occasion aforesaid, is desolate and not inhabited, but occupied with beasts
and cattle, so that if hasty remedy be not provided, that Isle cannot long
be kept and defended, but open and ready to the hands of the king's
enemies, which God forbid. For remedy hereof, it is ordained and enacted
that no manner of person, of what estate, degree, or condition soever,
shall take any several farms more than one, whereof the yearly value shall
not exceed the sum of ten marks; and if any several leases afore this time
have been made to any person or persons of divers and sundry farmholds,
whereof the yearly value shall exceed that sum, then the said person or
persons shall choose one farmhold at his pleasure, and the remnant of his
leases shall be utterly void."[35]

An act, tyrannical in form, was singularly justified by its consequences.
The farms were rebuilt, the lands reploughed, the island repeopled; and in
1546, when a French army of sixty thousand men attempted to effect a
landing at St. Helen's, they were defeated and driven off by the militia of
the island and a few levies transported from Hampshire and the adjoining
counties.[36] The money-making spirit, however, lay too deep to be checked
so readily. The trading classes were growing rich under the strong rule of
the Tudors. Increasing numbers of them were buying or renting land; and the
symptoms complained of broke out in the following reign in many parts of
England. They could not choose but break out indeed; for they were the
outward marks of a vital change, which was undermining the feudal
constitution, and would by and bye revolutionise and destroy it. Such
symptoms it was impossible to extinguish; but the government wrestled long
and powerfully to hold down the new spirit; and they fought against it
successfully, till the old order of things had finished its work, and the
time was come for it to depart. By the 1st of the 7th of Henry VIII., the
laws of feudal tenure were put in force against the landed traders.
Wherever lands were converted from tillage to pasture, the lords of the fee