e poor farmer was never to have any rest; no sooner
were the long wars over and pestilences in some sense diminished, than
the evils of enclosure and the dissolution of the monasteries came
upon him. Many ills were popularly ascribed to the fall of the
monasteries; in an old ballad in Percy's _Reliques_ one of the
characters says, in western dialect:--

'Chill tell the what, good vellowe,
Before the friers went hence,
A bushel of the best wheate
Was zold vor vorteen pence,
And vorty eggs a penny
That were both good and newe.'

NOTE.--If any further proof were needed of the constant attention
given by Parliament to agricultural matters, it would be furnished by
the Acts for the destruction of vermin.[204] Our forefathers had no
doubt that rooks did more harm than good, yearly destroying a
'wonderfull and marvelous greate quantitie of corne and graine'; and
destroying the 'covertures of thatched housery, bernes, rekes,
stakkes, and other such like'; so that all persons were to do their
best to kill them, 'on pain of a grevous amerciament'.

FOOTNOTES:

[184] Much the same tendencies were at work in other countries,
especially in Germany.

[185] Slater, _English Peasantry and Enclosure_, 248.

[186] Smyth, _Lives of the Berkeleys_, i. 113.

[187] _Cal. Pat. Rolls_, 1331, p. 127.

[188] _Lives of the Berkeleys_, i. 141.

[189] Ibid. i. 141.

[190] _Lives of the Berkeleys_, i. 160.

[191] _Historical MSS. Commission, 6th Report_, p. 359.

[192] Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i. 379.

[193] Ashley, _English Woollen Industry_, pp. 80-1. Broadly speaking,
there are four stages in the development of industry--the family
system, the guild system, the domestic system, and the factory system.

[194] _Hist. Reg. Angl._, p. 120.

[195] Gisborne, _Agricultural Essays_, pp. 186-9.

[196] _Antiquities of Warwickshire_ 2nd ed., p. 51.

[197] Denton, _England in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 135.

[198] See Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i. 331; Denton,
_England in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 127.

[199] 7 Hen. VIII, c. 1.

[200] Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i. 489.

[201] Dissolution of small monasteries, 1536; of greater, 1539-40.

[202] Thorold Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, iv. 129.

[203] Dugdale, _Monasticon_, v, 291.

[204] 24 Hen. VIII, c. 10; 8 Eliz. c. 15; 14 Eliz. c. 11; 39 Eliz. c.
18.

CHAPTER VIII

FITZHERBERT.--THE REGUL