on lands held of the king, whereon many houses had been rebuilt and much pasture reconverted to tillage; but on lands holden of other lords this was not the case, therefore the king was to have the moiety of the profits of such lands as had been converted from tillage to pasture since 4 Hen.  VII until a proper house was built and the land returned to tillage; but the Act only applied to fourteen counties therein enumerated.  The enclosing for sheep-runs still went on, however, often with ruthless selfishness; houses and townships were levelled, says Sir Thomas More, and nothing left standing except the church, which was turned into a sheep-house: 

     ’The towns go down, the land decays,
     Of corn-fields plain lays,
     Great men maketh nowadays
     A sheepcot of the church’,

said a contemporary ballad.

Latimer wrote, ’where there were a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.’  ’I am sorie to report it,’ says Harrison,[224] ’but most sorrowful of all to understand that men of great port and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers to have anie gaine at all that they themselves become graziers, butchers, tanners, sheepmasters, and woodmen, thereby to enrich themselves.’  The Act against pulling down farmhouses was evaded by repairing one room for the use of a shepherd; a single furrow was driven across a field to prove it was still under the plough; to avoid holding illegal numbers of sheep flocks were held in the names of sons and servants.[225] The country swarmed with heaps of miserable paupers, ‘sturdy and valiant’ beggars, and thieves who, though hanged twenty at a time on a single gallows, still infested all the countryside, their numbers being swollen by the dissolution of the monasteries and the breaking up of the bands of retainers kept by the great nobles.

Rents also were rising rapidly.  Latimer’s account of his father’s farm is too well known to be again quoted; his opinions were shared by all the writers of the day.  Sir William Forrest, about 1540, says that landlords now demand fourfold rents, so that the farmer has to raise his prices in proportion, and beef and mutton were so dear that a poor man could not ‘bye a morsell’.  ’Howe joyne they lordshyp to lordshyppe, manner to manner, ferme to ferme.  How do the rych men, and especially such as be shepemongers, oppresse the king’s people by devourynge their common pastures with the shepe so that the poore are not able to keepe a cowe, but are like to starve.  And yet when was beef ever so dere or mutton, wool now 8s. a stone.

‘Now’, says another, later in the century, ’I can never get a horse shoed under 10d. or 12d., when I have also seen the common pryce was 6d.  And cannot your neighbour remember that within these thirty years I could bye the best pigge or goose that I could lay my hand on for four pence which now costeth 12d., a good capon for 3d. or 4d., a hen for 2d., which now costeth me double and triple.’[226]