[81] Paston Letters, I. 12, II. 248. Plummer's edition of Fortescue, _On the Governance of England_, Intro., p. 21.
[82] Atkinson's _Quarter Sessions of the North Riding of Yorkshire_, lists of recusants.
[83] _e.g. Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. iii. (quoted below, pp. 251-253), and Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber_, vol. ii., _Inhabitants of Thingden_ v. _Mulsho_; also Holkham MSS., Burnham Documents, Bdle. 5, No. 94 (quoted below, p. 245 _n_.).
[84] Harrington's works, 1700 edition, p. 69 (_Oceana_), pp. 388-?389 (_The Art of Law-giving_). See also Firth, _The House of Lords during the Civil War_, pp. 28-?32.
From such degrading subservience the freeholders, "slaves to none," were secure. As it was, they often left substantial fortunes to their children, and by the middle of the sixteenth century were already following the examples of their social superiors in entailing[85] their lands. One can quite understand therefore that there is nothing inconsistent between the glowing accounts of their prosperity at the end of the century given by Harrison and his lamentation over the decline of the rural population, or between the well-attested sufferings of the small cultivator in the sixteenth century and his equally well-attested importance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth. The explanation is that the freeholders, though most important politically, did not form the larger proportion of those substantial yeomen whose decay was lamented. The day of their ruin was to come. But for the next two centuries they were safe enough, and, if anything, gained on the class immediately above them, whose lands they bought or leased, into whose families they married, and with whose children their own competed in the learned professions, laying, as the historian of Suffolk[86] said, "such strong, sure and deep foundations that from thence in time are derived many noble and worthy families." Nothing in the life of the period caused more pride than the prosperity of this solid body of small property-owners, and the contrast which it offered to the downtrodden peasantry of the Continent. No loss has been sustained by the modern world greater than their disappearance.