redistributed This was confiscated, and appropriated, not to public
purposes, but, as usually happens in revolutions, to the use of the
astutest of the revolutionists. Among these, John Russell, afterward Earl
of Bedford, stood preeminent. Russell had no particular pedigree or
genius, save the acquisitive genius, but he made himself useful to Henry
in such judicial murders as that of Richard Whiting, Abbot of Glastonbury.
He received in payment, among much else, Woburn Abbey, which has since
remained the Bedford country seat, and Covent Garden or Convent Garden,
one of the most valuable parcels of real estate in London. Covent Garden
the present duke recently sold, anticipating, perhaps, some such
legislation as ruined the monks and made his ancestor's fortune. As for
the monks whom Henry evicted, they wandered forth from their homes
beggars, and Henry hanged all of them whom he could catch as vagrants. How
many perished as counterpoise for the peasant massacres and Lollard
burnings of the foregoing two centuries can never be known, nor to us is
it material. What is essential to mark, from the legal standpoint, is that
while this long and bloody revolution, of one hundred and fifty years,
displaced a favored class and confiscated its property, it raised up in
their stead another class of land monopolists, rather more greedy and
certainly quite as cruel as those whom they superseded. Also, in spite of
all opposition, labor did make good its claim to participate more or less
fully in the ownership of the property it cultivated, for while the
holding of the ancient villein grew to be well recognized in the royal
courts as a copyhold estate, villeinage itself disappeared.

Yet, unless I profoundly err, in the revolution of the sixteenth century,
the law somewhat conspicuously failed in its function of moderating
competition, for I am persuaded that competition of another kind
sharpened, and shortly caused a second civil war bloodier than the Wars of
the Roses.