holders of England there are more in extent and richer than in any other country in Europe." At the commencement of the century which was to witness the accomplishment of that revolution which I have undertaken to chronicle, the yeoman class had been threatened rather than attacked; it still counted within the nation as an economic, political and social element of very great weight.1

V

THE AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS

A STUDENT of the time who carried his investigations below the class of farmers and small landowners would be struck at the outset with the species of legal servitude which lay heavy on the agricultural labourer; he would imagine that he had discovered in him the one suffering member of that prosperous community. It is one of the features of feudal society that, outside the towns, the individual counts for nothing unless he hold lands, which confer a power upon their owner and stand a pledge for his acts. Those who possess nothing but the strength and skill to labour are outside the law; they are subject to the good pleasure of their superiors, who are responsible for them as well as for the maintenance of public order which is supposed to be threatened by them.

In the fourteenth century, when this system of patronage had lost its force, there ensued great disorder and a complete displacement of personal and economic relations; it was considered impossible to combat this state of things except by a series of harsh statutes which dealt either with the pettiest details or involved pro

visions of a sweeping and indefinite character; the justices of the peace were entrusted with the task of carrying them into effect. Under the Tudors the monks were dispossessed of the estates which they had administered in patriarchal fashion, and the rapacity of the new owners showed itself in the frequent expulsion of tenants: these evictions, and the dispersion of the indigent poor who had clustered round the monasteries for protection, once more turned adrift a considerable section of the lower orders and rendered necessary the re-enactment in a fuller and more elaborate shape of the statutes of Richard II. At this period we find justices of the peace fixing the rate of wages, regulating the price of provisions, imposing compulsory service and apprenticeship, and sanctioning the forcible employment of the poor in the cultivation and harvesting of the crops. The hours of labour were fixed by law. The poorrate was the inevitable result of this system of servitude and the price paid for its establishment.

It is possible that so far as regarded the civil and criminal law, the English peasant, even though he were a pauper, may at this time have enjoyed more freedom than any other peasant in Europe; but so far as regarded public administration, the maintenance of order and social economy, the class in England which owned no land, was in a measure outside the legal pale; English liberty, the subject of so much boasting, did not extend so far down the social scale.

It is one of the curiosities of history that oppressive laws do not always check the prosperity of the particular class which seems to feel their weight. A century

and a half before Elizabeth, the English peasant enjoyed the necessaries of life in the greatest abundance. Immediately after the Black Death the rate of wages rose considerably. The rigorous enactments of the time— the preambles themselves of the statutes prove it-were aimed at a class which was in a state of progress, a class which had become a disturbing element for the very reason that its condition had changed.

This process of change had set in motion the law of supply and demand, and so alarmed a community who were accustomed to consider the ratio between the two as permanently fixed. The men who under the terms of these statutes were prosecuted and punished as vagabonds were very frequently nothing more than workmen in search of better wages. The rate of wages had, in fact, become higher as the general increase of wealth enabled landowners and farmers to offer better terms. At the time of Edward IV. the English peasant, as Fortescue describes him, was warmly clad in woollen stuffs; he lived on fish and meat, and only drank water as a penance; he was well provided with household furniture and implements of husbandry. The French peasant, of the same period, was clad in sackcloth and ill-nourished on rye bread, and feasted at rare intervals on a morsel of bacon, or on the offal and heads of beasts that had been slaughtered for his lord. Fortescue views this contrast with complacency, but he is a boastful writer, and his work has the suspicious flavour of a panegyric. Still, after making due allowance for exaggeration, sufficient evidence remains to place beyond all question that the condition of the English agricultural

E.C.

K

labourer at the end of the fifteenth century was an enviable one. It is not impossible that his condition changed somewhat for the worse during the sixteenth century, but in any case it continued to be superior to that of the corresponding class on the Continent. French writer asserts that English workmen earned more in a week than Spaniards or Germans did in a month. He speaks with wonder of the journeymen carpenters who had money to spare and found time to play tennis. The existence of a compulsory poor-rate shows indeed that at the time of which we are speaking paupers were a numerous body; but it should be observed that the poor law was then neither a symptom of that hopeless destitution which we sometimes meet with in purely industrial communities, nor had it then become, as it became later on, a pauperizing and demoralizing agent. At this period relief was given to the impotent and helpless only; the able-bodied poor had no claim to it, and they were forcibly compelled to work; it was moreover distributed by the parish, that is to say, through an agency almost paternal in its character. Thus the poor-rate in Elizabeth's time had nothing in common with the local and aristocratic socialism which was so much in vogue during the eighteenth century. Civil society had taken over the traditional responsibilities of the Church with regard to the poor, and every little parish discharged them without ostentation, and, on the whole, impartially. While some required assistance, the greater part of the peasants were prospering. We find them again in the seventeenth century subject to the same system of discretionary