2- 5JeuJ ^atk Halt ajoUcgc of AgricultutB At (flotnell llniiiecsttg 3tt|aca. ^. 1. Sitbrarg HC 253.R72™" ""'""">"■""">' Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013979236 THE ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION: OF HISTORY. By the Same Author. -THE INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford, Edited by Arthur G. L. Rogers. Demy ^o, cloth, i6f. I-ondon: T. FISHER UNWIN. THE ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY ^LECTURES DELIVERED IN WORCESTER COLLEGE HALL, OXFORD, 1887-8) BY JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS *EOFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFOHC AND OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS, KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON, AUTHOR OF "SIX CENTURIES OP WORK AND WAGES,'' "a HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE AND PRICES IN ENGLAND," ETC. SMCOND EDITIOia. T. FISHER UNWIN PATERNOSTER SQUARE , NEW YORK : G. P. PUTNAM'S sblSfS c3 (^^lio PREFACE. The lectures coutained in this volume were delivered in the hall of ihe author's College (Worcester, Oxford) in his capacity as lecturer in Political Economy to that Society. They were open to all memhers of the university, and were very numerously attended. I mention this, because, being printed as they were read, the fact may explain or excuse the various local allusions which they con- ta,m, and the occasional repetitious of statement which will be found in them. The business of a lecturer is to teach as best he -can. I should be the last person to deny that there are economical generalities which are as universal in their application as they are ivae. Such, for example, are those which affirm that the indi- vidual has an inalienable right to lay out his money, or the pro- duce of his labour to the best advantage, and that any interference with that right is an abuse of power, for which no valid excuse whatever has been, or can be, alleged. In other words, there is no answer to the claim of free exchange. Of course I am well aware that an answer has been attempted, and that civil government con- stantly invades the right. The invasion is brigandage under the forms of law. Other illustrations can be given, as that the police of society must always regulate the trade in instruments of credit, that certain services are part of the function of government, that the satisfaction of contracts, under an equitable interpretation, must be guaranteed, that the only honest rule in taxation is equality of sacrifice, with what such a rule implies or involves, and fio on. It is very likely that in practice government violates these economical principles, and gives more or less plausible reasons for yi PSEFACE. its misconduct. And &s wrongs done by government have an endur=- ing effect, it is difiScnlt, if not impossible, to interpret any problem in political economy, without taking into account those historical' circumstances of which the present problem is frequently the result,, and occasionally to examine the present political situation. In brief, any theory of political economy which does not take facts into ac- count is pretty sure to land the student in practical fallacies of the grossest, and in the hands of ignorant, but influential people, of the most mischievous kind. I could quote these fallacies by the dozen. Some have been over and over again refuted ; others stUl possess- vitality. Some are slowly losing their hold, especially in practicfd politics, which is becoming every day more economical. Many of these errors die hard, especially when they assume the form of a vested interest ; sometimes they are maintained as part of the con- tinuity of policy ; sometimes they are defended by bold and baseless- assertions. In time, they become the subjects of parliamentary compromise, at last they are swept away and repudiated. Any^ student of the economical laws which can be found in the historical statute book, wUl constantly find that the wisdom of one genera- tion is the foUy of another. Many years ago I began to suspect that much of the political economy which was currently in authority was a collection of logomachies, which had but little relation to the facts of social life^ Accident, and some rare local opportunities, led me to study these facts in the social life of our forefathers, facts of which the existence was entirely unsuspected. I began to collect materials, chiefly in the- form of prices, and at first of the necessaries of life. But I soon widened my research, and included in my inquiry everything; which would inform me as to the social condition of Englishmen, six centuries ago and onwards. Gradually, I came to see how EngUshmen hved through these ages, and to learn, what, perhaps,. I can never tell fully, the continuous history of social life in thisr- country, up to nearly recent times, or at least till that time in. which the modem conditions of our experience had been almost stereotyped. By. this study, I began to discover that much which popular economists believe to be natural is highly artificial ; that what they call laws are too often hasty, inconsiderate, and in- accurate inductions ; and that much which they consider to be= PREFACE. y» demonstrably irrefiitable is demonstrably false. I have often had to conclude that the best-intentioned thinkers and ^ters have been supremely mischievons, and that in attempting to framd a system, they have wrecked ?ill system. It must, I think, be admitted that political economy is in a bad way : its authority is repudiated, its conclusions are assailed, its arguments are com- pared to the dissertations held in Milton's Limbo, its practical suggestions are conceived to be not much better than those of the philosophers in Laputa, and one of its authorities, as I myself heard, was contemptuously advised to betake himself to Saturn. Now all this is very sad. The book^ which seemed to be wise are often compared to those curious volumes of which the converts at Ephesus made a holocaust. And the criticism is just. The distrust in ordinary political economy has been loudly ex- pressed by working men. And, to speak truth, one need not wonder at it. The labour question has been discussed by many economists with a haughty loftiness which is very irritating. The economist, it is true, informs them, that all wealth is the product of labour, that wealth is labour stored in desirable objects, that capital is the result of saved labour, and is being extended and multiplied by the energies of labour. Then he turns round, and rates these workmen for their improvidence, their recklessness, their incontinence in foolishly increasing their numbers, and hints that we should be all the better off if they left us in their thousands, while there are many thousands of well-off people whose absence from us would be a vast gain. I have never read in any of the numerous works which political economists have written, any attempt to trace the historical causes of this painful spectacle, or to discover whether or no persistent wrong doing has not been the dominant cause of Eng- lish pauperism. The attempts which workmen have made to better their condition have been traduced, or ignored, or made the subject of warnings as to the effects which they will induce on the wage fund, this wage fund, after aU, being a phantasm, a logomachy. In the United States the case is worse. A writer will publish a book on wages, and deliberately ignore the effect of the American tariff on the real wages of workers. If he knows anything at all of what he is writing about, and is not merely writing for office, he should be aware that no fertile customs revenue can come from anything '1/' - i •( M LEGISLATION ON LABOUR AND ITS EFFECTS. . The effects vfihe G^ieea/tPl^guer-^Begulatipn of .prices by mithoriiy customary when there were labour jiriees^-The first Statute of labourers — Successive Statutes of Labourers — The appeal of the '' lUorTitnen to Dordesday-^The events of 1381 — Lelgisidtion of Meriry IV., v., VI. — Guilds of artifioeiv^neitTy VII. and Henry VIII.-^ Sabits of the ' latter-^-His .issue of base, money- — The position of .Ehzoibethr-rThe .Elizahetham ^tat^te, of ^aJfourera^^Xbe (ibjeots of the statute — Indirect resqv/rces , of labourers — JVages actuaUy paid — Assessments more generous under the Commonwealth. It is inevitable, in a series of lectures like the present, Where far- fekchin^ and present effects are traCeft to distant causes, that one should Beem discursive When one strives to be connected. ' The war- filre of capital and labour in England has been more prolohged tlian flny other historical struggle. DynaStic wars, wars of religion, wars oh behalf of the balance of power,' wirs for supremacy in commerce have been, as you Well kndw, Waged in Europe for lengthened •periods. But iidne has been so lasting as that between employer and labourer. None has hitherto been so obscure. The histoi?y of the contest is to be extracted from the Stattite Book, in laws long Sihce repealied or modified, or become bbsolete; in laws which no niodem edition of the Statutes at large reprints. t ' doubt Whether the^ 'exist in biiy bth^r printed' form than in' the numerous folio volumes in which all, or nearly all, the Eiglish laws ever ■enacted were 'published, by authority of Parlisiinent, in «iB««n»o, but are found, T believe, 'only ia the' greatest of our pliblic libraries. 24 LEGISLATION ON LABOUR AND ITS EFFECTS. These laws, however, wonld be only indefinite, incoherent, and more or less effectual explosions of wrath and discontent, were it not for the contemporaneous evidence of wages actually paid, evi- dence which I have been able to supply, ha-sing long been an assiduous and solitary worker in this field of research. The law and the facts illustrate each other. But I must say, with some regret, that the inferences which I am constrained to draw, inferences which are genuine and irrefutable history, have not increased my reverence for the machinery by which the social state of England has been developed. There is, I must confess, a sordid aide to the most energetic efforts of collective, I do not say individual, patriotism, and the student of the economical history of England has to prepare himself for painful experiences, even during the most heroic ages of our political history. At the same time, men are not to be blamed for taking advantage of what law accords them. It is to their credit that, in course of time, they became more merciful than the law, as I have found that they constantly were. They never, to be sure, when they made the machinery of their discipline, and what they called law and order, more searching and more severe, declared that they had created no new crime, when their principal and successful effort was to render it impossible, by studiously demoralizing the agents of law, to distinguish between innocence and guilt. I have referred, in the last lecture, to the magnitude of the calamity known as the Plague, and more recently, it seems, as the Black Death. Before this event, and the consequences which ensued from it, these consequences having been almost inmiediate, every one, from the king to the serf, cultivated land for his own profit. It is impossible to cc-nceive any social condition which would be so certain to breed a reverence for law and property as one ' in which every person was possessed of property, which, unless pro- perty were respected, was so open to marauders as agricultural pro- duce was. I have no doubt that the singular respect for property in agricultural produce which so distinguished Englishmen in the fourteenth century, and, for the matter of that, onwards, and the honour in which husbandry was held, had a good deal to do with the formation of the early English character among aU classes. Even in the severest time — ^I can give the negative testimony of my TBE EFFECTS OF THE GREAT PLAQJJE, 25 own inquirieB— it Tvas rare indeed that, farm produce was stolen. I do not mean to say that, outside the jurisdiction of the local courts, the foreign, trader, the Lombard exchanger, or even the Pope's emissary, could traverse the king's highway in complete safety. I will not even assert that abbots and, priors were always able to con- vey their cash and valuables -yyithout risk of Eobin Hoods. But the insurance on the conveyance of money is very low when it is put into the hands, as it often is, pf the common carrier, and I have never found the record of a , loss from robbers in the many thousand cqUegijite and monastic accounts which I have read. Englishmen were very prone to defend their rights, real or supposed, by insurrection, and even to depose bad or weak kings, and change the succession, but they rarely broke the king's peace. Even during the civil wars of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries there was little marauding, In 1461, the Northern. army of Margaret took to pillaging; and Edward was instantly called to the throne. In the Parliamentary war, 1642-§, the Eoyalists of the west showed an imperfect appreciation of the rights i of property, and they had to meet the resistance of the clubmen. On the other, hand, it was the custom of the age to regulate prices by authority. The assize of bread and beer is so old that it is undated- For centuries afterwards local authorities were empowered to fix prices. The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, in the seventeenth century, put out his list of m^iximum prices for meat, poultry, and wine, and even of the fares on the new stage, coaches. The law did not affect to regulate the prices of wheat and malt. Such a function was beyond the power of the legislator, and, it must be added, against his interests. But the law regulated the price at which wheat could be turned into bread and malt into beer. The Statute Book is fuU of regulations as to the price of meat and cloth- ing. Nor does it seem that these regulations caused discontent. It was probably considered an advantage that certain services regularly needed should be put under a local police, which should see that statutable prices were not exceeded. Not a little of the criminal business transacted at the manor court is that of present- ments and. fines in the case pf the baker and brewer and the fraudulent miller, who have broken the assize or cheated the tenants. The landowners, then, were. not attempting tp enfprce 20 LEGISLATION ON LABOUR' AND ITS EFFECTS. an absolute novelty wlien they demanded and obtained tlie Statute of LaboHrers. In the first instance the king addressed a proclamation to William the Primate, as the urgency was great, ordering that workmen Bhould labour at the old wages. This act of tti© king's is a cnrioos illustration of the situation. Death, the new death, or as the Scotch called it, though only for a time* the foni death of the English, had been busy with the CSinrch, and Edward had offered the see of Canterbury to William Edyndon, the predecessor of WiUiam of Wykeham in the see of Winchester, and Edyndon had -declined it. The ultimate occupant was Simon Islip. Parliament was at once summoned, and the first Statute of Labourers, 23 Ed. in., was enacted. The preamble of the Act recites the fsict and the effects of the Pestilencd; the straits to which masters were put by the consequent scarcity of servants, who will not work except at excessive wages. It then provides that every person under sixty years of age who does not Kve by merchandise, exercises no craft, who has no means of his own, or proper land for his occupation in tillage, and who is not serving any particular master, shall be bound to serve in hus- bandry, whoever may-require him, at the wages customary in the twentieth year of the king's reign. Lords who have bond-men and bond-tenants have a prior claim to their services — a proof that wh»i the dues were paid which were annexed to such persona' holding, they were free to work for whom they leased. Any two men could denounce the person who refused to work to the sheriff, who conM imprison him. To use a modem phrase, " if a servant in hus- bandry struck work," he should be imjaiBcmed, and the employment of such a person after his liberation should involve the same penalty on the employer. If higher than customary wages were taken, a penalty of double the amount given and received should be in- flicted, the process being taken in the Lord's court. But if the lord himself gives more than the law allows, he is to be prosecuted in the county wapentake) tithing, or other court, and treble penalties are to be inflicted on him; Artificers, many kinds being named, and a general clause including all others being added, are also to expect the wages of 1346. Then comes a clause declaring that provisions shall be sold at reasonable rates, under penalties, the administration THE FIRST STATUTE OF LABOUBEBS. 