgotten. For instance, in this growth of a new territorial body
upon the ruins of the monastic orders, in this sudden and portentous
increase of the wealth and power of the squires of England, the
mutability of the new system is perhaps as striking as any other of
its characteristics.

Manors or portions of manors which had been steadily fixed in the
possession and customs of these undying corporations for centuries
pass rapidly from hand to hand, and though there is sometimes a lull
in the process the uprooting reoccurs after each lull, as though
continuity and a strong tradition, which are necessarily attached for
good or for evil to a free peasantry, were as necessarily disregarded
by a landed plutocracy. There is not, perhaps, in all Europe a similar
complete carelessness for the traditions of the soil and for the
attachment of a family to an ancestral piece of land as is to be found
among these few thousand squires. The system remains, but the
individual families, the particular lineages, appear without
astonishment and are destroyed almost without regret. Aliens,
Orientals and worse, enter the ruling class, and are received without
surprise; names that recall the Elizabethans go out, and are not
mourned.

We are accustomed to-day, when we see some village estate in our own
country pass from an impoverished gentleman to some South African Jew,
to speak of the passing of an old world and of its replacement by a
new and a worse one. But an examination of the records which follow
the Dissolution of the monasteries may temper our sorrow. The wound
that was dealt in the sixteenth century to our general national
traditions affected the love of the land as profoundly as it did
religion, and the apparent antiquity which the trees, the stones, and
a certain spurious social feeling lend to these country houses is
wholly external.

Among the riparian manors of the Thames the fate of Bisham is very
characteristic of the general fate of monastic land. It was
surrendered, among other smaller