ABSTRACT
In his opening oration to the 1597-98 parliament, Lord Keeper Egerton praised Her Majesty-formidably in attendance-for so great a care in preserving her kingdom to the benefi t of her subjects “that the simplest among them could not but see, and the wisest but admire, their happiness therein; the whole Realm enjoying peace in all security.”1 Yet this was to prove, in J. E. Neale’s words, a parliament “into which rushed concern for the economic disorders of the day”, lamenting problems in the rural world of catastrophic magnitude: enclosures, dispossession, depopulation, vagabondage and hunger. On the fi rst day of business, November 5th 1597, Francis Bacon condemned, probably by governmental direction, “Lords that have enclosed great grounds and pulled down even whole towns and converted them to sheep pastures”. All shame for such proceedings had now disappeared, he said, “and therefore there is almost no conscience in destroying the savour of our life-I mean bread.”2 Bacon’s motion sought to replace privately lucrative pastures by publically benefi cial agriculture, reconverting to cultivation all fi elds taken out of longstanding tillage since the queen’s accession. Supporting the bill, one speaker noted bitterly that “There groweth cleanness of teeth through scarcity of bread.”3 “The eyes of the poor are upon this Parliament”, he warned. “This place is an epitome of the whole Realm . . . We sit now in judgement over ourselves.” Echoing More’s Utopia, he deplored a state very different from the happy kingdom of Egerton’s offi cial rhetoric-a “brutish land, where sheep shall devour men”; and he blamed “gentlemen”, who “will become . . . grinders of the poor, whereby, if not the heart of Cain, they yet strive to bring the punishment of Cain upon their younger and weaker brethren, to make them vagabonds and runagates upon the earth.”4
