'Our sheepe are very excellent for sweetness of flesh, and our woolles are preferred before those of Milesia and other places.'[223] So thought Harrison and many English landowners and farmers too, so that legislation was powerless to stop the spread of sheep farming. In 1517 a commission of inquiry instigated by Wolsey held inquisition on enclosures and the decay of tillage, and it seems to have been the only honest effort to stop the evil. It was to inquire what decays, conversions, and park enclosures had been made since 1489, but the result even of this attempt was small. In 1535 a fresh statute, 27 Hen. VIII, c. 22, stated that the Act limiting the number of sheep to be kept had only been observed 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.