27 of ihis part of ithei law being, ;put into the hands of mayors and bailiffs in the several cities and towns, and no gift is to be made to beggars who can work, under painiof imprisonment. The Act is to be published 'by archbishops and bishops. in all churches of their several dioceses, and the parochial clergy are bidden to see that the law is enforced. , j The legislation of ,3849 was a total failure. , It is probably the case that the reference to the Lord's court, in which a formal pre- sentment of offenders had to be made first, and the cases to be tried byia jury next,, was the cause of the ill-success of the legislation. There arose a custom of entering the amount of ihe ■ labourer's demand in the account, then, ■running it through with a pen and substituting the statutory amount. The bailiffs kept the letter ' of the statute, butipaid theihigher wages. ; i ...In 1350-1, 25 Edi III», Parliament, with the. assent of prelates, earls, barons,, and . other great men, descants on the malice of ser- vants, asserts that they pay no respect to the older statute, and refuse to work except at double or treble wages. New provisions are therefore enacted. The money wages of all, kinds of. workmen, servants in ; husbandry, and artisans, are fixed at certain rates, as long as wheat is under 6s. 8d. a quarter. The jurisdiction of offences is transferred from the 'Lord's court to the justices, who are to meet 'for the purpose of hearing and'^djudicating on offences at least four times a year, and are empowered to inflict forty days' imprisonment for the, first offence, three months for the second, six for the third, .as well as levying the fines , of the first statute, the penalties to gp to. the exchequer. Seryanta, flying from county to county were to be airrested. Contemporary writers assure us. that this became. a common practice, workmen no doubt seeking those localities ;in , which labour was most required, and developing an organization for information and action. In fact, we are told that associations exactly Jike.ihose of modem trade unions were entered into, the members subscribing for, purposes ; of defence and for paying such fines as .might be imposed. In a subsequent' statute, 25 Ed. III. cap. 7, provision was made for paying the fines, and estreats into the exchequer. The Act was again a failure. If we can infer from the next legis- lation, the ill-success of the measure was due to the fines being 28 LEGISLATION ON LABOUR AND ITS EFFECTS. payable to the Crown. There was and there remained a scarcity of workmen. The void was not satisfactorily filled by imprisoning the obstinate, and the aggrieved person, the employer, was not particularly active in levying fines which should go to the king- Besides, the landowners soon despaired of carrying on the old system of cultivation with their own stock, under bailiffs, and rapidly devised a new relation between themselves and their lords, the stock and land lease, under which the landowner let his stock with the land for a time to a tenant farmer. Under 31 Ed. III. statute 1, caps. 2 and 7, the fines enacted for breaches of the statute were to go to the lords, and London, the Cinque Ports, and all other franchises were brought under the general law. The office of justice of the peace was remodelled by an Act of 34 Ed. III. The fine on the recalcitrant labourer was abolished, for the action of the lord was now superseded. But imprisonment was to remain, and the offence was to be no longer bailable. Artisans are to be included in the new legislation. Wages are to be by the day, not the week, but persons may contract in gross for work to be done. Then the statute throws a curious light on the organizations which artisans had entered into, when it declares that the " alliances, covines, congregations, chapters, ordinances, and oaths made or to be made by masons and carpenters shall be void and annulled." The freemason of our day may detect in these associations the germ of his lodge, the economist may allow this view, but sees in them the trades union of the fourteenth century. The policy of the labourers is further illustrated by a clause in the Act, under which fugitive labourers, by whom' must be meant other than serfs, since these could always be reclaimed, were to be outlawed, and branded with the letter P, Furthermore, mayors and bailiffs are constrained to deliver up all fugitive labourers, under a penalty of £10 to the king and a hundred shillings to the aggrieved party. By the 36 Ed. III. cap. 8, domestic chaplains are brought under the Statute of Labourers, and their wages are fixed. Five marks, ^3 6s. 8d., were declared to be a sufficient stipend for such persons. By 42 Ed. III. it is ordered that the Statute of Labourers should be enforced by the justices. The reign of Richard II. gives us fresh information as to the course of the straggle. " Villains," the preamble says, " withdraw SUCCESSIVE STATUTES OF LABOUBEBS. 29 their services and customs from their lords, by the oomfort and procurement of others, their counsellors, maintainers, and abettors, which have taken. hire and profit of the said villains and land- tenants, by colour of certain exemplifications made out of Domes- day, and afSrm that they are discharged, and will suffer no distress. Hereupon they gather themselves in great routs, and argue by such & confederacy that every one shall resist their lords by force." The justices are to take cognizance of such practices, imprison the offenders, and inflict fines to king and lord, on the counsellors of such persons. This is an Act of the 1 Eic. ; in the next year the Statute of Labourers is confirmed. This remarkable preamble refers no doubt to the company of poor priests, whom WikHf had appointed, and who were the channel by which communications were kept up among the disaffected serfs. It is clear, too, that they had taken and paid for legal advice, and that the purport of this advice was, that according to the most ancient and venerable authority, Domesday, the satisfaction of the legal obligations of the tenant in viUenage was a bar to the claim of any farther service on the part of the lord, and especially to that part of the Statute of Labourers which gave a prior claim, at the old rates, of the serf's extra services, to the lord on whom he depended. It is not a little singular that the administration and Parliament were entirely in the dark about the danger which was menacing them. The preamble of this sjatute supplied me, more than twenty years ago, with the key to Tyler's and Littlestreet's insurrection in 1381. The lords had attempted to make claims on the serfs, and were indeed backed by Parliament, which would have practically enlarged the liability of their tenures. They had claimed the old labour rents, which had long been commuted for money payments, flo long that no memory went back to the more ancient custom, and had demanded further sacrifices from them. There was no viUenage in Kent, but Tyler, of, Dartford, had made common cause with the workmen, and probably had far more ambitious ends than the removal of social grievances. It appears, too, that some of the nobles, notably Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, were in sympathy with the insurgents, and we know that some of the city aldermen favoured them. The ostensible object of the insurrection was the total abolition of aU the incidents of viUenage. 30 LEGISLATION ON LABOUR AND ITS EFFECTS. The story of Tyler's msurrection is told witfi snfficient details in all the ordinary history books, aiid those of modem date have accepted in silence the proof that I puhlished more than twenty years ago as to the causes and consequences of the msurrection. The late Mr. Tom Taylor told me that when he discovered' the real facts of the case, as I had narrated them, he was exceedingly struck with the situation, and that be meditated writing an historical' drama on the subject. In point of fact, the whole political and social consti- tution of England was imperilled, and there was great reason in. what the young king told his mother, after the events of Smithfield, that he had lost and recovered his crown on that day. Notwithstanding the harsh language to the discomfited rebels, which the chroniclers put into the young king's moiith, it is clear that he wished to concede to the demands of the serfs. He con- sulted Parliament as to whether he should give effect to the charters of manumission which he had granted, and when Parliament indig- nantly' refiised, as it often does to this dajr refuse to listen to wise counsel, the judges, 1 am persuaded at the king's instance, gave the most favourable constructions possible on these servile tenures, and protected the serf from arbitrary action. Eichard himself, too, refused to bind the yoke more strictly, and when Parliament peti- tioned that the sons of serfs should be declared incompetent of holy orders, he flatly and peremptorily rejected their petition. He had no mind to provoke the risks of aaother Mile-end or Smithfield. Henceforth the characteristics of tenure in vUleinage and serfdom became slighter and more indistinct, though faint traces of personal disabiUty can be detected as l&te as the sixteenth century. Tenure by villenage is rapidly called tenure by copy, and any discredit attaching to the tenant of bare lands is speedily lost in the land- hunger of the fifteenth century, when copyholds were purchased by nobles and knights. - General pardbiQS were speedily issued, at fijrst to those who had been guilty of illegalities in suppressing the insurrection-; next to the insurgents themselves, though a long list of exceptiotis is pub- lished, the majority being Londoners. liQ one case the insurgents of EJmundsbury were pardoned, but were constrained to plead tbeir pardon and give security 'to the Abbot of Bury. Ton will find the narrative of the serfs' acts and claims in Walsinghain, and the THE EVENTS OF 1381. 31 expedients whiok the reluctant abbat adopted in order to elude -the insurgents. There is however an Act of this iseign, 9 Eic. II. cap.. 2, under which provision is maiie, that if villains and niefs- (female serfs) bring fictitious suits against their lord, he is not to be fore- barred by answering at law, By the apcient custom, if a lord pleaded against a serf of .his own in .a coiart of law, he admitted by implication the, serf's. manumission, and was Jicld to have enfran- chised him. ' ., I have given thiishght sketch of the events of 1881, becEtuse the gradual emancipation df , the; serfs, dating unquestionably and prO' ceeding progressively from the greatt Insurrection, must have had its effect in, strengthening, the hands of aU (labourers in resistance to these iaterested statutes. The fees -labourers had made common cause with their meaner fellow-countrymen, and were now rein- forced by those whom they had helped .to emancipate. Fortunately for human progress, there are, and- we trust there always will be, many, .who toeing in ho appreciable peril themselves at the hands of tl^pse .■syho. wield _ power iselfishly or claim rights injuriously, by the aid of their, dependents and their sycophants, undertake the cause of the oppressed, and gam victories in which they win no spoU. Beyond doubt, even in that day, there were many men who,'haYing freedom and rights themselves, thought it. their duty to aid .those whose freedom was imperilled and whose rights' were assailed. It was not to be imagined, because king and Parliament relaxed the feudal lord's grasp on thg serf, that they were likely to yield without further efforts to the claims of the labourer.' The statute 12 Eic. II. cap., .4, whUe.it re-enacts the original Act of Edward, introduces some new provisions into the law. Alleging that " ser- vants and labourers will not, nor for ,a long time would serve ■\vithout outrageous and excessive, hire," it proceeds to fix -the wages of those servants in husbandry who were lodged, and boarded by their employers; Biit it also introduces a passport systeni, - It enacts that, servants going from one employment to another hiring shall carry letters testimonial from their late employer, puts the obligation to: carry passports on pilgrims, and beggars, punishes those wlio are without such letters of credit with the stocks, and those who forge, them with imprisonment, at the discretion of the justices. It also provides that such persons as have been engaged 32 LEGISLATION ON LABOUB AND ITS EFFECTS. in husbandry up to twelve years of age shall be incapable of being apprenticed to trades or handicrafts, and declares their indentures void. It compels artisans to labour in the fields at harvest time, and puts increasing fines on those who give or receive more than the legal rates. The 4 Hen. IV. cap. 14 prescribes that labourers should be hired by the day and not by the week, that they should not be paid for holidays, nor for the eves of feasts, and that they who quit work at noon should be paid for only half a day. The Act puts a penalty of 20s. on the labourer who takes more than the statutory payment. It is remarkable that in 1408 Henry pays four carpenters at Windsor sixpence a day for 365 days in the year. But the statute, as I have proved conclusively, was kept by neither king nor subject. Under 7 Hen. IV. cap. 17, re-enacting the Statute of Labourers, Henry gave an answer to a petition presented by Parliament, to the effect that no person should be allowed to bind his or her son apprentice, unless he had 40s. a year in land or rent, an income from land, which up to recent times would have represented at least £80 a year. The draftsman of the petition, after stating that there was great scarcity of labour owing to the practice of appren- ticeship, enacts that the limit should be 20b. a year, and puts a penalty of lOOs. on any person who takes such an apprentice, any person being permitted to inform against oflFenders. But the Act allows parents to put their sons or daughters to school at their discretion. By 2 Hen. V. cap. 4 the Statute of Labourers is again confirmed, and order is taken that it should be exemplified and sent to the sheriffs for publication in the county court. A new clause is added under which workmen and employers may be examined on oath, as to wages given or received, and a further power is given to the justices of issuing writs for the reclamation of fugitive labourers. By a further Act of the same reign (4 Hen. V.) the penalties for re- ceiving excessive wages are hereafter to be levied from the receivers only. Legislation on the wages of labour is abundant and inoperative during the next reign, the long minority of Henry VI. In the second year, the Statute of Labourers is re-enacted, and a new clause added, one which was hereafter to bear such evil fruit, that the LEGISLATION OF TEE EENEIE8. 