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В подтверждение своих слов:

>>А что именно Вас смущает? Не соответствует образу "кровавого тоталитарного режима"?

По поводу образов:
" Among the results of this conquest of agriculture by the new spirit of commercial competition three may be noticed--firstly, the clearer recognition of the advantages of farms held in individual occupation, large enough to make the employment of capital remunerative; secondly, the substitution of pasture for tillage, of sheep for corn, of wool for meat; thirdly, the attack upon the old agrarian partnerships in which lords of the manor, parsons, freeholders, leaseholding farmers, copyholders, and cottagers had hitherto associated to supply the wants of each village. Legislation failed to prevent a movement which harmonised and synchronised with the progressive development of the nation on commercial lines. But in its earlier stages, the consequences to the rural population were serious. Many tenants lost their holdings, many wage-earning labourers their employment, when landlords "turned graziers," and farmers cut down their labour-bills by converting tillage into pasture. It is impossible to doubt the reality of the distress. From 1487 onwards, literature, pamphlets, doggerel ballads, sermons, liturgies, petitions, preambles to statutes, Commissions of Enquiry, Acts of Parliament, bear witness to a considerable depopulation of country districts. In the numerous insurrections, which marked the sixteenth century and the early Years of the reign of James I., rural distress undoubtedly contributed its share. But zealous advocates of Roman Catholicism found it useful to ally agrarian discontent with religious reaction, and men like Protector Somerset thought it politic to attribute anti-Protestant risings entirely to agricultural causes. There was no novelty in the withdrawal of demesne lands from the open-field farm and their partition into individual occupations; or in fencing off portions of the home-farm and of the reclaimed "assart" lands as separate plots; or in the appropriation of parts of the commonable waste for private use; or in the encouragement given to partners in the village association to throw their scattered strips together into one compact holding. Each of these processes had been for many years in progress; each had necessitated enclosures; none had required the decay of farm-houses and cottages, loss of employment, eviction of tenants, or rural depopulation.
...
If evidence which is rarely impartial may be implicitly trusted, considerable tracts of cultivated land were converted into wildernesses, traversed only by shepherds and their dogs; roofless granges and half-ruined churches alone marked the sites of former hamlets; the "deserted village" was a reality of the sixteenth century. Already anxious for the maintenance of the national supply of corn, men began to be alarmed at another result of the movement which became increasingly prominent. John Rous (1411-91), chantry priest of Guy's Cliffe and Warwickshire antiquary, was the first to protest against the decay of population caused in the midland counties by enclosures for pasture farming. To this rural exodus the attention of Parliament had been called by the Lord Chancellor in the first year of Richard III. (1484). Francis Bacon, writing of the opening years of the reign of Henry VII., says: "Inclosures at that time began to be more frequent, whereby arable land, which could not be manured without people and families, was turned into pasture which was easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenances for years, lives, and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people." So formidable did the danger begin to appear, that in 1489 two Acts of Parliament were passed for its prevention. The first Act was local, dealing with the effects of enclosures in the Isle of Wight from the point of view of national defence; the second is general, directed "against the pulling down of tounes" (i.e. townships or villages). These Acts were the precursors of many others throughout the sixteenth century, forbidding the conversion of arable land into pasture, ordering newly laid pasture to be restored to tillage, directing enclosures to be thrown down, requiring decayed houses to be rebuilt, limiting the number of sheep and of farms which could legally be held by one man, and imposing severe penalties for disobedience to the new provisions."






>>Так какие именно законы карали именно за бродяжничество? "Имя, сестра, имя!"


It was on those agriculturists who were unwilling or unable to adapt themselves to the times that the blow fell with the greatest severity. The Husbandman in the Compendious Examination knew several of his neighbours who had "turned ether part or all theire arable grounde into pasture, and therby have wexed verie Rich men." These were the men of whom Harrison and Sir Thomas Smith speak as "coming to such wealth that they are able and do daily buy lands of unthrifty gentlemen and make . . . their sons gentlemen." But the Husbandman himself, having "enclosed litle or nothinge of my grownd, could never be able to make up my lorde's rent, weare it not for a litle brede of neate, shepe, swine, gese and hens." Hence it is that, while Latimer laments the degradation of small yeomen who, like his father, had farms of "three to four pounds a year at the uttermost," Harrison describes the rise of substantial farmers and of the middle classes, and their improved standard of living. The distribution of wealth was becoming more and more unequal; the problem of poverty was acquiring a new significance. In the growing struggle for existence it was possible for men, who were neither infirm nor idle, to lose their footing. Voluntary almsgiving was tried and proved inadequate. Gradually and cautiously the legislators of the reign of Elizabeth were forced to apply the principle of compulsory provision for the relief of the necessitous. Previous legislation, in dealing with the impotent poor, had outlined the systems of local liability and of settlement which were adopted in the later poor-laws; but it had been mainly concerned with the suppression of those persons who were styled idle rogues and vagabonds. The object explains, though to modern ideas it cannot justify, the harshness of the law. Able-bodied men and women, who were willing to work but had lost their livelihood, were unknown to the legislators who had sketched the first poor-laws for the relief of the impotent poor and the punishment of sturdy beggars (validi mendicantes ). Our ancestors did not discriminate closely between the different sources of poverty. To them, as is stated in the preamble to the statute of Henry VIII., "ydlenes" was the "mother and rote of all vyces." The "great and excessive nombres" of idle rogues and vagabonds were a crying evil. To this class belonged the men who committed "contynuall theftes, murders, and other haynous offences, which displeased God, damaged the King's subjects, and disturbed the common weal of the realm." Apart from the committal of serious crime, the mass of idle vagrants was in country districts a nuisance and a danger. The kidnapping of children was not uncommon. Housewives were robbed of their linen, and their pots and pans, or terrified by threats of violence into parting with their money. Horses were stolen from their paddocks, or, still more easily, from the openfield balks on which they were tethered; pigs were taken from their styes, chickens and eggs from the henroosts. Men and women, as they returned from markets, were waylaid by sturdy ruffians. Shops, booths, and stalls were pilfered of their contents. Tippling-houses were converted into receivers' dens for stolen goods. The comparative leniency of the laws of Henry VII. had failed; therefore the evil must be stamped out with a severity which was not only unsentimental but ferocious.
...
More's eloquent appeal may have produced effect. In the year after the publication of Utopia, the first and most important Commission was issued (1517-19) to enquire into the progress and results of enclosures in the twenty-four counties principally affected. The Returns of the Commissioners in Chancery are admittedly imperfect. But they justify the conclusion that More's picture, though true in particular instances, is as a general description of rural conditions too highly coloured. Dispossessed agriculturists undoubtedly contributed some proportion of the class which the Government grouped under the heading of idle rogues. Contemporary writers imply that the proportion was large: modern research, based on contemporary enquiries and returns, suggests that it was relatively small. The evidence seems insufficient for a decision. In coping with a real evil, the Government attempted no classification. The innocent suffered with the guilty, and men and women, whether many or few, who had lost their means of livelihood and were willing to work, were the victims of severe punishment designed for the class of professional vagabonds."

Тут с оговорками, но тем не менее.

Взято
http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010136ernle/010136ch3.htm