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To: AnAmericanMother
Because the old nobility was smashed beyond repair already. They'd been hit particularly hard by the social fallout of the Black Death and the internecine struggle known as the Wars of the Roses had pretty much completed the job. Oh they struggled on for some time after, but their influence declined rapidly. After Henry VIII most of England's wars were fought over trade, not land.

The clerics were NOT administering their property according to the laws and rules applicable to everybody at the time. They had their own laws and rules and those were not the same as English common law. So how is that fair?

If evil is evil is evil, and justifying it by saying the old order is wrong, then why did the American "patriots" overthrow their lawful King and dispossess/disenfranchise or drive out all the loyalists?

177 posted on 02/02/2011 12:55:19 AM PST by Vanders9
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To: Vanders9
Because the King and Parliament stopped following their own rules and denied American colonists the rights of Englishmen -- imposing taxes, ex post facto laws, and various penalties, and denying them representation in Parliament.

It's as though a lord started treating one of his freeholders like a serf. Ordinarily, even a serf and certainly a freeholder would have resort to the King's Justice in that case -- but Americans were stymied at every turn.

That - in contrast to the monastic orders' administration of their estates - was not in accordance with the accepted law of the time.

I disagree with you re the Wars of the Roses and the Black Death. Certainly a few (the number is greatly exaggerated) old families were wiped out and new families came up, but the basic structure stayed the same. It was not until some years into the Tudors that things started to change -- and you can debate cause and effect on that til the cows come home. Was it Henry VIII and his father before him who brought about the changes, or were they organic changes that would have happened regardless of their actions? Maybe a little of both . . . but the spoliation of the monasteries was sudden, traumatic, and did a great deal of harm. Even the revisionists who believe in economic forces as the be-all and end-all of causative factors attribute that to Henry's greed (exacerbated by his profligate spending and bad monetary policy) not to the end of the feudal system. Certain aspects of the feudal system survived right up into Victoria's time.

The change from "medieval" to "Renaissance" is one of those handy watersheds that historians like to bandy about . . . but like the fall of the Roman Empire you probably didn't notice it while you were living through it. Individual events (like the Sack of Rome or Bosworth Field) weren't the obvious milestones that they have become when people are trying to make some linear sense out of "history".

181 posted on 02/02/2011 8:18:33 PM PST by AnAmericanMother (Ministrix of ye Chasse, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment))
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