33 justices in quarter sessions should be empowered to regulate the rate of wages. But the Act was temporary. In the iiest year, 3 Hen. VI. cap. 1, the confederacies and yearly congregations oi masons in general chapters and assemblies are forbidden,, and the punishment pf &ie and ransom and imprisonment denounced agaiast offenders. By 6 Hen. VI. cap. 3 the labour statutes of Eichard are re- enacted, and the clause permittiag the justices of peace to fix the rate of wages re-enacted and enlarged. . The justices, in every county and the mayor in every city and town are to make proclamation every Easter' and Michaelmas fixing how. much each workman or artificer is to have, with or without food, and these proclamations are to have the force of statutes. But the statute is again temporary. It is re-enacted by 8 Hen. VI., and is to endure "iill the king hath otherwise declared his will in ParHament." By 11 Hen. VIi the Statute of Apprenticeship is again enacted, but London^ is exempted from the 20s. a year clause, by which " the Londoners are grievously vexed and infuriated." ' By 15 H^n. VI. cap. 6 the guilds of artificers and other labourers are attacked. It is stated that " guilds interpret their own charters for their own profit, and to the damage of others." The new law enacts that hereafter all letters patent and charters of guilds shall be registered before the justices of the peace in counties and the chief governors of towns. A penalty of JEIO is to be inflicted on every ordinance which is not in accordance with the charters. You will notice that county or village guilds must have been numerous, or they would not have been made the subject of legislation and in- spection. By 18 Hen. VI. cap. 11 the qualification of the justice is raised to £20 a year in land. By the 23 Hen. VI. cap., 12, the law provides that a servant shall give notice to his employer that he intends to leave his service, " so as to let him provide a new one." The Act also gives a schedule of wages, in which the rates now become customary are aU but acknowledged. , It also declares that hirings in husbandry shall be . for a year certa,in. There is no legislation on the subject of labour during the reigns of Edward IV. and Eichard III. The labourers had won the day. In Henry VII.'s reign the rule about the quali- fication of apprenticeship is rescinded in the case of Norwich by 4 34 LEGISLATION ON LABOUB AND iTS EFFECTS. 11 Hen. VII. cap. 11 ; an^' by cap. 22 of the same year; a Bchedttle of wages is given, which, conisideting the cheapness of the time, is exceedingly liberal.- At no time in English history have the earn- ings of labourers, interpreted by theit purchasing power, been so considerable as those which this Act acknowledges. But the day is twelve hours from March to September, from daybreak till night for the rest of the year. It is certain that fifty years before the labour- day was one of eight hours only, and the wages paid were far ia excess of what was tl}e statutable rate at the time. There is but little legislation of labour during the reign of Henrj VIII. , His Acts remiti the penalties on employers who give higher wages than the statute allows, and re-enact the rates which his , father's law had prescribed. By 7 Hen. VIII. cap. 5, labourers in London are exempted from the Statute of- Labourers, and by 28 Hen. VIII« cap. 5,1 no corppration or company was allowed to restrain apprentices when their time was up from trade, or' to exact more • than such legal fees for their freedom as were permitted under existing laws. I am sensible that the recital which I have made of these ancient laws is dry and dull. But you Cannot study the history of any civilized country to any profit without taking* note of its laws, still less that of England, in which the course of legislation seems t'o be so much a matter of compromise and immediate expedieiiey, but'in which it is therefore more immediately connected 'v^ittf its histey, least jdf all in the economical interpretatiofl-of history, where law ■is to the: social state what chronology and geography are tb the . political estiinate of a nation. During' all this tiifle tlie mass of ' Enghsh labourers, by no means claiming more than the reasonable reward for their services, were thriving under their guilds and trade imiona, the peasants gradually acquiring land,- and becoming the numerous small freeholders of the first half bf the seventeenth ccentury, the,' artisans the master hands in their craft, contractors in Jhe samerperiod for considerable works, planning the solid -and hand- some strpdlures iii what is known of the Perpendiciilar styfe, and iwithal working with their own hands on the buildings which their ^8hrewdness and.iixpOTience had planned. It is true that at the very -best age of the worknan a ruin was impending, the causes of which I have been able to collect, and shall now ^proceed to expound. HW^T Vm-> SIS- HA^BITS.^ . ,35 I)uriii«J the whole of English history,- there never was a sovereign so outrageously and w;anionly extravagant as Henry. He inherited an en-Jrmous fortune from his thrifty, fathe;r,' as fortunes in the 8ixt»<*Jith century went, and dissipated it sp^dily., His wars and aUi^ces in which subsidized the needy Emperor of G-iermany, and W3^ baffled and foiled in all which he undertook cost him much, bfit his expenditure during time of peace was prodigious. He had ^wenty or thirty palaces^ on all of which piilliag down and building ■ivas perpetually going on,, in which an army of' workmen, often by /night and day, on Sundays and on the highest festivals of his ' Church, were incessantly employed, The costof his establishments was enormous. He seemed to have an idea that it was splendid and safe to entertain his nobles, g,nd, he made them quarter them- selves on his numerous palaces. The establishment of Mary, till he disowned her, of the infant Elizabeth, of the ihifant Edward was each more costly than the whole annual charge of his father's living, as the extant wardrobe books testify. He built huge ships which would not sail, huge palaces which were the whims of the tour, and were soon l^ft to decay.- If he could have got at it, he would have spent all the private wealth of all his subjects, and he made every effort to get at it. Whatever he procured, borrowed, raised was soon like the bag of gold which, ^unyan, in his ,vision, saw poured into the lap of Passion. He was popular in. a way, for wasteful people generailly are, even when they waste what does not belong to them. , ^ The smaller monasteries went, and he soon came to an end of their accumulations. The larger ones he sp5,red, declaring them to be the seats of piety and reUgion, He pledged himself that the spoil of the monasteries given himi he would ask his people for no more taxes, not even for necessary wars. Soon the greater monas- teries went. I beUeve that, foreseeing the storm, the monks had granted long leases of the lands, so that much of his plunder was reversionary. But the accumulated treasures of ages came into his clutches. A long atray of waggons carried off the gold, silver,' and precious stones, which for^nearlj four centuries had accumulated round the shrine of Becket. , This shrine was ho doubt the richest in England, perhaps in Christendom. But there were otliers more ancient and nearly as wealthy, at Winchester, at Westminster, at a 36 LEGISLATION ON LABOUB AND ITS eF:iMQ''^^- hundred sacred places. It is exceedingly probable that th^^*'*'^™ lations of these holy places were, as bullion, equal to all thei '^ ^ in circulation at the time. It vanished hke snow in sueP Nothing stayed with him apparently for a longer time thj^^^ could hurl it away. The lands of the monasteries were sai^ . have been a third of the English soil. yi^ After these exploits he seems to have hardly dared to ask people for money. But there stiU remaiued a way in which could most effectually attack their pockets. He began to issue ba^ money, at first with very Httle alloy beyond what had been cus^ tomary. He soon became shameless, for his mint kept issuing baser and baser coins. He is the only English sovereign who has ever committed this peculiarly mean and treacherous crime, for Charles only thought of it. I reckon the continuance of this vile practice under his son as his act, for he had the credit of breeding and bringing up the infamous knaves whom he appointed as his son's guardians. At last, when the wretch was sinking into his grave, worn out by his vices and debaucheries at a comparatively early age, bloated and shamefully diseased, he bethought himself of robbing the labourers and artisans, by confiscating their guild lands. He would have confiscated all the property of the universi- ties had he lived, but fortunately Mr. Froude's patriot king died, the Vitellius and Nero of English history. The mischief begun by Henry was continued by the guardians of his son. It is impossible to speak with too much contempt of the crew whom Henry left to watch over and advise the yoimg prince. Bad men, especially bad men to whom the interests of nations are entrusted, make their instruments worse. The chief of the gang was Somerset, who soon got rid of his brother Seymour at Tower Hill. Somerset completed the confiscation of the guild lands which Henry contemplated. By a pohtical law that in such a time the greatest villain gets the mastery, Northumberland got Somerset out of the way, and for a time seemed master. He was on the point of dismembering England and creating for himself a principahty or kingdom north of the Trent when Edward died ; the angry and impoverished labourers raUied to Mary Tudor, and Northumberland felt. On the scaffold he added one more vice to his catalogue, for he pretended to repent. But he was so bad a THE POVEBTY OF ELIZABETH. 81 man that it may be doubted whether hypocrisy could have made him worse. When Elizabeth came to the throne both sovereign and people were miserably poor. The base money had driven the working classes to beggary, and England, once the most powerful of Western States, was of little more account in the poHcy of Europe than a petty German princedom was. The queen's first task and first duty was to reform the currency. But she could not afford to make good her father's and brother's dishonesty. It would have cost her five years of her revenue. The details of Henry's crime, and the details of Elizabeth's remedy, I must postpone till I deal with the question of metallic currencies in England. It was necessary that I should say as much as I have said in order that we may have Ught where- with to follow the fortunes of the English labourer. His guild lands, the benefit societies of the Middle Ages, which systematically relieved destitution, were stolen by the greedy leader of the new aristocracy, he had suffered eighteen years' experience of a debased currency, prices rose 150 per cent., and the wages of labour were almost stationary. Wages do not rise with prices. To assert that they do, or will, is either ignorance or dishonesty. During the few years which followed on the great American Civil War, and a crew of sharpers, among other dishonest actions, had insisted on, and for a time maintained, an inconvertible paper currency, the condition of workmen in the United States was very distressful. But it was not so bad as the condition of the working classes was in England after the great queen's accession in 1558. There were people at that time who wished to continue the circulation of base money, as they made a large profit on discounting it. In the American case an Englishman, seated as an economist in an academical office, was tempted, because his vanity was flattered, to defend the practice of the Wall Street junto of soft money gamblers. In the days of the English base money. Sir Thomas Gresham, financial agent of the English court at Antwerp, formulated the law which has sub- sequently gone by his name, that if two kinds of money declared by authority to be of equal value, but discovered in the course of trade to be of unequal value, are put into circulation simultaneously, the over-valued money wUl speedily drive that which is under-valued Out of circulation. S3' LEGISLATION ON TAllVUB AND ITS EFFECTS. After reforming the currency, ElizabetH and lier advisers passecl a new S^tatute of Labourei:s. In the Statute Book it is known as 5 Eliz. cap, 4. If, began by repealing all the' statutes" which h'ad regulated, lafciour sincie 2'3 Edward III., over two ceiituries before. It thejl'took all that was most . stringent froni the statutes which ' I have already referred to,' and put them into a comprehensive enactihent, which was hereafter to regulate the relations of em- ployer and labourer. I do not indeed believe that EHzabeth and her' counsellors intended ^o deal unjustly by the workmen ; some indeed of the clauses of the Act are intended, for the Working man's protection, but the mischief of tjie Act was. in the machinery by whicb it vould be carried out, and in tbe, t^erribly depressed condi- ijiop of the labourer, He was handed over to the merpy of his employer at a time, y>'hei be was Utterly incapable of resistmg tl e grossest tyranny^ The Government qf the day probably remem- bered the uprisings oi Tyler and Cade, certainly that of K^t, and they determined to make use of an ihstrumelit, the justices in' quarter sessigns, who would be able to chesi any discontent, even the discontent or despair, and might be trusted, if necessaiy, to starve t^e people into submission. We shall see how completely success attended their ^fiforis, . ! Iii certain., employments servants were t.o be hired by the ye^. Every unmarried person under the age of Spj and not having 40s. a yfar . of his own, nor otherwise employed, was compellable to serve at a yearly hiring in , the craft to which he was brought up. You will note here tbat the limit of private income, the old frapebise of Henry Vl.^s' law, suggests tha;t the framers of the statute are of 9E?^°P ^^^^ *^^ °1^ prices .would recur, and, that calling, a coin a shilling, whep it only contairiecf about the third of a shilling, would enable it to' b;uy as much as when It was three times its present weight, ^y fervant hired for a year couW not be dismissed except Up6n cause ^allpwed by two justices, nor at the ejid Of the year with- ouit a quarter's potipei, Next,, all persons bei^e6n the age? of 15 ^!^^ '^f^'r, ^°^ *P* f °!:'f"^^'!^^Sp employed or' apprenticed, were made %^^^, *° y^?^^)^e 'in,iiu8bandry. Masters unduly dismissing their servants .we're .tp ^be fine,4 40's,„" and servants unlawfully (juitting their employment we're 'to be imprisoned. Servants were not to quit city or parish without a testimonial, if they do so they arc lo THE ELIZABETHAN STATUTE OF LABOUBEBH. 