The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of
 the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last
 third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century.
 A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market
 by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as
 Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled
 house and castle.” Although the royal power, itself a
 product of bourgeois development, in its strife after
 absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of
 these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause
 of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the
 great feudal lords created an incomparably larger
 proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from
 the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as
 the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands.
 The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the
 corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the
 direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been
 devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the
 child of its time, for which money was the power of all
 powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was,
 therefore, its cry. Harrison, in his “Description of
 England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles,” describes how
 the expropriation of small peasants is ruining the country.
 “What care our great encroachers?” The dwellings of the
 peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the
 ground or doomed to decay. “If,” says Harrison, “the old
 records of euerie manour be sought... it will soon appear that
 in some manour seventeene, eighteene, or twentie
 houses 673are shrunk... that England
 was neuer less furnished with people than at the present...
 Of cities and townes either utterly decaied or more than a
 quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little
 increased here or there; of townes pulled downe for
 sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in
 them... I could saie somewhat.” The complaints of these old
 chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they reflect
 faithfully the impression made on contemporaries by the
 revolution in the conditions of production. A comparison of
 the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals
 the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton
 rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated
 without any transition from its golden into its iron age.