In consequence of the revival of industries, money at once began to circulate more freely, and this naturally exercised a beneficial effect on the nation at large, long the prey of poverty and discontent. Those only had been satisfied who were enriched by the plunder of churches and monasteries. The monopoly of land having been one of Henry’s chief objects in seizing Church property, every stray piece of waste ground was enclosed and rack-rented, so that the poor man, who had hitherto been able to keep a cow and a few sheep, could not afterwards so much as find food for a goose or a hen. The fishing population, since days of abstinence from meat were no longer obligatory, suffered as much as the country people, for the fisheries declined, through want of a market to dispose of the smack-loads with which the ports were glutted. The suppression of the religious houses affected the arts and crafts throughout the country. Nine years afterwards, at the beginning of Edward’s reign, it was found necessary to deal with vagrancy by legislation. The indigent had become the great bulk of the nation, while those who had grown rich with the wealth which had formerly been distributed at the convent gates, thought of nothing less than of feeding the hungry. Stringent poor-laws were enacted, but failed to meet the difficulty. A vagrant might be pressed into the service of any person who met him on the King’s highway. If he refused to do the work assigned to him, how vile soever it might be, he was branded with the letter V, and adjudged a slave for two years, to be fed on bread and water and refuse meat. A first attempt at escape was punished by the slave being branded with an S, after which he was kept a slave for life. A second attempt resulted in a felon’s death. From all this Mary delivered her people. Poverty under her was no longer considered a crime, and if there is one special reason more than another for honouring her memory it is her love and care for the poor and afflicted, of which we shall presently see many examples.[343] But besides the able-bodied vagrants, a vast number of feeble, halt, blind and wretched vagabonds lay and crept begging in the miry streets of London and Westminster. Money, urgently needed to reanimate commerce, and pay the debts of the Crown, had been squandered in the erection of expensive public buildings. In Sorranzo’s report on England in 1553, the Venetian ambassador says of London, that on the banks of the river were many fine palaces, making a grand show, but that the rest of the city was much disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of churches and monasteries, belonging heretofore to friars and nuns. The population was dense, numbering 180,000 souls.[344] Mary found, not merely an impoverished exchequer, but a mass of royal debts. In 1551 Edward’s liabilities had amounted to £241,179 14s. 10d.; in 1553 they still exceeded £190,000.[345] Immediately on her