standard by which we can measure civilisation, and if we knew more than we do, the village life of the sixteenth century and England is all villages-would still be a mystery to us. Yet, before returning to the humbler task of examining economic conditions, we may perhaps summarise the sort of impressions formed of the peasants by those who knew them in their own day, impressions no doubt as misleading as a traveller's sketches of modern England, yet, like a traveller's sketches, possessing a certain value, because they show the points which an intelligent outside opinion selects for emphasis.

One is encouraged in one's belief in the comparative prosperity of a large number of the peasantry in the earlier sixteenth century by the comments which the writers of the periods pass upon it, even after a decline has already begun. The picture we get is of an open-handed, turbulent, largeeating and deep-drinking people, much given to hospitality and to merriment both coarse and refined; according to modern standards very ignorant, yet capable of swift enthusiasm, litigious, great sticklers for their rights, quick to use force in defence of them, proud of their independence, and free from the grosser forms of poverty which crush the spirit. The latter feature strikes everybody. Foreign visitors1 notice with amazement the outward signs of wealth among the humbler classes. English writers, though their tone becomes sadder and sadder as the century proceeds, are never tired of boasting of it. Even in the eighties of the sixteenth century, when many of the peasants are much worse off than they had been a hundred years before, Harrison, though he paints in dark colours the ruinous effects of the agrarian changes, describes their hearty life with good-humoured gusto. "Both the artificer and the husbandman are sufficiently liberal and very friendly at their tables, and when they meet they are so merry without malice, and plain without inward Italian or French craft and sublety, that it would do a man good to be in company among them. . . . Their food consisteth principally of beef

1 Harrison in Elizabethan England (Withington), p. 114, quoting one of "the Spaniards in Queen Mary's days." "These English have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as the king."

and such meat as the butcher selleth. That is to say, mutton, veal, lamb, pork. In feasting also the latter sort, I mean the husbandmen, do exceed after their manner, especially at bridals, purifications of women, and such odd meetings, where it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent, each one bringing such a dish, or so many with him, as his wife and he consult upon, but always with this consideration that the lesser friend shall have the better provision." The peasants themselves have a good conceit of their position, and all unmindful of the whirligig of time and its revenges, contrast it with that of their class in France, where women labour like beasts in the fields, where men go in wooden shoes or no shoes at all, where the people drink water instead of ale, eat rye bread and little meat, and have not even the heart, like honest Englishmen, to rob the rich who oppress them, and that in the most fertile realm in all the world; "Caytives and wretches, lyvyng in lyke thraldome as they dyd to the Romaynes, and gevynge tribute for theyr meat, drinke, brede, and salte, which for theyr wayke personayges and tymorous hartes I may compare to the pigmies who waged battayle against the Cranes, so that I dare let slip a hundred good yeomen of England against five hundred of such ribaldry."2 Apart from the utterances of these good Jingoes, stray glimpses show us a people which not only is materially prosperous, but is also bold in action, and can produce men of high moral ardour. In the twentieth century the rural population is a bye-word for its docility. Its ancestors in the sixteenth were notorious for their restiveness. Hales, who knew and loved them, makes one of the characters in his dialogue suggest that men at arms should be used to put ⚫ down the disturbances made by them and by the unemployed

1

1 Fortescue, On the Governance of England, chaps.iii. and xiii. The Scots, he thinks, are only one degree less faint-hearted than the French. "Thai ben often tymes hanged for larceny, and stelynge off good in the absence off the owner theroff. But ther hartes serve them not to take a manys gode, while he is present, and woll defende it."

Coke, Debate of Heralds. See also the quotation, Froude's Henry VIII., vol. i. chap. i., from a State Paper of 1515: "What comyn folke in all this world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folke is so mighty, so stronge in the felde, as the comyns of England?"

The Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), p. 94.

weavers, only to answer, through the lips of another, that to call in the military will be the best way to make them riot all the more:-" Marie, I think that waye wold be rather occasion of commotions to be stirred than to be quenched, for the stomakes of Englishmen would never beare that, to suffer such injuries and reproaches as I knowe suche (i.e. the men at arms) use to do to the subjects of France."

These humble people have their idealisms. They produce martyrs for the new religion and for the old, Lollards who suffer persecution for upholding the Wycliffite tradition in the quiet villages of Buckinghamshire, Catholics who follow Aske in that wonderful movement of northern England, the last of the crusades, in 1536, or fall in Devonshire thirteen years later before the artillery of Herbert. Nor are they altogether cut off from the springs of learning. For at the beginning of the sixteenth century the upper classes have not yet begun to covet education for themselves sufficiently to withhold it from the poor. Bequests1 show that the sons of well-to-do peasants may have been among those godly yeomanry whom Latimer 2 described as once, in happier social

1 Victoria County History, Berkshire, ii., 208. In 1558 a yeoman leaves his son a portion of land worth £10 a year "for his keepinge and learninge in Oxford for five years nexte." On the same page there is a case of a man described as a "yeoman" who is tenant by copy of Court Roll.