39 bq iipprispned, and if they have a forged testimonial they are to be whipped. M^isters taking a servant without a testimonial are to he fined £5. The hours of labour are defined, as in earlier laws, at twelye hpurs a day during the summer months, and ftom daybreak to night in the y?itit,er. Absence from work is tO;be punished with a fine of a, penny an. hour. A strike is to be visited with a month's imprisonment and, -a fine, of £5, a sum whicih appears to be a btew ag9,inst :wh;9,t .might be surviving of the old trade unions. The justices are to hold a rating sessions i(they| generally held it a .littJG afte? Easterjj in which they are to fix the rate of wages in all employmentsja summer and winter, by day or year, with' board or ■witbPWt.it'.oMd. These rates are to be certified in Chancery, appr(>v:e^ by;the.5?ivsy:GQuncilv aad proclaimed by the slieiiff, who is to call attention to the penalties in the Act. The justices are to be, paid 5s. a day for;their attendance, and, those who are absent frpm ithe rating pes&iojjslare to be fined iBlO. The penalty on giviiig higher I wage^ than th.e, scale is £5 and ten days' imfpfisonment, ton th^ ijepfpyeri tventy-one days, the contract beingj' declared void. Workmen ^assaBlting. » master are to- be imprisoned; for a year or more. Artificers may beieompelled to do harvest work. ' ' "Workmen are .allowed to migrate fcom cotmty to county in h?,?vesfe, time. ,. Women between twelve aaid forty years old, if single,, .can ,be cpHjpEllei to work by the year, week, ox day, at the optjftnof the hirer, and certain persons are allowed to take a,ppren- ^ ticeSj in, Ji"fibapdj:y., , .Householders in towns may. take apprentices' 'f f(S,seyee years (terms,, and .each may hate, two, if *hey be children of artificers, and, an artisan may have as an apprentice the son of 'a^- pers.pn ■vschQfbftanp.jJaiidi,, iThe apprenticeship must be for seven yeai;s, Ujndej: ^a pen^iUyof ;4:0Sfc.a month for .all the. -period short < of.jthis timet But j»erchajits are not to take apprenticesi except ■ frgm paiieiiiliguhftving iOsjj^& year in freehold Jand^:! and in certain specified callings, n.otably in the trade of woollen ^olofh weaving, ui;ilegs, they po^seag a Jreebold of £B a. year. ; ©ne jouineyman' must be ,hirfd with; every three apprentices* and:if moreibhan three-kre inde^tjiredy' one journeyman ,-to,^a(di laqlditionaJi. appBeitticev » But persons rpfu^ng tesbfiSapgreniiced are to be ini^isobfid.) BtBia'wftys ^ are,,to.]bie imprjg§ne4. .,'.,''■• ■ ■ '■■ ' !.':'<;.<•.:■ i ' -•■: ^,Tbe justices .ftre, to inquire p.eriodjcally.into Iheexecution-of thfr- 40 LEGISLATION ON LABOUR AND ITS EFFECTS. Act, and to revise their rates according to the cheapness or deamess of the necessaries of life. The Act further recognizes the common informer, who is to have half the penalties, the other half going to the Crown. Thirty-three years later the Act was amended. The liabilities of the Act were extended to weavers, the justices were empowered to issue their rates in divisions of the shires, and the rates are to be published by the sheriff, but the obUgation of cer- tifying them to the Privy Council through Chancery is abrogated. They are henceforth to be presented by the Custo Eotnlorum. As was commonly the custom at that time, the Act was temporary, but was constantly renewed in the last chapter of the Parliamentary roll. Thus it was re-enacted in 1601 and 1603. In all, between 23 Edward 1. and 1 James, thirty-seven Labour Acts were passed by Parliament. The justices soon set to work. The first assessment extant is dated June 7, 1663, and is for the county of Eutland. The original is in the great collection of Elizabeth's proclamations, a volume that certainly belonged to Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, after- wards Earl of Salisbury. This assessment was, I make no doubt, to be a guide for counties south of the Trent, as one of 1595, and also printed in the same collection, is for those which are north of the Trent. Altogether I have found thirteen of these assessments between the years 1563 and 1725. I beheve that they were dis- continued during the eighteenth century, not because the law was neglected, but because the assessment had effectually done the work for which it was designed, the labourer's wages being now reduced to a bare subsistence. ,The object of this celebrated or infamous statute was threefold — (1) to break up the combinations of labourers, (2; to supply the adequate machinery of control, and (3) by limiting the right of apprenticeship, to make the peasant labourer the residuum of all other labovir, or, in other words, to forcibly increase the supply. The courts of law, if the justices were slow to act, could be quite relied on for enforcing the statute, for the most prejudiced lawyer cannot deny that the Stuart judges were, with some exceptions, timid, servile, and crueL Attempts have been made to argue that the Stuart kings wished to rule strictly by law. But their apologists forget that law is no abstract proposition, but a highly practical TBE OBJECTS OF TBB STATUTE. 41 condition of social. life, and that procedure is as.muclilaw as the penalties which a statute enacts, and the rights which law professes to guarantee. To keep tg the letter of the law and corrupt its procedure, is a far greater treason against law and freedom than it i^ to enact a law of Draconiaja severity. Now the Stuarts made the judge's patent run during the pleasure of the Crown, and gave the judge abundant warnings that they would be ejected &om office if, their rulings or interpretations of law displeased authority. It was from this point of view, I venture to affirm the true one, that the answer of the aiged Serjeant Maynard was made to William IIL "You must have outlived all the lawyers," said the king. "Yes, sir," he replied, '\ and if your Majesty had not come hither, I should have outlived all the law." But the Stuarts did not repeal laws, they only perverted their administration by the hands of wicked judges, Tiiey did not even punish Chief Justice Vaughan for affirming the immunity of juries. At last the judges got freeholds in their offices, and, became incomparably more honest. The justices in quarter sessions took no note, as the statute •instructed them, of "the cheapness or deamess of provisions." Their object was to get labour at starvation wages, and they did their best to, effect their object. The law gave them the power, and provided no appeal from their decision. It may be said . that the framers of the statute imagined that the magistrates could adopt a sliding scale, like that which was evidently contemplated under 25 E dward III. , and as evidently was before the mind of Parliament when it framed its own scales.in the fifteenth century, particularly in 1495. Some time since, in a work of mine, entitled, " Six Centuries of Labour and Wages," my information as to the amount of wages paid and the price of food having been far less copious than it now is, I was able to show that whjle the Act of 1495 enabled an artisan, in prices of that time, to procure a certain amount of food and df ink with a fortnight's labour, at the rates of the statute, and an agri- cultural labourer to obtain the same with three weeks' labour, the justices' assessment rarely enabled the peasant to obtain the same quantities with a whole) year's labour, and would sometimes have required two years' incessant labour. . ^or it must be remembered that though the law pressed hardly on the artisan, it was intended to press far more hardly on the peasant, cheap agricultural labour. 42 LEGISLATION ON LABOUB AND ITS EFFECTS. in the absence of any notable, as I shall show hereafter, any possible improvement in the art of agriculture, being, as was seen clearly enongh, the best means by which, concurrently Trith a high price of produce, agricultural rents could be raised. Now the researches which I have made subsequently to the the publication of mj work, have abundantly confirmed the inferences which I drew as to the intention of the quarter sessions assessments. I have discovered more of these documents than were before me a few years' ago, and have been able to trace the conse- quences of the system. It is true that in some particulars the position of the peasant was not so bad as it now is. He was rarely without his patch of land. The Allotments Act of 31 Elizabeth cap. 7j under which an attempt was made to check the growing evil of building cottages without curtilages, which provided that no cottage should hereafter be built, uidess four acres of land were attached to, for the peasant to work on his own account, and forbad under penalties that- more than one family should inhabit the same tene- - ment, is, to my mind, conclusive as to what had been a practice, and that the practice had been recently abandoned. I can trace the - continuity of tMs practice and its beneficial effects during the early part of the eighteenth century. In the latter half of this century, - the Act was repealed.' Its duration was a hindrance to the fashion '. of enclosures then' so prevalent. Again, beyond the plot which he held in severalty, the peasant had more or less extensive rights of common. The common, even if it did not afford hesbage for his cow, was a run for his poultry, and assured him "the occasional fowl in the pot. "When ihe system of enclosures was in full vigour, people commented on the very different treatment received by the man who stole thegoOse from the common and^he man who stole the common from the goose. The gradual appropriation of these indirect advairtages, ihowever much the policy of enclosures may have increased the productiveness- of agriculture, was an insensible aggravation of thei peasant's lot, -and a cause of iiicreasing distress to him. •'Again, as there were larger tracts of open- and swampy eonntry, the England of two and more centuries ago- swarmed with wild- animals. From the earhest times of which we.nead, some of these- animals were protected for private amusement or consumption^' m'l^'litkCf ''B'ESdVBCES dF-I/ABOtJBBBS. 43 as stags and deer, Hares and wild' boars. In later times, especially in JameS the First's reign, gamielatrs, restraining the' practice of spbrting, on the plea that 'the practice of fowling and snaring made the labouflel^s idle, w^re enacted. But it is certain that the laws Xvere inoperative. I hate examined manj accounts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lii^hich register the domestic ex-- penditure of several noblemen of ranli and'fottune, and of corpora- tions, ^he amount of ga'mef, Winged and ground', which is bought,' especiallyin winter, is prodigious. Many purchases are made of birds which are not, I believe geiietally found' on table's now. But if the solfe right of netting and fowliiig had been reserved, as the statntB- of James pres'cribes, these items could not have appeared' iii the accotints. They were doubtlessly stipplied bythe small farmers and peasa.ntry. Now, what they sold at the great house, theymight have consumed themselves. - '•'■ ■ i.f.'.'a .-u; .. ;, 'These ad-^aiifa/ges which one discovers by studying the sooiat legislation and habits "of th'e- time, existed to ah equal or a greater extent in the time of the'fitst Tudor sovereign." It is thte gradual de|privation oftheii, withoiit any bdmyensation' beyond' the conces-' Fion of a bare' Subsistence which marks the - economical history of the poor as the centuries pass on. It is, I think, most probable that the practice of the'^uarter sessions assessment ceased in the south of England atthe'close of the'seventeenth centuryj and in the north at the beginning of the eighteenth. It would be strange if the prtet'ieie''was coritiniiied^ -while agricultural history, now getting, full of comments on the' situation, is'ientirely silent' on the subject; Btitjih fact^the justices had^ done their work. iThey had made low wages, famine wages, traditional, and these wa^§, insufficient by themselves^,- 'were Supplemented from'the poor fate. ■ We have an account or, return- of the- poor-rates, actually "^collected arid' expended in ever'y English ooutity,* at the end couhtry, jand iihe-tra3^ with one's own fellow countrymen is the safest and least risky trade, of siQ. Everything diherefQrje,r be it laW, practice, ob cuStoia,triiich . discourages agriculture or checks its development, is. a public nuisance, however venerable the law, practice, or custom maybe. There has been, and there is, considerable discouragement j)ut on agrioulture, and 48 TEE CULTIVATION OF LAND. it is the duty of statesmen, without delay, to remove, or at least to mitigate, the causes of this discouragement. 3. The success of agriculture is the measure of rent. Eent is imdouhtedly the payment made for the use of a natural instru- ment, the use of which is necessary to human society — the effectual and successful use of which is of profound interest to human society. The Duke of Argyll, a great, perhaps an over- confident eulogist of landowners, has compared the hire of agricultural land to the hire of a musical instrument. The com- parison is ingenious and not inaccurate, but I do not think that the Duke saw the fall force of his comparison. Perhaps if he had, he would not have quoted it. ' Let us admit that the hire of a piece of land is hke the hire of a Straduarius violin. In the hands of most of us, certainly in my hands, the rent I would give for the violin would not be a penny a year ; I could make no profitable music by it. But in the hands of Herr Joachim, the rent of such an instrument might be worth many pounds a year, for he could dis- course most excellent music by it. And this is just the case with land. It needs the skill, experience, education, intelligence of the occupier. This has been tiU recent times, is in some parts of the United Kingdom, of the highest capacity and efficiency. I have studied the agriculture of Europe on the spot over the greater part of its western countries, that of America from the seaboard to the Bocky Mountains, and northward to the Great Lakes. I have never seen any husbandman equal to the English farmer. But I shall have occasion hereafter to dwell on this at more length and with more precision, when I handle the economic history of rent. At present I need only say that rent is the result of two forces. Ordinary economists have generally dwelt on only the first of them. The one is the natural powers of the soil, sometimes called original and indestructible, foolishly sOiliecause one hardly can tell what are the original powers, and no one can allege what are indestructible, except it be such as certainly do not contribute to fertility. The other, and the vastly more important one, is the acquired capacity or skill of the tenant — the power, to revert to the Duke's illustration, of playing with effect on the violin. Unfor- tunately, the acquired capacity and skill of the tenant are very destructible, and have been destroyed. BENT. THE HISTOBY OF PEOQBESS. 