stand still. Burghers began to marry their sons and daughters to insolvent nobility, and Henry, who aimed at creating an aristocracy dependent on himself, frequently recruited the diminished ranks of the old peers from among burghers, lawyers and borough magistrates. This growth of the royal court at the expense of the feudal castle filled London with raw courtiers1, drawn from all classes, who attached themselves to men of influence, partly to see the world, and partly to advance their own fortunes under shelter of a great name. Such a suddenly enriched or ennobled society was not likely to be reconciled to the simple, rough life of their forefathers. Luxury and excitement became necessities and received their comment in contemporary literature. In 1530, the Address in verse to new-fanglers was prefixed to Chaucer's Assembly of Fowls. Wynkyn de Worde issued three editions of A Treatise of a Gallant, which laments the pride, avarice and ambition of the new fledged courtier and his love of quarrel. The tract deplores the influx of foreigners, whose phraseology was corrupting the purity of the English idiom, and censures the Englishman's admiration for French customs and French vices. At this time, the example of Henry VIII and his sister Margaret made dice and card-playing fashionable and the pleasures of gambling gave great opportunities to the gentleman thief, who now became a perpetual menace to society, and, in 1532, apparently, was printed a Manifest detection of the most vyle and detestable use of dice play and other practices like the same. This tract is one of the first great exposures of the age, throwing into relief the practices and resources of those who fall from the hardness of virtuous living to the delicacy and boldness of uncareful idleness and gainfull deceit.' We learn how the provincial is met at Paul's by a gentleman with three or four servants in gay liveries, an acquaintance is cleverly established, the 'couzin' is unwittingly introduced to the gaming-house and, eventually, he is fleeced. Elaborate tricks to entice the 'couzin' with different kinds of cogged dice, even the name of the most reliable maker, canting terms, the mode of making cards and other forms of imposture and thievery, are all made public. These disclosures are presented in a lively dialogue, in clear, simple English. The sixteenth century love of anecdote is gratified and the conversation is carried on between two welldefined characters, the one a raw courtier, the other an experienced man of the world.

1 Cf. a poem by Richard Edwards in The Paradyse of Daynty Devises, beginning In Youthfull yeares when first my young desires began

To pricke me forth to serve in court.

Brinklow's Complaynt of Roderyck Mors 99

The triumph of the reformation under Henry VIII and the suppression of the monasteries had raised great hopes in those churchmen who looked on Rome as the root of all evil. But the disorganisation of society always brings abuses to the surface and the venality of judges, the chicanery and delays of law-suits, the tyranny of the powerful and the oppression of the poor and defenceless, now became doubly apparent. The prevailing clearsightedness as to the evils of both past and present found vigorous expression in Brinklow's Complaynt of Roderyck Mors. Brinklow's sectarian hatred of popery precludes the slightest regret for the abolition of the old religion; in fact, he laments that the 'body and tayle of the pope is not banisshed with his name.' At the same time, his sense of justice and righteousness keeps his eyes open to the fact that ecclesiastical and state administration1 are no better under the new order and that the social conditions are a great deal worse. A marked feature of the tract is the constant appeal to the king's divine authority to rectify social and legal abuses. Henry's practice differed greatly from the ideas of his conscientious supporters. The riches he appropriated from the monasteries were not devoted to the relief of the economic situation, as Brinklow urged him to use them (chap. XXII). Part went to the king's middle class favourites, who now availed themselves of the fall of noble families and the eviction of abbey-lands, to speculate in agriculture and buy country estates. This upstart squirearchy knew nothing of the old baronial practice of hospitality, and the passing away of the ancient ideal added, in some measure, to the pessimism of the times. Some ballads have come down to us lamenting the new order, such as John Barker's, printed 1561, with the burden:

Neibourhed nor love is none,

Treu dealyng now is fled and gone.

Besides neglecting the claims of good fellowship, the nouveau riche introduced methods of commercial competition into land speculation. The rearing of cattle was found to be more profitable than the leasing of farms2. Thus, neither the lords of the manor nor freehold tenants hesitated, when it was advantageous, to abolish the small homesteads that had supported the yeomanry

1 Chap. XII, That kynges and lordes of presons should fynd their presoners suffycyent fode at their charge: and of men that have lyen long in preson, œcete, is one of the first signs of a literature which, in the next century, was to include The Blacke Dogge of Newgate (c. 1600), The Compters Common-Wealth (1617), Essayes and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners (1618), by Mynshul, and Wil Bagnal's Ghost (1655).

of baronial England. Evicted tenants were forced to become vagabonds or seek a livelihood in manufacturing industries, thus further disorganising the labour market; and, all this while, the reckless extravagance of the court raised the general cost of living, and the debasement of the currency and increase of taxation made poverty more acute.

