The anxiety to make money that pervaded all classes, but which was especially observable in the middle class, besides influencing the status of the constable and making the guild such a prominent feature of the time, was to a large extent responsible for the increasing rigour of the criminal law. The claims of property were urged to the uttermost, and people who had anything to lose pressed for the infliction of exemplary punishment in all cases where the rights of ownership were threatened. The result of this attitude was, that the war of extermination against those who had no visible means of subsistence was waged more relentlessly than ever before. The dissolution of the religious houses, following upon the civil commotions of the previous century, had multiplied the number of vagrants until the country was full of homeless and starving wanderers, many of whom, needless to say, maintained themselves by robbery. Bad government first created this dangerous class, and then attempted to exterminate it by wholesale hanging: it is said that more than 70,000 persons were put to death during the thirty-eight years of Henry the Eighth's reign; from this number a considerable reduction may be made for exaggeration, and of the remainder a large proportion suffered on religious and political grounds. But the general government was rigorous in the extreme, and, the value of human life being but little accounted of, a penal system grew up which exacted the death penalty for offences of a comparatively trivial nature, thus laying the foundations of the barbarous code which continued to disgrace our Statute book for centuries, vainly endeavouring to supply the place of preventive police by repressive measures that were expected to deter by virtue of their extreme severity. Sir Thomas More saw the uselessness of such a policy, and pointed out in his "Utopia," that as robbers often killed their victims on the principle that dead men tell no tales, it would be desirable, therefore, to reduce the punishment for theft in order to check the frequency with which murders were committed.