49 Economists tell us, inter alia, that they busy themselves with the laws which regulate or govern the production of wealth ; though when they deal with details they display the grossest ignorance about the production of the most necessary and important of human products, those of agriculture. The laws which primarily govern the production of wealth are laws of nature, and by discovering them, following and using them, human industry confers utihty on matter. Some are obvious and simple. No husbandman sows corn in midsummer, expecting to reap in midwinter. The earliest artisans, miners, metallurgists knew certain natural laws, attention to which was essential to their industry. But some natural laws have only been arrived at by long observation, by profound study, by cautious research. The shortening of a voyage out and home from an EngUsh port to one in TTindostan and back again, from two years to four months, is the result of an infinite study of natural laws^ some gathered on the ocean itself, some in the workshop, some in the laboratpiy, some, and these not the least, in -the mathe- matician's study; Wrought iron cost in money of the four- teenth century £12 a ton. Twelve is generally a fair multiple for prices of that time, taking one thing with another, when we compare them with modem experience. Why has iron fallen in price from £144 to £4, but by the discovery and adaptation of natural laws ? ^he production of wealth, ttien, is the selection and ad option of natu^i^lawSj, through the agency ^_human inteihgence, which is progressive. We cannot tell what are the limits 'of"Euman ihtelli- "gence and consequently of its power. We are amazed at what it has done, and cannot guess what it may do. To have predicted a century ago, that a power would convey passengers over roads at the rate of sixty miles an hour, would have seemed as absurd as the nocturnal and aerial voyage of Borak. To have predicted that the most delicate colours would be procured from coal tar, and flavours and essences from the same material, would have been deemed the talk of a Bedlamite^ There are no doubt arid and uiiprofitable statements constantly made, such as that men' will never travel as fast as light, or in organic chemistry make synthesis as easy as analysis. There is no subject on which impossibilities have been predicted with more imfortunate assurance by economists 5 60 THE CULTIVATION OF LAND. as those on production, and especially on agricultural production and its congeners. We, who have to read those books in which the speculative element obscures the practical sidie of political economy, are treated to many alarmist predictions about the margin of cultivation, . th6 law of diminishing returns, and the exhaustion of fertility, and this constantly by people who are profoundly ignorant of the practical side of that on which they dogmatize. But no one except ia a general way has ever discovered the margin of cultivation, has ever seen the law of diminishing returns ia operation, or has witnessed the exhaustion of fertiUty. It is because' they know nothing about the facts that they are so strangely and, at times, so mischievously confident. As yet we know that whea.t will not grow on a granite rock, though if this rook be disiategrated it makes the most fertile of soils; and that you could not on grounds of physical space and botanical conditions grow 150 bushels of wheat to the acre, and that you can by an indefinite number of croppings of a certaia kind extinguish and annul the indestructible powers of the soil, but no one ever saw these results. Unfortunately the reputation of those who talk and write nonsense, soraetimes induces most mischievous fallacies of practice on the mind of those who do not see through the nonsense, and great hostility to the professors and teachers of a science which men of the world, who have to interpret the system, declare to be unpractical and intolerable verbiage^. I do not indeed purpose, in this lecture, to deal with the econo- mical history of rent. The treatment of this most important fact, in what economists call the laws which govern the distribution of wealth, will be reserved for a subsequent occasion, for I hope that we shall be able, as I go on with these several subjects, to proceed from what I may call the general treatment of economical history to those concrete cases, in the true interpretation of which such serious consequences are mvolved, and such necessary appeals are made to the interposition of law. For as the laws which govern the distribution of wealth, by -which an economist means the share which each person in the great industrial partnership receives, are merely or mainly of human origin, it is plainly part of the functions of the statesman to remedy any injustice which may be traced to this adventitious origin, to determine what contracts should be • THE EBBOBS OF THEOBY. 51 permitted, and the extent to which 'cbritr acts, -which Inay be condi- tionally permitted, shall be practically enforced. This much I ought 'to sa^ here. ■ Bent, a s Adam Smith did not^ see, and he may well be pardoned for'npt_ seeing it, is not a, eanse of value, but a consequent of value. It is because agricultural and analogous produce fetches mOre in the market than it xjost to prb- duce, outlay and average profit considered, that rent, i.e., econoniical tent, arises. Hence, if we admit, as we must by' the fact that every producer seeks to obtain the maximum result with the' least possible expenditure of nervous and muscular energy, persona,l or supple- irientai-y as the case may be — and economical labour is not ia itself a desirable thing — it- necessarily follows that the ideal of the econo- mist would be a state' of things in which the produce necessary for' human life could be obtained so regularly, so readily, and with so' little labour, and 'consequently so cheaply, that' no rent could arise. I cannot dispute the claim of the' landoVtier to' the rent Which he receives. I think that the theory which Would deprive him of it by law is unjust and odious. I hold that to have" bought him out,' when Mr. Mill first ventilated' the doctrine of the unearned incre- ment would have been ruirlous, as I insisted to that distiaguished' person that it would have been When he advocated it; and as for the nartionalizatioh of latad, by which' I Suppose' is meant the violent acquisitioHvof it by the State, I must haVe a far better idea' of "any human a'dministration than I have ever beeii able' to form, before I hesitate to conclude that such an expedient would be the beginning of a setifes of perpetual'and nefarious jobs. Land Was nationalized under the Eoman Eepublic, and we all know what became of it, and of the- Eoman Eepubhc too. ' ' " '" If I have made myself at all clear you will conclude that the fdrtiunes and history of English agriculture are the key to the iiiterpi:etation of the gravest social questions' which have arisen in Enghsh economical history, probably of the present situation, possibly of difficulties' in the near future. For it cannot be too often remembered and inculcated that we, in the present day, are not only the descendants of an ancient nation, with a long and connected history, but that we inherit the consequences of the folly as well as of tlfe wisdom of our ancestry, and are what we are by virtue of causes which have had an historical beginning, and in some eases 52 THE CULTIVATION OF LAND. an enduring influence. Not only is this the case, but the analyst of economic history soon discovers that effects endure after causes have, to all appearance, wholly passed away ; and that he is con- strained, if he makes an adequate interpretation of the present situation, to modify the ancient maxim, Cessante causa, cessat effectus. In my last lecture I illustrated this fact very fully by showing that the quarter sessions assessments had an enduring influence on the conditions of labour long after they were disused and forgotten. In the course of this inquiry we shall have cumulative evidence of the same facts, or of facts similar to them. Now there are certain historical facts which have had from time to time great influence on the progress of English agriculture. Such, to take some of its principal, are the great change in the occupancy of land after the middle of the fourteenth century, on which I have already made certain comments, the singular exhibi- tion of agricultural prosperity in the fifteenth, the change of owner- ship after the dissolution of the monasteries, and the great extension of sheep-farming in the sixteenth, the development of rack-renting in the seventeenth, and the enclosures and experimental husbandry of the eighteenth. I do not know whether I shall have opportunity on the present occasion to refer to the remarkable reaction of the nineteenth, and in particular to the existing condition of agriculture. I shall have to make reference to most of these facts in my lecture of to-day, and perhaps the best and most obvious way in which to make them clear is to give you the information which I have been able to collect as to the rate of production at different epochs of agricultural history. Now in 1333-iS, by which I mean| on this occasion, four years, though the document contains part of six years, Merton College in Oxford had a return made to the fellows of the seed sown, and the produce threshed on ten of their estates, all these lands being in their own hands, cultivated by their own capital, and under the superin- tendence of their own baiHffs. Wheat is not grown on aU the estates in every one of the four years, but it is so generally, that I am sure the omission pomts to a fallow. The largest breadths are sown on the best land. Now the average produce in cheap, that is, abundant, years, as aU these years are, is nine bushels of wheat and fifteen of barley, the seed being two bushels of the former and THE HISTOBY OF AGBICULTUBAL PBODUCE. 53 four of the latter grain. This produce is therefore in' excess of the average, and the oldest writer on English agriculture, Walter de Henley, expressly states that, unless the farmer reaps full six bushels an acre, he is cultivating at a loss, giving reasons for his estimate. This series of four years' produce precedes the great change in occupancy 'which I referred to as occurring ia the middle of the fourteenth century, and as consequent on the plague. The next account of production to which I invite your attention is one of after the middle of the fifteenth century. It is at Adisham, in Kent, between Canterbury and Dover, and presumably therefore a favourable specimen of agriculture. Here the produce of wheat is twelve bushels, of barley sixteen, of peas and vetches eight, and of oats twenty. The year is abundant, and prices are below the average. In 1655 HartUb tells us that the average production of wheat was from twelve to sixteen bushels an acre, but Gregory Kiag, about 1693, says that the produce for all kinds of grain was not more than a dozen bushels. I think that King has given a more correct estimate than Hartlib has, whose experience was to some extent of the new agriculture. In the early part of the eighteenth century the rate all round was certainly twenty bushels, and perhaps a little more. Now from these and similar facts, for I am only giving you a specimen, I concluded that the average wheat produce of England and Wales, from the accession of Edward III. to the end of the sixteenth century, could not have been more than two and a half millions of quarters, and that the population was as numerous as the quarters, for in those days wheaten bread was the food of the people aU through England, and there was little else that could be used in substitution for it, since winter roots were unknown. This in- ference of mine was practically confirmed by one of the poll taxes of the fourteenth century, which is virtually a census, and gives the same amount, and by an actual census of certain hundreds of Kent in the sixteenth century, where the same conclusion, when a contrast is made with the present population, is distinctly arrived at. I have already mentioned that the distribution of land was very general, most persons holding a little farm, and the poorest a decent curtilag'e. Evidence of the distribution of land is derived from about 54 THE CULTIVATION OF LAND. 1257, and continuously onwards.' It cannot, be by accident thiat in the numerous accounts of private estates, none are found before thi» period, and that they are abundant after it. The custom of keeping accounts of agriculture and of manor roUs must have commenced about the period of strong political disaffection, ; and, I may add, of generally low prices. The lord ordi;narily owned about haK the estate or manor ; but it is from his baihffs accounts only that I have been able to collect any evidence. The records of no peasant's holding have survived, even if any account was taken of them. But beyond question such persons, having before them the method on which the lord cultivated his estate, profited by his example, by his successes and failures. In many ways the landowners of the thirteenth, and the first half of the fourteenth centuries must have been the instructors of the poorer cultivators, just as in a more recent and stirring time the best English landowners, and they were then many, instructed English tenant farmers in the new agriculture. Nothing can be more carefully and more exhaustively drawn than the bailiff's account. He made rough notes of his receipts and expenditure, and from these notes, which occasionally survive, the audit was based and the roll engrossed. It is almost always in Latin, and the writing was certainly the work of the mendicant clergy. But it: is absurd to imagine that the baUiff would have rendered his account in an unknown tongue. The English baihff, generally a small farmer, often a serf, must have been at least bi-Ungual, Everything is accounted for, all receipts, including those from the manor court, all rents and all produce. The acreage sown, the seed required for the purpose, the live and dead stock on the farm are carefully noted, even to an egg, a peck of tail com, or a chicken, all losses are ^ven, all allowances recorded, and the audit completed, and the quittance admitted ; and then the bailiff began in the same methodical way to register for his next year's balance-sheet. If two consecutive years of these accounts are preserved, one can easily discover what the rate of production was from the previous cultivation. Now at this time the Enghsh people lived on the produce of their own country. There might have been occasionally imports of grain from the Baltic seaboard, and there are occasions, late in the middle THE ACCUBACY OF ANCIENT ACCOPNTS. 55 period, in which notice is taken of such trade, .fcoiQ which, by the way, came that peculiar measure, the last or .double ton, traceable as a local, measure in the Eastern counties to the early part of the eighteenth century at least. The administration was aliiife to the expediency . of prohibiting ,'the export, of corn to foreign cojantries when the home supplies were short. Thus in 1438-9, the only famine 'of the 'fifteenth century, when Parliament petif;ioned,for a relaxation, of the restraints on inland water carriage, the petition was rejected, on the plea that the Government were convinced that the concession would be interpreted as a license of ex- portation. You are perhaps acquainted with Gregory King's law of prices, one of the most important generalizations in statistics, ^n^. applic- able to, all values whatever. King applies it to the .harvest only, and states that a defect in produce raises prices in a different ratio from that which characterizes the dearth. Thus, a defect of — 1 tenth raiiscs the prices .(ibgye tjbe common rate 3 tenths , 2 tenths „ „ „ 8 tenths 3 tenths „ . '„ „ 1-6 tenths 4 tenths „ ' ' ' ,, ,V 2-8 tenths 5 tenths „ „ „ 4-5 tenths* This rule operates in depressing as well as in exalting prices, and is not thought of in times of high and low prices as it should be. It applies to all articles in demand, but the^ depression is more marked •in the case of over-supply in articles of voluntary use, and the ■exaltation more marked in the case of under-supply in articles of necessary use. Hence the j particular phehdmraion which King -wished to comment' on, the effects' of scarcity, are more visible in the principal grain than in any other. Nor must it be inferred that King has gathered hiS' ratio of increase from an actual survey of facts. He merely means to imply that the rise wiU be in some- thing like this proportion. I. cannot, indeed, linger on this object, for I have made it the subject of a special lecture to, be given, here- after, but I may mention here that a small: margin of excess and defect will produce results which are entirely diapfopoaitionate to the amount of excess or defect. Of course, too» when the population * Dayenant, ii. 224. 