As to the first, it put the National Government, dependent as it still largely was upon the customary and fixed payments, into a perpetual embarrassment.  Where it still received nothing but the customary shilling, it had to pay out three for material and wages, whose price had risen and was rising.  In this embarrassment, in spite of every subterfuge and shift, the Crown was in perpetual, urgent, and increasing need.  Rigid and novel taxes were imposed, loans were raised and not repaid, but something far more was needed to save the situation, with prices still rising as the years advanced.  Ready money from those already in possession of perhaps half the arable land of England was an obvious source, and into their pockets flowed, as by the force of gravitation, the funded wealth which had once supported the old religion.  Hardly ever at more than ten years’ purchase, sometimes at far less, the Crown turned its new rentals into ready money, and spent that capital as though it had been income.

The Tudor character was a second cause.

It is a pleasing speculation to conceive that, if some character other than a Tudor had been upon the throne, not all at least of this national inheritance would have been dissipated.  One can imagine a character—­tenacious, pure, narrow and subtle, intent upon dignity, and with a natural suspicion of rivals—­which might have saved some part of the estates for posterity.  Charles I., for example, had he been born 100 years earlier, might very well have done the thing.

But the Tudors, for all their violence, were fundamentally weak.  There was always some vice or passion to interrupt the continuity of their policy—­even Mary, who was not the offspring of caprice, had inherited the mental taint of the Spanish house—­and before the last of the family had died, while still old men were living who, as children, had seen the monasteries, nearly all this vast treasure had found its way into the pockets of the squires.  In the middle of the seventeenth century every one of these villages is under a private landlord:  before the close of it even the theoretical link of their feudal dependence upon the Crown is snapped:  and the two centuries between that time and our own have seen the power of the new landlords steadily maintained and latterly vastly increased.

Apart from the transfer of the monastic manors there was yet another way in which the Dissolution of the religious houses helped on the establishment of the landed oligarchy in the place of the old National Government.  The monasteries had owned not only these full manorial rights, but also numerous parcels of land scattered up and down in manors whose lordship was already in private hands.  These parcels, like the small lay freeholds, which they resembled, formed nuclei of resistance to the increasing power of the squires.

The point is of very considerable importance, though not easy to seize for anyone unacquainted with the way in which the territorial oligarchy has been built up or ignorant of the present conditions of English village life.