The new regime had, however, other features about it which must not be forgotten.  For instance, in this growth of a new territorial body upon the ruins of the monastic orders, in this sudden and portentous increase of the wealth and power of the squires of England, the mutability of the new system is perhaps as striking as any other of its characteristics.

Manors or portions of manors which had been steadily fixed in the possession and customs of these undying corporations for centuries pass rapidly from hand to hand, and though there is sometimes a lull in the process the uprooting reoccurs after each lull, as though continuity and a strong tradition, which are necessarily attached for good or for evil to a free peasantry, were as necessarily disregarded by a landed plutocracy.  There is not, perhaps, in all Europe a similar complete carelessness for the traditions of the soil and for the attachment of a family to an ancestral piece of land as is to be found among these few thousand squires.  The system remains, but the individual families, the particular lineages, appear without astonishment and are destroyed almost without regret.  Aliens, Orientals and worse, enter the ruling class, and are received without surprise; names that recall the Elizabethans go out, and are not mourned.

We are accustomed to-day, when we see some village estate in our own country pass from an impoverished gentleman to some South African Jew, to speak of the passing of an old world and of its replacement by a new and a worse one.  But an examination of the records which follow the Dissolution of the monasteries may temper our sorrow.  The wound that was dealt in the sixteenth century to our general national traditions affected the love of the land as profoundly as it did religion, and the apparent antiquity which the trees, the stones, and a certain spurious social feeling lend to these country houses is wholly external.

Among the riparian manors of the Thames the fate of Bisham is very characteristic of the general fate of monastic land.  It was surrendered, among other smaller monasteries, in 1536, though it enjoyed an income corresponding to about L6000 a year of our money, and of course very much more than L6000 a year in our modern way of looking at incomes.  It was thus a wealthy place, and how it came to be included in the smaller monasteries is not quite clear.  At any rate it was restored immediately after.  The monks of Chertsey were housed in it, as we have already seen, and the revenues of several of the smaller dissolved houses were added to it; so that it was at the moment of its refoundation about three times as wealthy as it had been before.  The prior who had surrendered in 1536, one Barlow, was made Bishop of St Asaphs, and in turn of St. Davids, Bath and Wells, and Chichester; he is that famous Barlow who took the opportunity of the Reformation to marry, and whose five daughters all in turn married the Protestant bishops of the