e increased urbanization of the country. As there grew to be more and more people living in cities who were wealthy and cultured, the link between both wealth and refinement and ownership of property became more tenuous. Not only did the urban elite count their wealth in ways other than landholdings, they also began to create their own forms of refined amusements not linked to rural traditions. Moreover, the urban upper classes were more inclined in their religious views towards Nonconformism.
This rise of an urban upper class was thus one of the small chinks in traditional English beliefs about the connection between land and power that, once started, would grow dramatically, as Mingay notes:
Thus the landed interests and the commercial and industrial interests moved on separate courses, divided not only by the differing sources of their wealth but also by differences in outlook, culture and even in some degree religion .
There were a number of contemporary critics of this shift away from the traditional division of landed gentry and landless (but tied to the land) peasantry, such as the mid-18th-century rant by John Byng, fifth Viscount of Torrington, who in his diary both railed against the leveling of distinctions brought about by mercantile-based wealth .
But perhaps a more significant (and certainly more extreme) challenge to the traditional relationship between power and land in England came about at the end of the 18th century as a small group of radicals began to attack the entire concept of private property and so to strike at the fundame
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