56 TEE CULTIVATION OF LAND. is relatively dense, in comparison •with tbe success of agriculture, scarcity may be of frequetit recurrence. We shall find that it was so in the seventeenth century, and between 1795 and 1819. In both these periods the population increased rapidly, by virtue of well- ascertained causes, and in both there were severe and continued famines. A register of prices, and especially of prices dated through the year, the highest prices being generally those of May, when the harvest of the previous autumn was getting scanty, and the prospects of the coming harvest were imcertain, is nearly equal in exactness to a meteorological register, and is even more suggestive. Taking the agricultural year from Michaelmas to Michaelmas, the only way in ■which agricultural produce can be annually isolated and satisfactorily examined, it will always be found that when there is an anticipation of a defective harvest, the ordinary high price of May is gradually enhanced, and if the anticipation is verified, prices go on increasing up to the ensuing May, when the same estimate of probabilities is 'made, with analogous results, the price rising if they are unfavour- able, falling if they are satisfactory. The severest famine ever experienced in England was that of the two consecutive years of 1315 and 1316. In both these years the famine was occasioned by excessive wet and defective solar heat, the com hardly ripening in the ear. These causes have always produced dearth in England. Our ancestors always cut their corn high on the stalk, and generally used the sickle for all kinds of grain. They had good reason for the practice. By cutting high they could reap and carry their produce ia nearly aU weathers, and they could dry it with comparative ease. They avoided cutting weeds with their wheat, and under a system of fallows without root crops their land inevit- ably became foul, and they could, and did, cut the stubble at then: leisure, and use the straw, unbruised by threshing, for fodder and thatching. In 1815, the price at harvest time is high, but not excessive. It rapidly rises to four or five times its ordinary value by May, and hardly drops in July and August. In the next year it is scarcely ever below three times its ordinary price, and rises, not indeed to the extreme famine rates of the previous year, but to even four times its usual price. Nor does the hope of the ensmng harvest come till late. ENGLISH FAMINES. 57 The weather must have changed for the better in the month of July or August, and happier times followed. The greatest scarcity of modem times, and the highest recorded price of wheat, is in December, 1800, when it was rather more than double that which had at that time become customary. In 1315, it reached more than the highest estimate of increase, which is suggested in Gregory King's table given above. Scarcities, or famines, almost as serious occurred, for only single years, in 1321, 1851, and 1369. There was only one year of great scarcity during the fifteenth century, that of 1488, already referred to. In the sixteenth the dear years were 1527, 1550 and 1551, 1554, 1555 and 1556, when the base money was in circulation, and worst of all in 1595 and 1596, when the privation was nearly as severe as it was 280 years before. Now we may be quite certain that the same cause was at work in all these cases, excessive rain and deficient solar heat in summer. There is a curious confirmation of these inferences in the price of salt. A bad harvest is always a dear year for salt, either immediately or subse- quently. The reason is that all the salt consumed in England, and it was a real necessary of life, as for half the year people lived on salted provisions, was obtained by solar evaporation only. The price of salt is therefore an indirect register of the amount of solar heat in any given year. The interpretation of the facts in the seventeenth century is far from easy. In no period of previously recorded history was scarcity so recurrent and so prolonged. But though public affairs were of spch absorbing interest, very little note is taken in contemporary authors of the terrible straits to which the working classes were reduced. I should weary you if I gave you a list of aU the famine years. But sometimes they continued for a lengthened period. The five years, 1646-1651 inclusive, were of unbroken dearth; the middle year, 1648, being, as is usually the case, the worst. A simi- larly calamitous period occurs in the four years 1658-1661, the last year being in this case the worst, not only of this epoch, but of the whole century. Lastly come the seven years of scarcity, as they were called at the end of the century, 1692-98 inclusive. Now during the seventeenth century, the population was certainly doubled. The cause of this was partly immigration from France, Flanders, and Germany, of refugees from the wars of religion and 58 THE CULTIVATION OF LAND. persecution, partly the great development of the woollen industry, mostly the settlement of England north of the Trent, which began after the union of the two Crowns, and the peace of the Border. By the end of the century, as we know from the hearth tax, the north of England was nearly as popiilous as the south, though it was far poorer and more backward. Now there can be no doubt that owing to this last cause the area of cultivation was extended, though it is certain that the agriculture was rude. The invariable comment of writers on agriculture in the seventeenth century proves that the farmer was grievously rackrented {low, as I shall show in a latOT lecture, as the rents were, according to our modem experience), and was therefore at once impoverished and deterred from making im- provements. It is. true that the labouring peasant suffered even more severely than the farmer, for the landowners knew welj enough that if they could compel cheap labour, they could raise their rents, and they acted steadUy on that conviction in their assessments. Aa I have already stated, the justices during the connnouwealth raised the wages in their assessments quite 50 per cent., and though their successors after the Bestoration tried to revert tp the Qld rates, employers paid the new. It is satisfactory to discover that during the great paxt of the period between the Bestoration and the second Bevolntion, the price of wheat was low. In the first half of the eighteenth century, except iox two years, the prices of all the necessaries of life were even lower lliaii they had been in the seventeenth, but this was due to the praiseworthy and patriotic energies of the great landowners, ^ho betook themselves generally to the new agriculture, and encouraged, the, tenants by their own example to follow. A vast: amount of land was enclosed, partly what had been open fields, partly what had been common, and there is no doubt that the bounty granted; on exported com had its effect. In point of fact the bovinty stimulated the least objection- able kind of gaming, gambling for the bounty, by endeavouring to increase the. produce. But after the fooUsh and obstinate war with the American plantations, and still more during the prolonged Con- tinental war, comes an era of wild finance, of enormous debt, of oppressive indirect taxation, never profitable unless it attacks the consumption of the poor, and the abandonment of landlord culti- vation. But I shall have occasion to deal with this subject THE CHABACTEE OF ENGLISH AGBIOULTVBE. 59 more eiactly when hereafter I handle the history of agricultural rents. The system under which land was 'cultivated was one of very re- mote antiquity, was possibly prehistoric. It has not become entirely extinct till very recent times, for I have myself seen it still in opera- tion in Warwickshire and elsewhere^ No doubt elosesand meadows^ usually the private estate or demesne of the lord, were in existence in very early times. But the land of the parish or manor, these closes or meadows excepted, was generally distributed as follows. There were a number .of large corampn fields, in which each owner or occupier had a certain number of furrows more or less frequently repeated. 'Between each set of furrows- ran an uncultivated balk, a foot or so in breadth, which formed a boundary or landmark, and for some time of the year a pasture. ■ The distribution and arrangement of such a common field is described with sufficient accuracy by Fitz- herbert in his treatise on surveying, published in the first quarter of the M.xteenth century. But you will undei*stand the system better, after you have inspected the volume which I have by me, and will send round for your in- spection. .This is an exact copy pf a survey (the ori^ial is still in «xistence) made of the parish of Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire in 1603, by one Thomas Langdon, and for which Merton College, to whom the original and copy belong, paid him £12, stating, with justice, that he •had most beautifully drawn it. It certainly is not only the most ancient survey which I. have seen, but by far the most exact and elegant. Gamlingay is a laxge parish on the western b&undary of Cambridgeshire. It contains 8,755 acres, and has been partly in the possession of Merton College by gift of the founder from the begin- ning of that college. It is a curious coincidence, that the earliest endowed college in Oxford, and the latest endowed college in Cambridge, Merton here, and Downing there, are interested in Gamlingay. • The college had two manors in the parish, one which goes by the ■name of Mertonage, the other by that of Avenells. The lenclosures, meadows, and woods belonging to the college by its possession of these two manors amount to a little over 816 acres. There was a third manor in the parish, that of Woodberry, which had belonged to the Abbot of Saltreye. The college is the principal lord, but 60 THE CULTIVATION OF LAND. there axo other considerable proprietors — as the Queen ; Captain Merton, Clare HaU, in Cambridge ; the Vicar of Waresley, in Hunts ; the parish of Waresley ; and a Mr. St; George. With the family of this last-named proprietor the college had ancient quarrelsr for they went to law with a Wilham St. George, of GamUngay, in 1344 and 1345, and spent no inconsiderable sum of money in these years with the view or plea of expediting justice, and according to modem notions in a very suspicious manner. This survey was drawn up in order that it might be produced in court, and a note in the original is to the effect that it was put in as evidence in a suit for realty. You will notice that each one of these fields is divided into very numerous strips, and that the dimensions of each with the name of the owner or occupier are duly given. You wiU see that there are some thousands of these strips. Langdon's survey gives thirty-four houses in the village, and the population in 1601, would, therefore, be from a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy persons. At present the inhabitants are over two thousand, and the increase is in accordance with what I have suggested was the population of England in the sixteenth century. The cultivation of the common fields was necessarily that of two grain crops and a fallow. Even if the art of cultivating roots and artificial grasses, already practised in HoUand had been known, it could not have been practised on the open fields, for after the har- vest was gathered, aU the sheep and cattle of the parish were turned into the fields to feed on the balks and what they could pick up among the stubbles. In this case the owner of several or private pastures had a great advantage, for he could send his cattle into the common field with those of the other occupiers, and reserve the aftermath at least, or rowens as it is sometimes called, of his own meadows, till the common field was eaten bare. No doubt a great deal of injustice was done by the enclosures of the eighteenth century, but the new agricultura would have been impossible without them, and the new system was the making of English agriculture, and, when Sir J. Sinclair carried it further north, of the Scottish. The owners or occupiers of these common fields had other advan- tages in the commons of pasture and the lord's woods. These commons of pasture seem to have been, in early times, almost uni- COMMON FIELDS. . 61 versal. They were, it would appear, that part of the settlement which was least convenient for the plough, least accessible, and least defensible. A modern English village, with its street and its church, and its very few outlying houses, is a distinct survival of the earliest occupation. In my native place in the Meonwaras I have no manner of doubt that many of the vQlage houses have been sites for habitation during a dozen centuries, and that homesteads in the parish but away from the street are comparatively modern occupan- cies. Now in this common of pasture, there was generally no stint. When the stint of pasture was the rule, it was either because the common was of limited extent, or was merely the same thing as saying that the tenant of a small holding could not have, and therefore should not have, an excess of beasts or sheep on the common pasture. The case of the lord's woods, and the pannage of pigs was a different affair. This was only a quaUfied right on the part of the tenants. They had no right to send their hogs under the common swineherd, except under payment, but I am sure that every tenant who paid pannage, generally a half-penny an animal, had the right to send them into the wood, to browse on the acorns or beech mast. This at least I have gathered from the manor accounts, where the fines on defaulters are recorded, but no charge of trespass made. I have already referred to the enormous, the prohibitive price of iron. The plough was rude, though if one can trust ,the earHest writers on husbandry, an acre a day was a moderate amount for a first ploughing. But the ground, I suspect, was. only scratched. Deep ploughing was a thing of the remote future. The peasant farmer, even in the sixteenth century, could not afford an iron harrow. The teeth of this implement when he used it, especially when the ground was stony, were oaken pins carefully dried aiud hardened at the fire. The cart was generally supplied with soUd wheels, bored out of a tree trunk, for iron was too dear for tires, even after, the cost had, been considerably reduced, for I have found such wheels well into the sixteenth century, when iron was half the price at which it was purchased in the fourteenth. The cattle on these farnis were small and stunted by the priva- tions of the winter. There was no attempt to improve breeds. Cows fire a good deal cheaper than oxen, bulls a good deal cheaper than 62 THE CULTIVATION OF 'LAND. cows. Nor does there seem to have been any attempt of a general kind to improve the breeds of sheep. I have found some dear rams, but they are quite exceptional. There was to be sure temptation enough. Certain wools from the neighbourhood of Leominster were eight times dearer than wool from Suffolk. Even as late as the play cf Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Leominster wool is quoted as superlative. Li 1734 Lord Lovell only gets 3d. a pound, or 7s. a tod, for Norfolk wool. It is true that at this time, the old monopoly of Enghsh wool had passed away. But in the fourteenth century wool was often three times the nominal price of Lord Lovell's sales. The fact is there was no winter feed, and unless the farmer can keep his live stock continually in conditioii, it is idle to talk of breeds, or to make any attenipt to perpetuate or select them,. I do not believe that, on the average^ any material increase was made in the market- able ox, between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and but little in the size of the marketable sheep. In the agricultural economy of the Middle Ages, the regular clergy were of no little importance and value. The Benedictines, apart from their learning, were the great agents in making such improvie- ments in husbandry as th&age could effect, the Cistercians in sheep- breeding and wool- dealing. It is quite possible that in early times, the iatal gift of wealth had demorahzed the earUer orders, as ap- ■ parently the habit of simulated poverty did the Franciscans and Dominicans. But the social civilization of England would have been greatly retarded had it not been for the efforts and the labours of the regular clergy. Thousands of acres were reclaimed by the industrious monks, and estates of great value, acquired in later times by the favourites and accomplices of Henry Vm. were turned from desert into garden by the ancient orders; They continued up to the Dissolution to be indulgent landlords, partly, perhaps^ because they had become unpopular, and retained the stock and land lease, out of which the tenant had become enriched and independent, after the landowner was constrained or induced to abandon it. They were the principal agents in keeping the roads in repair, for as their ■ estates were scattered, and their rents were taken in kind, or valued in money and taken in kind, it was an object with them to make access to the monastery easy and safe. It is certain that after the •' Dissolution roads got out of repair, though I do not think that even TEE BEQVLAB CLEBGT AND AGBICULTUBE. 