Amid such disorder and suffering the modern spirit of competition was ushered into the world, and contemporary literature could see little but evil in the period of transition. It was especially the spectacle of men trampling on one another in the struggle for wealth which roused Robert Crowley from the production of controversial and religious tracts. Crowley was a printer, a puritan and a famous preacher. Most of his pamphlets, sermons and answers are composed for theologians; but the reading public was sufficiently large and the influence of the press sufficiently universal to make it worth his while to address the whole commons of the realm in five popular tracts. In 1550, he boldly exposed the more glaring social and moral abuses of the time in a series of short verse essays, arranged in alphabetical order and entitled The one and thirty epigrams. But, in spite of these devices, his standpoint remains that of a Hebrew prophet and his style that of a preacher. In The Voice of the Last Trumpet, which appeared in the same year, he shows even more clearly how far his sectarian training had unfitted him to handle problems of progress or social reform. The tract is a methodical appeal to the different classes to lay aside their peculiar sins; his view is still that of the Middle Ages, and God is supposed to have placed barriers between the classes 1 which no individual can cross without sin. Crowley warns his readers not to stray from their class, but to let the gentry cultivate learning, the commons obedience, and all will be well. In 1550, he also printed The way to wealth, a graphic and searching enquiry into the mutual hatred and distrust which existed between the rich and the poor, showing how peasants attribute the late seditions to farmers, graziers, lawyers, merchants, gentlemen, knights and lords, while the upper classes-'the gredie cormerauntes '-point to the wealth and insolence of the peasantry. But he sternly warns the lower classes against disobedience and covetousness, bidding them be patient and not usurp the functions of their rulers. He rebukes the clergy-'the shephardes of thys church'-for their lust of wealth,

1

1 Even in Dances of Death, such as that painted on the wall of the church of La Chaise Dieu in Auvergne, and that at Basel, each individual takes precedence rocording to his class. Wright, T., History of Caricature and Grotesque, chap. XIII.

The Hye Way to the Spyttel Hous ΙΟΙ

but reserves his sharpest censure for the rich men who tyrannise over the commons. In the following year he produced Pleasure and pain, heaven and hell, an even more direct protest against competition or, as Crowley calls it, 'the gredy rakeyng togyther of the treasures of this vayne worlde,' which was widening the gulf between rich and poor. Still writing for the large reading public, he couched his expostulation in the attractive form of a poem representing Christ's address to the world on the Last Judgment Day. But the most interesting of Crowley's tracts is the Informacion and Peticion agaynst the oppressours of the pore commons of this realme. In this address to the parliament of Edward VI, the preacher fulminates against the rich in the language of the Psalms and Isaiah. He draws a powerful picture of the misery caused by the aggressions of the wealthy: how poverty makes slaves of men and drudges or prostitutes of women, how youths are reduced to beggary and, in the end, 'garnysh the galowe trees.'

Crowley had neither the intellectual equipment nor the literary talent necessary to illuminate the perplexity and suffering of his age. His five tracts simply give voice to the thoughts of those who looked backward and cried 'order,' when they felt that the times were out of joint.

In these and similar pamphlets one thing particularly arrests the attention-the continual references to the ever increasing class of beggars and vagabonds. As early as 1528, Simon Fish begins his Supplication with these tremendous words:

Most lamentably compleyneth theyre wofull mysery unto youre highnes youre poore daily bedemen, the wretched hidous monstres (on whome scarcely for horror any yie dare loke), the foule unhappy sorte of lepres and other sore people, nedy, impotent, blinde, lame and sike, that live onely by almesse, howe that theyre nombre is daily so sore encreased that all the almesse of all the weldisposed people of this youre realme is not halfe ynough for to susteine theim.

The historic class of outlaws, vagabonds and pilgrims had been enormously increased by the victims of falling: prices and decaying guilds. The phenomenon forces itself on the attention of Robert Copland, who printed and probably composed The Hye Way to the Spyttel Hous, after 1531. No work more clearly illustrates the transitional state of English literature. Copland describes himself as taking shelter from the rain in the porch of a spyttel house and interrogates the porter on the inmates. The author really wishes to describe the different types of fools and knaves; but, instead of grouping them under a fraternity, boat or testament, he chooses the spyttel house to serve as a frame, the picture con

taining those who knock for entrance. Under this heading, nearly all the lower types of humanity are classed, not only the idle and the lascivious, but busybodies and those who refuse to forgive their neighbours or discipline their servants; even idle and domineering wives are also among those who visit the hospital. Thus, in its main conception, the book belongs to the general body of early sixteenth century satire. But the tract is profoundly coloured by the element of beggary. A hospital would not have been chosen as a substitute for the traditional background unless poverty was a very general curse, and we have a ghastly picture of the destitute wretches who crave admission. In the first part of the dialogue, the porter gives some amusing and graphic anecdotes of the tricks of sham beggars, thus showing that Copland had caught a glimpse of the boundless fields of comedy and humour which form part of the realm of roguery.

Such was the state of the poor while the religious houses still stood, but the suppression of the monasteries added to the army of the unemployed and, at the same time, deprived the destitute of the alms which had been expressly given in trust for them. Those who had formerly looked to the religious houses for help were now thrown upon society; mendicancy became a recognised fact; and legislation, while suppressing vagabondism, instituted compulsory relief for the poor and needy. Such a system, badly administered in a time of social disorganisation, led to inevitable abuse. Pauperism became a profession exercised by ingenious impostors, who perverted the administration of charity and, when occasion offered, robbed travellers, stole horses out of pastures and hooked linen out of house windows.

Vagabondism was a menace to society, and the curiosity which people feel in anything alarming was satisfied in 1561 by Awdeley's Fraternitye of vacabones. Again we see the power of literary tradition. Awdeley, apparently, found no more appropriate title than one as old as Wireker; but those who expected a satire on social types assembled under this denomination were disappointed. Under an old name, he followed up the idea of the German Liber Vagatorum, and produced an anatomy of vagabond life and vagrancy. The tract is divided into two parts; the first consists of a series of concise definitions of thieves' cant and contains startling revelations, how the 'Abraham man' walks this earth feigning madness and calling himself Poor Tom1, how the 'washman' lies in the highway with artificial sores produced by

1 Compare King Lear, Act III, sc. 4.