begging and vagrancy; state first assumed statute of 27 Hen. VIII. c. 25; beginning of the parochial poor-law system; contented itself with the negative duty of enacting statutes for the punishment of begging and vagrancy.1 But when the crown took away from the monasteries the means by which the care of the poor had been maintained, it was confronted by a correlative duty which it could not refuse to assume. The first assumption of this duty was embodied in the statute the care of of 27 Hen. VIII. c. 25, whereby the incorporated towns, hunthe poor by dreds, parishes, and manors were charged with the duty of putting to labor all such as were able to work, and of receiving and supporting all such as were unable, the means for that purpose to be collected as alms on Sundays, holidays, and other festivals, or otherwise among the people. Such was the beginning of the parochial poor-law system which, after much im1 In their inception such statutes for more than a century, to the terror were a mere corollary of the Statutes of all rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy of Laborers (see above, p. 47), because beggars. Not long after the passage by their terms the laborer who re- of Elizabeth's act of 1597 followed fused to work where he happened to her famous poor law of 1601 (43 Eliz. be, at the wages there offered him, c. 2), from which time the legislation became as soon as he went away a against vagrancy "may be regarded to vagrant and a criminal. To punish a great extent as forming the criminal vagrants for crimes committed while aspect of the poor laws," which underwandering from place to place, and to took to provide for the helpless, to force them back to their usual places furnish work for the willing and able, of abode, were passed 1 Rich. II. c. 6 and punishment for the able-bodied (1377); 2 Rich. II. c. 6 (1378); 7 Rich. who were unwilling to work. In 1713 II. c. 5 (1383); 12 Rich. II. (1388); Elizabeth's act of 1597, as amended 2 Hen. V. c. 4 (1414); 11 Hen. VII. by James, was reenacted by 12 Anne, c. 2 (1494); 19 Hen. VII. c. 12 (1503); st. 2, c. 23, with a few omissions and and 22 Hen. VIII. c. 12, a very severe alterations; and in 1737 that act was act (see abstract in Nicholas' Hist. of so explained by 10 Geo. II. c. 28 as the Poor Laws, vol. i. pp. 119-124), to extend it to persons acting plays in which was amended by 27 Hen. VIII. certain places, or without license from c. 25 (1535, 1536). In 1547 all these the lord chamberlain. In 1740 all such acts, upon the ground that they were acts were repealed and reenacted by not sufficiently severe, were repealed 13 Geo. II. c. 24, which was merged by the specially cruel statute of i Edw. four years later into 17 Geo. II. c. 5, VI. 2, which at the end of two years which was amended in 1792 by 32 was repealed by 3 & 4 Edw. VI. c. Geo. III. c. 45, and repealed in 1822 26, which revived the acts of Hen. by 3 Geo. IV. c. 40, designed to conVIII. In 1552 was passed 5 & 6 solidate the law upon the subject. Edw. VI. c. 2, which confirmed those Two years later that act was repealed acts with a provision for licenses to by 5 Geo. IV. c. 83, now in force, beg under certain conditions. In 1555 which so extends the definition of a the system of licensed begging was rogue and vagabond as to include elaborated by 2 & 3 Phil. & Mary, many persons of a suspicious class c. 5, which connected with it a provi- not actually criminals. Upon the subsion for weekly collections for the ject of vagrancy and wages, see Amos, poor. In 1572 all prior statutes upon Reformation Parliament, pp. 83, 84, the subject were repealed by 14 Eliz. 92-94. As to the vagrancy statutes c. 5, superseded in 1597 by 39 Eliz. c. considered as a part of the history of 4, which, with an amendment made in the criminal law, see Sir J. F. Stephen, 1604 by 1 Jas. I. c. 7, remained in force vol. iii. pp. 266–275. provement in the intervening reigns, was finally settled in that of Elizabeth,1-a system which grew more and more necessary as the conversion of feudal into free labor swelled the ranks and increased the distress of the laboring classes. Another act made necessary by the transfer of monastic property to lay hands which may be mentioned here is the statute of statute of 32 Hen. VIII. c. 7, whereby a legal remedy was for the first 32Hen. time given to laymen who had estates, or interests in parson- laymen to authorizing ages or vicarages, enabling them to sue for the subtraction of sue for tithes in the church courts.2 tithes; ute of bankrupts, 34 & VIII. c. 4; amendment The first statute of bankrupts is that of 34 & 35 Hen. first statVIII. c. 4, which was intended rather to prevent trade-debtors from fraudulently concealing or disposing of their goods than 35 Hen. as a means through which they could be discharged from their statute of debts after an honest surrender. By the statute of