“For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure--nothing profiting, yea, much annoying the public weal--leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep fold.... They turn all dwelling-places and all glebe land into desolation and wilderness. Therefore, that one covetous and insatiable comorant may compass about and inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all. By one means therefore or another, either by hook or by crook they must needs depart away, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, mothers with their young babies, and their whole household small in substance and large in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in.... And when they have wandered abroad till the little they have be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly be hanged, or else go about a begging. And yet then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not: whom no man will set a work, though they never so willingly proffer themselves thereto. For one shepherd or herdsman is enough to eat up that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many hands were requisite.” This was social England in the early years of Henry VIII., and every year saw things grow worse for the rural folk, in spite of further royal proclamations against enclosures in 1526. A series of bad harvests drove a starving population to riot in Norfolk in 1527 and 1529. In 1536 came the suppression of 376 lesser monasteries, followed two years later by the dissolution of all remaining monasteries and priories, and in 1547 by the royal confiscation of the property of the religious guilds and brotherhoods. The landowners having established a starving unemployed class by the simple process of depriving people of access to the land, and the crown having removed the only source of relief to the unemployed by destroying the monasteries, it remained for parliament to deal with the “social problem” thus created by declaring poverty a crime, and the unemployed person a felon. The lash and the gallows were to solve the problem.