63 the king's highway was in so scandalous a condition in the reign of Elizabeth, as it was two centuries afterwards in the reign of George III. You will of course understand that in the age which I have attempted to describe, and in describing which I have accumulated and condensed a vast mass of unquestionable facts, the rate of pro- duction was small, the conditions of health Unsatisfadtory, and the duration of life short. But, on the whole, there were none of those extremes of poverty and wealth which have excited the astonish- ment of philanthropists, and are now exciting the indignation of workmen. The age, it is true, had its discontents, and these dis- contents were expressed forcibly and in a startling manner. But of poverty which perishes unheeded, of a willingness to do honest work and a lack of opportunity, there was little or none. The essence of life in England during the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors was that every one knew his neighbour, and that every one was his brother's keeper. My studies lead me to conclude, that though there was hardship in this life, the hardship was a common lot, and that there was hope, more hope than superficial historians have conceived possible, and perhaps more variety than there is in the peasant's lot in our time. Perhaps it may be well to say a little on the effect which the English system of agriculture induced, on the social system of the country, and especially on the landowners. I have already stated, that where everybody was an husbandman, everybody was interested in keeping the peace, and making everybody else keep it. It is true that the law of primogeniture had been long a settled principle in the jurisprudence of the common law. But in the fourteenth cen- tury the stock on a weU-tilled farm, and every landowner tilled his land, and on the whole tilled it according to the best knowledge of the time, the stock of a farm was worth at least three times that of the fee simple, as, unless some wisdom supervenes, it seems hkely soon to be in our days, for land was constantly sold at six, eight, and twelve years' purchase, with sixpence an acre rent. But though the land went to the eldest son, the personal estate went to all the children equally, or was made the subject of a will. WiUiam the Norman had, for administrative purposes, enforced the concentra- tion of land on the representative of a family against the half- 64 THE CULTIVATION OF LAND. conquered and discontented English ; for equally politie reasons, be had striven to scatter the estates of the nobles, so as to make him powerful against them, but be had not attempted to induce the law of entail on personal property. He was too shrewd to do so, and bis successors shared his iateUigence. For some centuries, then, the younger son of a great estate was unknown. He shared in the stock, and I have Httle doubt that the motive of the famous statute which did away with subinfeudation was to facilitate the iadependent acquisitions of the younger son, to enable him to purchase without dependency on his elder brother. The king had no objection, for it multiplied his chances of escheat. The entail, though chronologically earlier, was economically later, for it is clear to me, &om the documents which I have examined, that entails were not general, at least on large estates, till the civil wars of the fifteenth century, and not common even then. After the great plague, and still more notably after the French war had endured for a generation or two, the younger son becomes a social inconvenience. The landowners, now landlords who let their land at a rent, were the sole inheritors. The younger sons sought their fortunes in the church and in the army. . The cadets of noble families appear among the bishops, and men, sometimes not of noble birth, rose to knighthood and nobility through the army, for not a few of our oldest titles were won by military adven- turers. Some of these warriors became large purchasers, as Fastolfe in the fifteenth century. Some, like Cromwell, Henry VI.'s treasurer, rose to rank by the Administration. But these were lucky people, the select of the fittest, or unfittest, as the case might be. The less fortunate became, as an only resource, military par- tisans, and were the stimulators and victims of the so-called war of succession in the fifteenth century. It was really a &ction fight, in which the Yorkist party strove to reform the Government, and the Lancastrian to appropriate the spoils. When the great plague, and the consequent deamess of labour made landlord cultivation impossible, the landowners established the stock and land lease. It was probably borrowed from monastic usage. The monasteries were wealthy, and were obliged to be rea^y to hold themselves at ransom. The inmates were under vows of poverty, the abbot was, if I can judge from his table and his per- THE STOCK AND LAND LEASE. 65 sonal expenditure, of which I have seen much, under no such restraint. But he husbanded the goods of .the monastery, and among them its savings. Some who had been reckless in their expenditure were degraded or displaced, occasionally bringing ruin on the establishment whose affairs they administered. To abbots who wished to invest the property of the monastery safely and profitably, especially at a crisis Uke that of 1849, the stock, and land lease offered great attractions. In the stock and land lease, the owner of the soil, who had pre- viously been its cultivator, let a farm, furnished with seed com, and stock, hve and dead, to a tenant for a term, the condition being that the tenant should, at the end of the term, deliver the stock scheduled to him, in good condition, . or pay the money at which they were valued when the lease commenced. The valua- tion is generally low, and when I first came across this kind of lease- I thought that the landowner let his tenant only the inferior articles on his own farm. But on inspecting the items, I came to the con- clusion that the low valuation was employed partly to attract tenants, partly to cover a very serious risk, which I subsequently found, that landlords regularly incurred, that of compensating their tenants for losses by disease among their cattle and sheep, certainly the latter, when the loss was above a particular percentage, all below falling on the tenant. The value of the hve stock is, of course, the principal item in the valuation, which is always written out annually on the bailiff's roll. I have found, too, that under this system, the- landlord, if no exceptional loss occurred, did nearly as well as on th/& old system of landlord cultivation. The stock and land lease generally prevailed for about seventy years after the owner had put it into operation on his own estate. Thus Merton College let most of its land on this principle, shortly after the Great Plague, and continued it to about the end of the first quarter in the fifteenth century. New College carried on farming on its own account, at least on some of its estates, up to the- end of the first quarter of the fifteenth century, and continued the lease tiU the end of the century. But the monasteries had it in operation up to the time of the Dissolution, and a considerable part of the assets of these institutions in the time of Edward VI. consisted of stock let to tenants for various terms, 6 66 THjE CTJLTWATiON OF LAND. Now I am disposed to believe that the landowners would not have abandoned the system, from which they got so good an income, voluntarily, and that this kind of lease was dropped by the tenant, who accumulated, during the prosperity of the fifteenth century, the means for buying stock for themselves, and even land. On the other hand, the monasteries would have oflfered easier terms as time went on. It is, of course, also possible that the armed factions of the fifteenth century were in want of money, and therefore made advantageous sales of stock to their tenants ; or that their tenants, taking advantage of the purchase clauses in the lease, elected to forfeit the prices, rather than restore the stock. The system of landlord cultivation, though it became rare, did not entirely disappear. The monasteries generally had one or two farms in their own hands, near to them, from which they drew sup- • phes. In these cases, it was the invariable practice of the bailiff to debit them, and take credit to himself for the sales which he effected with his own employers. Thus Battle Abbey held two estates in their own hands, one at Appledrum, the other at LuUington in Sussex, produce from which was regularly sent to the monastery. The great convent of Sion, too, retained Isleworth in their hands for similar purposes. It is pretty clear that, till they were squeezed out of it by the first Lord Bedford, the abbot and monks of West- minster held their estate of Convent Garden, noi-th of the Strand, and now the London property of the Eussells, for the same pur- pose. Again, Fastolfe, the well-known military adventurer of the war in Prance, of the fifteenth century, cultivated an extensive barley estate in Norfolk, and traded largely in malt with the Low ■Countries. Waynflete, the Bishop of Winchester and founder of Magdalene College, was made FastoKe's executor, and contrived to divert a portion of the estate which the devisor intended for other -charitable purposes to the coDege which he was founding, I sus- pect that the transaction was very-suspicious, for this pious founder was truly described by his contemporaries as nefarius iste epUcopus. But for all this, he has had the best of it with posterity. The next stage is the lease for terms of years. But the peculiar ■character of this lease, especially in the fifteenth century, is, I think, a proof that the position of the tenants is improving, and that the accumulation of occupancies in their hands was gradual. Most of DEVELOPMENT OF LAND TENANCIES. 67 the tenancies are of numerous parcels, the lease of each parcel being determinable at different years. Sometimes a tenant will have a dozen of them, spread over as many years. This kind of tenancy must have made disfraint for rent very difficult, when there was nothing but cattle to distrain on. I cannot but think that the •other forms of action by which rent was recoverable were expe- dients adopted in order to obviate the difiQculty of distraining on land which was held imder many grants. Tenancies for life were, no doubt, not infrequent. When, about the middle of the fifteenth century, Franks, the Master of the Bolls, devised a thousand pounds to Oriel College, the existing body of fellows, with commendable self-denial, purchased the reversion of an estate in Berkshire, held by a man and his wife, for the term of their naturallives. The man died soon after the purchase; the widow was disagreeably vivacious. The college made all sorts of offers to her, temporal and spiritual; for the fellows of Oriel, before the Eeformation, had a very active and successful trade in religious ofiBces. But the widow was inexorable, and the college had to wait for her demise. If I remember rightly, she lived till near the end of the century, probably outlived all the purchasers. The last was the tenancy at will, or at rack-rent. Up to the beginning of the seventeenth century there was little chance of such a rent, and the casual or irregular gains of the overlord were chiefly derived from practising sharp manor custom on his copyholders and freeholders, as Fitzherbert broadly intimates, a form of oppression which Norden's treatise on surveying, pubHshed early in the seven- teenth century, reluctantly allowed to have been charged frequently against his principals. But it is during the seventeenth century that rack-renting and rent-raising became so general as to arouse indignant remonstrance at the hands of nearly every person who writes on seventeenth-century agriculture, the special complaint being that it discourages all progress. But into the particulars of this stage I shall enter when I treat, in a subsequent lecture, of the economical history of rent. To this occasion, also, I must defer what I should, had time per- jnitted, have commented on in this lecture — the remarkable de- velopment of English agriculture during the eighteenth century. , It is almost worthy of separate treatment. But in these outlines I 68 THE CULTIVATION OF LAND. am seeking to give those leading featnres of economical histoiy which have been so conspicuous in our own country. The par- ticulars, though of profound economical significance, rather belong^ to that history of English agriculture which I have been the firsi to discuss and expound. IV. THE SOCIAL EFFECT OF EELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS, Europe after the fall of the Western Empire— The Church and the monasteries the only hope of civilization, especially the Bene- dictines — The three pa/rties in the English Church, official, national, andpapal — The situation in Wiklif'a days — His Swnvma Theologice, and its purpose — The poor priests and the peasantry — The con- ditions of religious movements — The teaching of PecoTc — The sects of the Beform,ation — The Independents and the Sevolution of 1688 — The movement of the Wesleys — The ancient prosperity of Norfolk. Tou "will of course anticipate that in dealing with the subject before me to-day, " The Social Effect of Behgious Movements in EngHsh History," I do not pretend to discuss the religious tenets which have from time to time been inculcated by those who have been prominent actors in these stirring events. There may, indeed, be a few particu- lars which I must deal with, in order to elucidate my estimate of the results which have from time to time been brought