amend- and jeofail, ment and jeofail, 32 Hen. VIII. c. 30, the administration of 32 Hen. substantial justice in civil proceedings was greatly promoted; while by the statute of 23 Hen. VIII. c. 1, taking away the benefit of benefit of clergy in many cases in which it had been before enjoyed, manifold abuses resulting from that source were removed from the criminal administration.3 VIII. c. 30; clergy taken away in many cases by 23 Hen. VIII. c. I. (1540-47): results of of the 7. Before Cromwell was hurled by his ungrateful master The closing from the bad eminence to which his genius had exalted both, years of the revolutionary policy he had undertaken to enforce had reign reached a perfectly successful consummation. High as the general power of the monarchy had been lifted by Wolsey, his pupil Cromwell's had lifted it higher still. Not only had the crown been emanpolicy; cipated from without by the complete abolition of the papal exaltation overlordship, but it had also been raised from within above crown; every rival force, temporal or spiritual. When Cromwell's administration began, the one really formidable foe by which it was confronted stood forth in the corporate person of the church, whose immemorial spiritual authority was greatly enhanced, not only by its vast temporal possessions, but by its more or less independent assemblies and tribunals, subject in 1 43 Eliz. c. 2. The history of that act as the basis of the modern poorlaw system will be considered hereafter. 2 As to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over tithes, see Reeves' Hist. Eng. Law, vol. iii. p. 95 et seq., and p. 3 For a masterly review of that sub- of the the last resort to the direction of a foreign head. That Cromhumiliation well should have undertaken to prostrate the church at the church; feet of the monarchy is not so remarkable as that he should Cromwell have essayed such a task with the aid of the parliament. employs From the accession of Edward IV. down to the fall of Wolsey, ment as the the settled policy of the crown had been to discourage parlia tool of the crown; the lords a spiritless body, and the commons made nominees; mentary action, by calling the estates together only on rare and critical occasions, and by confiding as far as possible the entire central administration of the state to the privy council. Under that system the council, in its judicial aspect as the star chamber, had overawed the entire administration of justice in the ordinary tribunals by making them subservient to the royal will, while, in its political aspect as an administrative body, it had to a serious extent substituted the system of royal benevolences in the place of parliamentary taxation. Under this condition of things, which the collapse of the estate system at the end of the civil war had made possible, there seemed to be but little hope of a parliamentary revival. The fact that the lords were still a subservient, spiritless body that cowered at the feet of the king, the fact that the commons were largely up of royal made up of members nominated directly or indirectly by the privy council, were no doubt the determining causes which emboldened Cromwell to reverse the royal policy by the constant employment of parliament as the agent through whose acts the papal supremacy was overthrown and the church stripped at once of its estates and of its independence. far from shrinking from an appeal to the estates, it was the essence of Cromwell's policy to call them together year after year, and to force upon their attention every possible question to which he desired to add the forms of legality or the apparent sanction of popular approval. The review which has just been made of that unbroken series of parliamentary enactments, beginning with the comparatively mild measures of 1529 and ending at last with the act of the Six Articles, has shown how completely the revolution which Cromwell carried on by the authority of the crown was at every step sanctioned and approved by the national legislature. When that series of royal edicts, over which was thus thrown the thin veil of national assent, are examined as a connected whole, the fact appears that Cromwell permitted nothing to rob his work of estates called to gether year after year the royal policy; So mal aggre ecclesiasti vested in a mere of state; its dogmas and liturgy fixed by royal authority; it the merit of completeness. Upon the abnormal aggregation an abnor of civil powers which the growth of the conciliar system had gation of already concentrated in the hands of the crown the absolute civil and control of the entire ecclesiastical system was superimposed. cal powers From its high place as an estate of the realm the church was the crown; reduced to a mere department of state; its wealth was laid at the church the feet of the king, while its ministers, from the highest to department