It is probably true that the new owners were harder masters than the monks had been. But the monks seldom came into direct personal contact with their labourers. The bailiffs and stewards had managed the estates for the religious, just as they continued to do under the new owners. But the bailiffs and stewards probably had a much freer hand in the old days than in the new. The whole spirit of the estate was changed. Instead of landlords who had held the property from time immemorial, who could afford to let a bad year be set off against a good, and who were, from the very fact of old possession, indifferent or tender-hearted according to the point of view we take of their conduct, the landlords were now men whose whole conduct shows them to be possessed of keen business instincts and intent on turning their new property to the fullest account. It is impossible to think they would be influenced by any feelings of sentiment or sympathy. The first Act of Dissolution ordered that the new owners were “to kepe or cause to be kept an honest contynewell hous and houshold in the same cyte or precynct, and to occupye yerely as moche of the same demeanes in plowyng and tyllage of husbondry, that ys to saye as moche of the seid demeanes which hath ben commonly used to be kept in tyllage by the governors, abbottes, or pryours of the same howses, monasteryes, or pryoryes.” But how far this wise and equitable provision was carried, or even intended to be carried, into effect has been seen by the deliberate arrangements which were made with the purchasers of the Friaries at Stafford and Lichfield, to take down, deface, and remove most of the buildings, even though it might be the work of three years. The new owners, indeed, seldom occupied the lands themselves. The greater ones sublet them, and lesser and greater alike speculated briskly with them. Sutcote, the “server of the Kingis Grace Chamber,” who obtained the Cistercian Nunnery at Brewood, just over the Staffordshire border, in a high-handed manner, had no sooner done so than he “offered hyt to dyvers to selle for suche a price that no man will gladly by hit at hys hand.” Trentham was only surrendered in 1536, yet in December, 1538, the Duke of Suffolk obtained by exchange a grant of the rents and reversions reserved upon the Crown leases there, and many cottages, lands, and advowsons; and at the same time procured a license to alienate. He sold it in 1540 to James Leveson, who had been so large a purchaser at the sales of the goods of the houses. The enterprising Leveson, in his turn, had no sooner secured Rushton Grange from the spoils of Hulton Abbey in 1539 than he sold it again to Biddulph of Biddulph. There is ample evidence to show he was a man who did a regular business in buying and selling monastic property of all kinds. It is evident that any inquiry into the original grants of the lands of the religious houses would throw little light upon the