of Henry VII. Early in the reign of Henry VIII, More, reserving his universal irony for the second book, in the first book of the Utopia speaks plainly and definitely of the sufferings of the common people of England and their causes. During the same years 1514-1518, the government was making another effort to solve the new problems. Somewhat later in the same reign appeared the ballad "Now-a-Dayes," and about 1536, Starkey's "Dialogue between Pole and Lupset," already quoted, while in 1533 and 1535, still a third group of statutes was passed on the same subject. In the later years of Henry VIII.complaints became more numerous, as shown in the pamphlet and ballad literature, and in the scanty local records. But the greatest distress among the people, or at least the fullest testimony to it, falls in the short reign of Edward VI. Latimer and Lever, Becon and Gilpin, in their sermons, Crowley and Forrest in their doggerel verse, the Protector in proclamations and statutes, all dilate on the miseries of the people, and these finally reach their culmination in the rebellion of 1 549. From the reign of Mary no mention of the difficulties has come down, except in the statute-book, where an act of 1553 adjudged as felons those "who to the number of twelve should break down hedges, ditches, or other inclosure of any park or ground inclosed," and another of 1555 reënacted all the old laws against inclosures, yet it is evident that the same causes were still at work, and in Elizabeth's reign they assert themselves frequently in the literature, as in Parliament. Midway in the reign, Harrison refers to "so notable an inconvenience growing by incroching and joining of house to house, and laieng land to land, whereby the inhabitants of manie places of our countrie are devoured and eaten up and their houses either altogither pulled downe or suffered to decaie by litle and litle." A few 1 See infra, p. 25. See infra, pp. 27, 36. * Harrison, Description of England, Book II, Chap. XIII. New Shakspeare Society ed., VI, 1, p. 259. years later, Stubbes declares that "these inclosures be the causes why rich men eat up poore men, as beasts doo eat grasse. These, I say, are the caterpillars and devouring locustes that massacre the poore, and eat up the whole realme to the destruction of the same. The Lord remove them.”1 At the very close of the century Bastard's vigorous epigrams give evidence at once of the improvement in poetry and the continuance of the social changes. "TO QUEEN ELIZABETH. I knowe where is a thiefe and long hath beene, The grasse grows greene where litle Troy did stand, O Prince, the wrong is thine, for understand, Even as late as 1604, in the first year of James I, a book already quoted sets out to prove of "Inclosure," that "(1) It decaieth Tillage, (2) It dispeopleth Townes, (3) It is against the Common-wealth of the Jews, (4) It is against the state of Christ's Church, (5) It is against Christian charitie, (6) It is against the Church and Commonwealth, and ancient liberties and customs of England, (7) Inclosure with depopulation is a 1 Philip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, 1583. Part I, Chap. VII. New Shakspeare Society ed., VI, 6, p. 117. Thomas Bastard, Chrestoleros; Seven Bookes of Epigrames, 1598. Book III, Epigram 22. sinne whereof God shall make especiall inquiry at the day of judgment." But these last complaints are almost isolated. Notwithstanding the increased bulk of literary production, mention of the most characteristic of the changes is more and more seldom found. The period of the movements here referred to was evidently drawing to a close and giving place to a more settled condition of affairs for the masses of the people. That period was practically identical with the reign of the Tudor sovereigns, or can be said to fall pretty fairly into the century and a quarter between 1475 and 1600. From much direct and indirect testimony, then, it is evident that some radical social changes were in progress during this period; that they bore with especial hardness on the lower classes of the people, and left a deep impress on the literature of the time. But in order to understand the nature of these changes, to appreciate the significance of much of the writing of the early sixteenth century, to see how and why so many people were suffering, it is necessary to gain some clear knowl. edge of the old English life by approaching it from the people's side, by recognizing its plain, everyday characteristics, before any great changes had occurred. For of all the group of contemporary changes, in the material, political, and intellectual world, there was none more profound than that in the ordinary life of the ordinary people. In fact, the problem we have to study in this essay is the effect on the masses of the people of the influences of this period: the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation, of the decay of the old nobility and the growth of absolute monarchy, of the increase of wealth and the extension of commerce, of the growing prosperity of the prosperous and the utter misery of the poor. I. Mediaeval England was an agricultural country. It had of course its cities and towns, quite numerous, active, and wealthy, with their handicrafts and their commerce. These will come 1 Francis Trigge, Humble Petition, etc. under our examination later; but they were small at best, and the vast proportion of the people gained their support by agriculture and knew only rural life. This farming country of the Middle Ages, however, and its population differed in many ways, even as late as the fifteenth century, from that with which we are familiar in modern England. The separate, isolated country house of the present time, whether gentleman's seat, farmhouse, or laborer's cottage, was almost unknown. The houses were all grouped into concentrated villages like those of the continent of Europe at the present day. A village street or open green was closely lined by the farmhouses, with their barns and outbuildings, of the whole surrounding stretch of agricultural country; and even the church, the parsonage, and the manor house were seldom far detached from the other buildings. Long afterward, the new habit of building houses separate from others was spoken of as an abnormal and perhaps somewhat impious thing. "This community of dwelling, inclosers do sometimes take away in Christ's Church; for they will have no man almost dwell neare them. We may see many of their houses built alone, like ravens' nests, no birds building neere them." 1 II. Outside of the group of houses of the village the country lay as open as in the "Angelus" of Millet. No hedges or fences divided the fields: the arable land, meadows, commons, and patches of woods stretched away uninclosed, and apparently undivided, till they reached the confines of another manor whose population was similarly gathered into a village surrounded by its open farming lands. From the farmhouses of the village men and women with their implements and cattle went out to work on their land, some of it perhaps a mile or more away, and returned to the village, on pathways which all converged, when their work was over. 1 Francis Trigge, Humble Petition, 1604. III. This open arable land was not divided up into farms in the modern sense, that is groups of fields, each field of some acres in extent, and each surrounded by a fence, hedge, or wall. On the contrary, the whole of the land surrounding a village was plowed into some hundreds or even thousands of "acres," an acre as a piece of land being approximately four rods wide and forty rods long. In some cases the division was into half acres, or even into roods, all these strips being of the same length, but of one half or one quarter the width, respectively, of a full acre. It is on an open field thus divided, that Piers Plowman says: 1. "I have an half acre to erye1· bi the heighe way, way teche." These acre or half-acre strips were cultivated each for itself, and were separated from one another either by the mere reversal of the direction of the furrow in plowing, by narrow strips of unplowed turf, called "balks," or when the strips were on the side of a hill, by grassy banks known as "linches."The narrow balks or grassy strips separating the grain-covered acres were a conspicuous feature, and appear frequently in literature. They were the resting places where, "Between the acres of the rye, These pretty country folks would lye.” Nicholas Breton makes his disconsolate lover say, Passus VI, lines 4-6, Text B. 8 Shakspeare, As You Like It, Act V, sc. 3. Toyes of an Idle Head, 1582, Chertsey Worthies Library. Skeat's ed. Early English Text Society. |