A contemporary writer draws a picture of “the Decay of England” almost too terrible for belief, yet all that we know tends to confirm his story. “Whether shall then they goo?” he cries in despair. “Foorth from shyre to shyre, and to be scathered thus abrode, within the Kynges maiestyes Realme, where it shall please Almighty God: and for lacke of maisters, by compulsion dryuen, some of them to begge, and some to steale.”[163] Happy those who in defence of their hearths had died in the West and in Norfolk at the hands of Spaniards, Italians, Germans, Albanians! A calculation based upon the statements of this same writer on the “Decay of England” gives 675,000 persons thrown upon the country by the decay of husbandry.[164] But to this number we must add those turned out of the monasteries, the poor, formerly maintained by the monasteries and by the yeomanry, the sick and infirm, ejected from the hospitals established for “Christ’s poor,” as they are called in the act of foundation of a hospital in the thirteenth century. And this immense number out of a population estimated at 5,000,000! “And nowe they haue nothynge, but goeth about in England from dore to dore, and axe theyr almose for Goddes sake. And because they will not begge, some of them doeth steale, and then they be hanged.”[165] Great numbers flocked to London, seeking in vain redress of their grievances. This was the great time of Tyburn. In his fourth sermon, preached on March 29, 1549, Latimer mentions, quite incidentally, the frightful number of executions taking place in London, when he was “in ward” with the Bishop of Chichester in 1539. “I was desirous to heare of execution done (as ther was euri weke, some in one place of the citye or other) for there was thre wekes sessions at newgate, and fourth-nyghte Sessions at the Marshialshy, and so forth.”[166] That is, sessions every three weeks at the one place and every two weeks at the other. Never had the gallows been so crowded. In the sentence quoted on the title-page of this book Sir Thomas More, writing in Latin in 1516, had said that twenty were “sometimes” hanged together upon one gallows. In the English translation, first published in 1551, the translator changed “sometimes” (“nonnunquam”) into “for the most part.” So had the gallows thriven! The bitter lamentations of Latimer, Brinklow, Ascham, Lever, Bernard Gilpin, Crowley, are not the cries of partisans of the old order. They had looked for a new heaven and a new earth—to see “the pure light of the gospel” kindled by John a Lasco, Stumphius, John ab Ulmis, illuminating homes freed for ever from taxation by the spoils of the monasteries. And “the Blessed Reformation” had sent countless thousands to the gallows, had reinstituted white slavery in England, and had established the “pauper,” no longer “Christ’s poor,” as a despised and degraded caste.