2 Latimer's Sermons. The first sermon preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549 (Everyman Series, p. 86): "We have good statutes made for the commonwealth, as touching commoners and enclosures; many meetings and sessions; but in the end of the matter there cometh nothing forth. Well, well, this is one thing I will say unto you; from whence it cometh I know, even from the devil. I know his intent in it. For if ye bring it to pass that the yeomanry be not able to put their sons to school (as indeed universities do wondrously decay already); I say ye pluck salvation from the people and utterly destroy the realm. For by yeomen's sons the faith of Christ is and hath been maintained chiefly." See also A Supplication of the Poor Commons (E. E. T. S.): "This thing causeth that suche possessioners as heretofore were able and used to maintain their own children to lernynge and suche other qualities as are necessary to be had in this Your Highness Royalme, are now of necessitie compelled to set theyr own children to labour, and al is lytle enough to pay the lorde's rent, and to take the house anew at the end of the yere." The children of yeomen had no doubt been educated mainly for the Church, and some attained high position (Surtees Society, vol. lxxix. pp. 263-264, for the son of a yeoman becoming a Bishop, and vol. li. No. 53, the son of a yeoman becoming subdeacon of York, vol. lxxix. pp. 176-177, for a yeoman's son sent to school for fifteen years). But in the fifteenth century this was not always so, v. Leach, Educational Charters, p. 41, for a school founded in Yorkshire, a county which "produced many youths endowed with light and sharpness of ability, who do not all want to attain the dignity and elevation of the priesthood, that

conditions than those amid which he preached, frequenting the older universities, and the records of some sixteenth century grammar-schools tell a similar story. Among the first twenty-two names on the register of Repton1 there are five gentlemen, four husbandmen, nine yeomen, two websters or weavers, a carpenter, and a tanner.

But by that time much had changed, and for seventy years before these documents begin the peasantry in many parts of England had had sterner things to think of than the schooling of their children.

as for

these may be better fitted for the mechanical arts and other concerns of this world." A case of hostility to the education of the poorer classes based on the idea that education should be reserved for "gentlemen" is given ibid. p. 470, where the notorious Lord Rich and other gentlemen argue husbandsmen's children, they were more meet. . . for the plough and to be artificers than to occupy the place of the learned sort. So that they wished none else to be put to school, but only gentlemen's children." Cranmer retorted, "Poor men's children.. .. are commonly more apt to apply their study than is the gentleman's son delicately educated. . . the poor man's son by painstaking will be learned, when the gentleman's son will not take the pains to get it, . . . wherefore if the gentleman's son be apt to learning let him be admitted; if not apt, let the poor man's child being apt enter in his room."

Repton School Register, 1564-1910. One of the husbandmen kept his boy at school for ten years. The average school life of the sons of seven yeomen was between six and seven years; one stays for twelve years, going to school at five and staying till seventeen. If one may judge by the attitude of most modern parents ("I went to the mill when I was ten, and why shouldn't Tommie?"), these men must have been pretty comfortably off.

CHAPTER IV

THE PEASANTRY (continued)

(e) Signs of Change

So far attention has been concentrated upon those phenomena which suggest that, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth century begin, there has been a period-one may date it roughly from 1381 to 1489-of increasing prosperity for the small cultivator. We have emphasised the evidence of this upward movement which is given by the growth among the peasantry of a freer and more elastic economy. We have watched them shake off many of the restrictions imposed by villeinage and build up considerable properties. We have seen how the custom of the manor still acts as a dyke to defend them against encroachments, and to concentrate in their hands a large part of the fruits of economic progress. In the century from the Peasants' Revolt to the first Statute against Depopulation, in spite of the political anarchy which disfigures it, there is, as it seems to us, an interval between one oppressive régime and another, between the leaden weight of villeinage and the stress and strain of the gathering power of competition. In that happy balance between the forces of custom and the forces of economic enterprise, custom is powerful, yet not so powerful that men cannot evade it when evasion is desired; enterprise is growing, yet it has not grown to such lengths as to undermine. the security which the small man finds in the established relationships and immemorial routine of communal agriculture.

There is, however, we need hardly say, another side to the picture, and to that other side we must now turn. We must examine again from another point of view some of

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