In the next reign the condition of the poor was much improved; the effect of the land sales in Henry VII.'s reign, when the moneyed classes purchased two-thirds of the estates of the nobility, and spent their amassed wealth in cultivating and improving the neglected lands. This factor--as well as the cessation of the Wars of the Roses--was beginning to work a lasting benefit to the poor, as the street cries of 1557 show, for, according to the register of the Stationers' Company that year, a licence was granted to John Wallye and Mrs. Toye to print a ballad, entitled-- "Who lyve so mery and make such sporte As they that be of the poorest sort?" "Who liveth so merry in all the land As doth the poor widow who selleth the sand? And ever she singeth, as I can guess, 'Will you buy my sand--any sand--mistress?' _Chorus._ "Who would desire a pleasanter thing Than all the day long to do nothing but sing? Who liveth so merry and maketh such sport As those who be of the poorer sort?" Even Daniel De Foe, writing one hundred and twenty years after, paid a passing tribute to Queen Elizabeth, and said "that the faint-hearted economists of 1689 would show something worthy of themselves if they employed the poor to the same glorious advantage as did Queen Elizabeth." Going back to the centuries prior to the Tudor period, one is reminded that all the best efforts at minstrelsy--song, glee, or romance--came from the northern counties, or from just on either side the borders. The prevalence of a northern dialect in the compositions show this suggestion to be in a great degree real. The poems of minstrelsy, however, claim something more than dialect--the martial spirit, ever fever-heat on the borders of the kingdoms of England and Scotland; the age of chivalry furnishing the minstrel with the subject of his poem. But with the strife of war ended, on Henry VII.'s accession, ballads took the place of war-songs in the heart affections of the people, and they sang songs of peace and contentment. Bard, scald, minstrel, gleeman, with their heroic rhymes and long metrical romances, gave way in the evolution of song and harmony to the ballad-monger with his licence. However, in turn they became an intolerable nuisance, and a wag wrote of them in 1740-- "Of all sorts of wit he's most fond of a ballad, But asses choose thistles instead of a salad." Another of the wayside songs of Henry VIII.'s time, sung by man, woman, and child, ran--