business, could no longer be made to pay. The importance of a feudal noble
lay in the body of retainers who followed his banner, and therefore the
feudal tendency always was to overcharge the estate with military
expenditure. Hence, to protect themselves from creditors, the landlords
passed the Statute _De Donis_ [Footnote: 13 Edw. I, c. I (A.D.
1284).] which made entails inalienable. Toward the end of the Wars of the
Roses, however, the pressure for money, which could only be raised by
pledging their land, became too strong for the feudal aristocracy. Edward
IV, who was a very able man, perceived, pretty early in his reign, that
his class could not maintain themselves unless their land were put upon a
commercial basis. Therefore he encouraged the judges, in the collusive
litigation known to us as Taltarum's Case, decided in 1472, to set aside
the Statute _De Donis_, by the fiction of the Common Recovery. The
concession, even so, came too late. The combination against them had grown
too strong for the soldiers to resist. Other classes evolved by
competition wanted their property, and these made Henry Tudor king of
England to seize it for them.

Henry's work was simple enough. After Bosworth, with a competent police
force at hand to execute process, he had only to organize a political
court, and to ruin by confiscatory fines all the families strong enough,
or rash enough, to maintain garrisoned houses. So Henry remodelled the
Star Chamber, in 1486, [Footnote: 3 Henry 7, C 1.] to deal with the
martial gentry, and before long a new type of intelligence possessed the
kingdom.

The feudal soldiers being disposed of, it remained to evict the monks, who
were thus left without their natural defenders. No matter of faith was
involved. Henry VIII boasted that in doctrine he was as orthodox as the
pope. There was, however, an enormous monastic landed property to be