Riots and mob violence have been seen even to our own time, but no great, well-organised movement to overthrow authority and establish a social democracy by force of arms has been attempted since 1549.
The characters of Robert Ket and his brother have been vindicated by time, and the rebel leader is now recognised as a disinterested, capable, high-minded man.

Ket took what seemed to him the only possible course to avert the doom of a ruined peasantry, and failed.

But his courage and humaneness are beyond question.[47] The enclosures did not end with the sixteenth century, and for another one hundred years complaints are heard of the steady depopulation of rural England.

In the eighteenth century came the second great series of enclosures--the enclosing of the commons and waste spaces, by Acts of Parliament.

Between 1710 and 1867 no less than 7,660,439 acres were thus enclosed.
To-day the questions of land tenure and land ownership are conspicuous items in the discussion of the whole social question, for the relations of a people to its land are of very first importance in a democratic state.
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