the lowest, were made to feel that their right to exercise their spiritual functions depended alone upon the royal authority, an authority which claimed the supreme right not only to prescribe the forms of worship, but also to define through the agency of parliament and convocation principles of belief, and in that way to fix the difficult line which then divided heresy from orthodoxy. During the seven years of Henry's reign that remained after Cromwell's fall, it was not found necessary to add anything to the system he had founded; it was administered to the end in substantially the same form in which he had left it by the king, whose one desire seems to have been simply to conserve and rest upon the results their joint efforts had accomplished. After Cromwell was rivalry of gone, the task of upholding the new ecclesiastical system was gious facnot lightened by the necessity that existed of forcing upon tions after the two rival religious factions an unqualified acceptance of fall; a theology which demanded at once an admission of the mass and of the royal supremacy. After the return of Norfolk to Norfolk's power, which followed the king's marriage with his niece, Catherine Howard, in the summer of 1540, it seemed for a Henry's marriage time as if, under the influence of the older nobles at whose with Cathhead he stood, and of the more conservative churchmen under ard in 1540; the lead of Gardiner, there was a gradual drift back to catholicism. Norfolk's hostility to the new religious movement was his hostility undisguised; and as he looked forward hopefully to a general religious council as the prelude to a reunion of England with the main movement body of the Catholic Church, he turned away from Francis and guised; the Lutheran princes in favor of an alliance with the emperor, through whose influence alone such a council could be brought about. And even after the decline of Norfolk's power, by reason of the execution of Catherine Howard in February, 1542, and the king's subsequent marriage with Catherine Parr in July, 1543, Henry still clung to the general line of foreign the reli return to power after erine How to the new undis ried Cath erine Parr, Henry mar- policy which the duke had advocated.1 Not until after the hostile action towards the Lutheran movement which was July, 1543; taken in the council opened at Trent, in December, 1545, and the subsequent effort of the emperor in the following year to break up the League of Schmalkald, did Henry finally realize the fact that the breach which the Reformation had made breach with between the papacy and the Teutonic nations was final and the papacy was final; irrevocable.2 when he realized that the In spite, however, of his hopes of a reunited Christendom, and of his devotion to the dogmas of the ancient faith as embodied in the Six Articles, the king found it impossible, as his reign drew to a close, to resist the demands of the protestant party for certain changes in the devotional system of the church suggested by the continental Reformation. As a part translation of the Lutheran movement Tyndale's translation of the Bible, and parts of made at Cologne in 1525, had come over into England, and the service that was followed by Coverdale's translation, also published of the Bible books into English; abroad in 1535. The translation last named is probably that referred to in the royal license given for placing the first complete edition of the English Bible in churches for the general reading of lay people, in 1536.4 In the next year a similar license was issued, permitting another edition to be used without hindrance by every one in private. To prevent the difficulties which at once arose out of the publication of a great number of unofficial translations by private persons, there was the "Great issued in 1539 the authorized version known as the "Great Bible" of Bible," reprinted in the next year, with a preface by Archbishop Cranmer. The same general impulse which thus prompted 1539; 1 In his review of the prospects of an Anglo-imperial alliance in the summer of 1542, Froude (vol. iii. p. 507) says "it was possible that the difficulties of Europe might be settled at last by Henry's favorite project, - a council under the auspices of himself and the emperor, where England and Germany might be freely represented." 2 In the last year of his life Henry was forced to fall back upon Cromwell's policy, and to offer to form an alliance with the German princes which "might be called indeed a very Christian league and confederacy." Henry VIII. to Bruno, State Papers, vol. xi. pp. 281, 282. But they had no faith in 4 Wilkins, Conc., vol. iii. p. 815. "The Great Bible' of 1539 (well known to us still by our Prayer Book Psalms) continued to be the authorized version of the Church of England until 1568, when it was superseded by that made under the direction of Arch |