Fifteen years before the convents were seized, Sir Thomas More wrote
_Utopia_, in whose opening chapter More has given an account of a
dinner at Cardinal Morton's, who, by the way, presided in the Star
Chamber. At this dinner one of the cardinal's guests reflected on the
thievish propensities of Englishmen, who were to be found throughout the
country hanged as felons, sometimes twenty together on a single gallows.
More protested that this was not the fault of the poor who were hanged,
but of rich land monopolists, who pastured sheep and left no fields for
tillage. According to More, these capitalists plucked down houses and even
towns, leaving nothing but the church for a sheep-house, so that "by covin
and fraud, or by violent oppression, ... or by wrongs and injuries," the
husbandmen "be thrust out of their own," and, "must needs depart away,
poor, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children,
widows." The dissolution of the convents accelerated the process, and more
and more of the weaker yeomanry were ruined and evicted. It is
demonstrated that the pauperization of the feebler rural population went
on apace by the passage of poor-laws under Elizabeth, which, in the Middle
Ages, had not been needed and, therefore, were unknown. This movement,
described by More, was the beginning of the system of enclosing common
lands which afterward wrought havoc among the English yeomen, and which, I
suppose, contributed more than any other single cause to the Great
Rebellion of the seventeenth century. In the mediaeval village the owners
of small farms enjoyed certain rights in the common land of the community,
affording them pasturage for their cattle and the like, rights without
which small farming could not be made profitable. These commons the land
monopolists appropriated, sometimes giving some shadow of compensation,
sometimes by undisguised force, but on the whole compensation amounted to
so little that the enclosure of the commons must rank as confiscation.
Also this seizure of property would doubtless have caused a convulsion as