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certainly quite as cruel as those whom they superseded.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.
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.
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