Thus the Act of Apparel, with its pains and penalties, was obviously more likely to give a handle to unscrupulous ministers to be used for purposes of revenue, than to curb those tastes for grandeur in attire which nothing was so likely to foster as the example of Wolsey himself.[539]
Legal interference with wages.
Thus, too, not content with carrying their income-tax down to the earnings of the peasant, this and the previous Parliament attempted to interfere with the wages of the labouring classes solely for the benefit of employers of labour. The simple fact was that the drain upon the labour market to keep the army supplied with soldiers, had caused a temporary scarcity of labour, and a natural rise in wages. Complaints were made, according to the chronicles, that ‘labourers would in nowise work by the day, but all by task, and in great,’ and that therefore, ‘especially in harvest time, the husbandmen [i.e. the farmers and landowners] could scarce get workmen to help in their harvest.’[540] The agricultural interest was strongly represented in the House of Commons—the labourers not at all. So, human nature being the same then as now, the last Parliament had attempted virtually to re-enact the old statutes of labourers, as against the labourers, whilst repealing all the clauses which might possibly prove inconvenient to employers. This Parliament of 1515 completed the work; re-enacted a rigid scale of wages, and imposed pains and penalties upon ‘artificers who should leave their work except for the King’s service.’[541] Here again was oppression of the poor to spare the pockets of the rich.
Increase of pasture farming.
Again, the scarcity of labour made itself felt in the increased propensity of landowners to throw arable land into pasture, involving the sudden and cruel ejection of thousands of the peasantry, and the enactment of statutory provisions[542] to check this tendency was not to be wondered at; but the rumour that many by compounding secretly with the Cardinal were able to exempt themselves[543] from the penalties of inconvenient statutes, leads one to suspect that Wolsey thought more of the wants of the exchequer than of the hardship and misery of ejected peasants.
Increase of crime and of executions.
It was natural that the result of wholesale ejections, and the return of deserting or disbanded soldiers (often utterly demoralised),[544] should still show itself in the appalling increase of crime. Perhaps it was equally natural that legislators who held the comforts and lives of the labouring poor so cheap, should think that they had provided at once a proper and efficient remedy, when by abolishing benefit of clergy in the case of felons and murderers, and by abridging the privilege of sanctuary, they had multiplied to a terrible extent the number of executions.[545]
If the labouring classes were thus harshly dealt with, so also the mercantile classes did not find their interests very carefully guarded.
Trade with the Netherlands interrupted.
The breach of faith with Prince Charles in the matter of the marriage of the Princess Mary had caused a quarrel between England and the Netherlands, and this Parliament of 1515 had followed it up by prohibiting the exportation of Norfolk wool to Holland and Zealand,[546] thus virtually interrupting commercial intercourse with the Hanse Towns of Belgium at a time when Bruges was the great mart of the world.