about in the social and economical history of England, by rehgious impulses. I am indeed disposed to beheve, that however much a later habit of mind has repudiated what was once thought necessary and true, the promulgation and acceptance of such tenets, the defence of them, and even as we may now think the enormous crimes perpetuated in ■order to enforce them, were acts of good faith, and were honestly beHeved essential to the safety of society. The historian who com- ments on the violence of Hildebrand, on the cruelties of Dominic, on the arrogance of Innocent, on the migration to Avignon, on the ■epoch of the Councils, on the causes of the German and the 10 TEE SOCIAL EFFECT OF BELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. Genevan Eeformation, on the rise of Loyola, on the religious wars which endured from 1550 to near a century later, on the last great outrage on our modem notions, the expulsion of the Huguenots, and the Penal Code of Ireland, may justly point out that infinite mischief has arisen from the policy which these circumstances indicate, but he errs as mischievously, if he thinks that the designs of those who promoted them were consciously dishonest. I have always regretted that in this place the authorized in- structor in ecclesiastical history rarely travels beyond the first four centuries of our era, and as far as I can learn, rarely gives a satis- factory exposition of what occurred in that time. For up at least to the fifteenth century, the development of theological dogma and discipline is a continuous process, every stage of which bears upon the history of the age ; the reaction from which, begun in this country, and carried thence to Eastern Europe, culminated at last in the schools of Luther and Calvin. I cannot see, in short, how men can understand the Reformation, unless they understand what it resisted, what it attempted to reform, what were the eompromises to which it was constrained to submit, and why it was so con- strained. The attack and defence of the old creed and practice in- volve the profoundest political, moral, and social effects, and the interpretation of these effects is obscured rather than assisted by limiting one's inquiry to the faith, the discipline, and the practice of the Early Church. The administration of the Eoman Empire made total havoc of ancient civilization. The ruin would have been earlier but for the- Empire, but it was inevitable that the Empire should bring th& ruin. In this universal chaos two powers survived — the Church and a few municipahties. But the latter were weak, and almost exhausted ; the former had to be concentrated, and to claim large authority, in order that it might continue to exist as a social force. The ceno- bite and industrial life which the Church assumed were necessary towards the revival of civilization. The Teutonic irruption adopted the vices of the later Empire without inheriting ita discipline and subordination. It was essentially lawless in the fact that it did not acquiesce in any central and legal authority. It rapidly de- generated even from ancestral custom. The pictm-e of the early Frankish monarchies, given by Gregory of Tours, and less clearly by ETJBOPE AFTER THE FALL OF TUWWMSTFSBN EMPIRE. 71 Predegariua, is sufficieat toah&w htfw early and hoyr opmplete the anarchy was. There was for many a century ''only pne Po^er which could make head against this recurrent chaos, for the empire of Charles the Great, carefully organized as it was, had as brief a duration,, and became as utterly chaotic as the Frankish monarchy which it super- seded. This was an orderly community, having a universal rule and a guiding centre, which was loyal tp the source of its own authority, and yet could be kept whplesome, even if the source became depraved. Such was the great Benedictine order, which preserved the rehcs of ancient literature and ancient law, restored agriculture, was an asylum against lawlessness, monarchical or aristocratic, and was able to survive the scandalous profligacy which characterized the Papacy in the, tenth century, and even to be a, great agent in the reformation of it, under Hildebrand. The philosophy of history proves that the monastic orders were the centre and the life of a reviving civilization. Though I confess that. I cannot see in the " Monks of the West '■' all that Montalembert. saw, I can discern that we owe to their example that habits of law^ the dignity of labour, the promotion of education, and th^ record of history, were not lost during the six centuries of their early career. Nor do I wonder that, from the point of view of the public interest^ apart from the strength which it gave the central power, all ecclesiastical authority favoured the cenobite at the expense of the regular clergy. Had the influence of Odo and Dunstan been enduring, Saxon England would have probably ^held its own against foreign invaders. The pohcy of WilUam the Norman was to establish an indepen- dent Church, ruled by hi^ nominees. But he was resolute and successful in checking foreign ecclesiastical aggression, however defensible it might be in theory in the hands of a reformer such as Gregory VII. was. WiUiam was a very different person from Henry IV. of Germany, and never needed to go an inch on the road to Canossa. It is singular, but an illustration of what I have been saying, that during the nineteen years in which William's grandson was king, though lawlessness was everywhere, more monasteries were founded than in any other reign. But evil as were the iimes of Stephen, they developed a set of circumstances which 72 TEE SOCIAL EFFECT OF BELiaiOUS MOVEMENTS. were rapidly made manifeet during the more vigorous reign of Jus successor. Prom the time of Henry II. and onwards to the Reformation in England, three sections, or, as the ancients would have called them, schools, are always visible in the English Church^ The first is the official section, which I may call by a prolepsis the Erastian party, which maintained the authority of the executive, and could always be depended on by the king. These men were generally the principal officials of the exchequer, the ancient description of which, first printed by Madox, purports to be written at the dictation of one of them. To this party belonged most of the bishops in Becket's lime, and the clerical chancellors and treasurers of succeeding centuries. The second is what I may call the national section or Anglican. To this belonged such men as Becket, Langton, and Grostete. They were especially characteristic of the sixteenth century, in the person of such men as Gardiner, who, if the tenets of the old faith were left unimpaired, were perfectly willing to sanction and assist Henry in freeing himself from the authority of the Papacy. It is a striking fact, and one rarely referred to, even by ecclesiastical historians, that Gardiner and Bonner resisted and protested against the rescissory Act of Mary Tudor's reign, under which all Acts of Parliament denying the authority of the Eoman See were abrogated in a lump at the instance of Cardinal Pole. The third was the Papal or Ultramontane party. As a rule, this party was chiefly found in the monasteries, and at last ex- clusively. The origin of the regular orders was Papal, or if this were doubtful, the privileges and exemptions which the monasteries enjoyed were of Papal origin and Papal grant. There was nothing Ayhich the monks desired more than exemption from episcopal discipline, and there was nothing which the bishops resented and resisted more than these exemptions. There is an amusing illus- tration of conflictiag opinion in Matthew Paris. He is, unlike most monks, strongly Anglican in his sentiments, and criticises un- sparingly the king for his impohtie action, arid the Pope for playing on Henry's weakness. In so far, therefore, as Grostete resisted the Papal nominations, he is a credit, in the eyes of Paris, to the English Church and the episcopate; in so far as he strove to extemJ TEE THBEE PABTIES IN THE ENGLISH CHUBCH. 73 episcopal discipline over the monasteries in his diocese, he was an «nemy to the Church, and to be condemned. Sometimes, as in the fifteenth century, the Anglican party was almost absorbed in the official, when hardly a bishop was found in his diocese, but most often were in attendance on the Court. Some- ■times the secular clergy made common cause with the regular, as •when they all concurred in getting from Boniface the Eighth, the famous Bull, ClericU laicos, and thereafter were entirely reduced to submission by the king. But I am disposed to believe that the secular clergy would have made little stir, had the movement of the fourteenth century anticipated, as it was close upon doing, the Dissolution of the sixteenth. The older orders had become wealthy and negligent, and though the two orders of begging friars were at "the height of their reputation in the thirteenth century, it is plain that they became unpopular in the fourteenth, not perhaps by the direct possession of wealth, from which the rules of their order ex- cluded them, but by the trusts which were created on their behalf, on the enjoyment of which they entered, as freely and fully as tbose of the other and older orders did on their endowments. In the fifteenth century the pious and learned Gascoigne has not a good word to say for any of them, but counsels their suppression. It was necessary for me to give this sketch of the state of the clergy, regular and secular, in England, up to at least the middle of the fourteenth century, because one cannot, without it, explain the force and persistence of that singular movement which began, 'as usual, at Oxford in the fourteenth century. I am referring, of course, to the political, polemical, and social career of Wiklif. It is not a little' remarkable that all the great religious movements in England, from the earUest to the latest, had their origin in Oxford. 8ome of the earliest intimations which we get of the existence of a university or of schools of teaching in this place is the narrative of the discovery made of some heretics at Oxford in Henry the Second's reign, who were expelled and outlawed fi:om Oxford, and perished because no one dared to shelter them. The University of Oxford, when under the influence of Grostite, appears to have welcomed the begging friars, of whom the Bishop of Lincoln had so high an ■opinion. In the next century the opinions of Wiklif were developed iere. In the following century Pecok, the premature advocate of 74 T3E SOCIAL EFFECT OF Sp^IGIOnS MOVEMENTS, Bationaliam, was an Oxford man ; and at the end of the century^ the revival of letters in England, distinctly associated -with Church Beform, but with an unaltered creed, in the hands of Erasmus, Colet. and More. The splendid schemes of Wolsey, intended to give effect to this reform, but rendered abortive by his sadden disgrace, were to- have been carried out at Oxford. After the reformation was accom- plished, the Puritan movement imder Sampson, and the literary one under Laurence, were commenced in Ehzabeth's reign. Later- on it is the home of the Laudia^ reaction. In the eighteenth century it originated a movement, by the action of the brothers Wesley, which has had well-mgh as wide and lasting an influence as that of Wiklif, and simultaneously developed the deistical tenets of Toland and Tindal, which were certainly not as obscure and un- important as some have made them. Lastly, it was the origin and. centre of the Anglican movement, which, however it* has been criticised, has affected the action, if not the ritual, of those churches which have declared the strongest antagonism to it. The cause of this singular phenomenon was probably, for the most part, the extra- ordinary privileges and exemptions which the University enjoyed. It was certainly self -governed, and its authority over its own students- was declared to be independent of bishop and pope. Many, too, believed that the course of its studies, under which the most sacred- questions were customarily attacked and defended, lent no Uttle aid- to the sceptical tone which characterized the writings and conversa- tion of its members. In 1305, Philip le Bel, who had quarrelled with Boniface VIII.,. contrived, after the short reign of the successor of Boniface, to securer the election of a pope who would be entirely devoted to the French- king's interests. This was the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name of Clement V., and migrated to Avignon. His successors, up to the epoch of the great Schism in 1378, were all Frenchmen^ and all resident at Avignon. This was not, indeed, part of the- French king's possessions, but it was henmied in by them. Now during the last thirty-five years of this period, Edward III. was a claimant of the French throne, under a title which many jurists, and French jurists too, thought valid, and the Avignon Pope was very generally deemed to be the English enemy, using his spiritual power for the purpose of aiding and abetting the French usurper. Attacks, THE SITUATION IN WIKLIF'S DATS. 75 therefore, on the authority of the Pope were likely to be tolerated, if not welcomed. The regular revenues of the Roman see were impoverished or suspended during the Babylonish captivity, as the residence at Avignon was described, and. the pontiffs cast about for some new sources of extraordinary revenue. They brought causes to the Papal courts of law, for I have discovered and published the details of some among them, original and appellate, where the delay was great and the costs excessive. The fees -paid to lawyers, all licensed by the Pope for a round sum paid down, were for the times very high. They created places for life, in consideration of present payment, and quartered such people upon their spiritual subjects in order to secure the iacome promised. One of them invented the doctrine of firstfruits, under which he reserved to himself the first year's revenue of all benefices in Christendom. But the greatest grievance of all was the habit which the Pope got into of putting his nominees into vacant benefices, without regard to the rights of patrons, and even, by what were called letters of provision, nominating persons in expectancy or succession to these benefices, before they were vacant. The vast sums obtained by these means were transmitted to Avignon by bills drawn on Flemish merchants, who traded with the English sheepmasters, and the English pubhc indignantly insisted that the Pope regularly extorted on one plea or another as much money out of England as the king's own revenue came to. It seems, too, that other nations used to laugh at the patience with which England allowed itself to be plundered. And when we add to this the real or reputed leaning of the French Popes to the French king's cajise, it is plain that there were all the elements of a pretty quarrel in existence. I suspect, had the English Companies caught the Pope, they would have treated him as harshly during the war as Nogaret did Boniface VIII. Wiklif is supposed to have been bom at a Yorkshire village of that name ia or about the year 1324. His collateral relations are said to have dwelt there, some generations after the Eeformation, and to have rem_ained staunch adherents of the old faith. The day of his death is certainly known, the last day of the year 1884. I suspect his birth -was at an earlier date than that ordinarily alleged. He was educated at Oxford, where is not known. He was certainly 76 TEE SOCIAL EFFECT OF BELIGI0U8 MOVEMENTS. a fellow of Merton, and probably master of Balliol. He was an ex- ceedingly popular person at Oxford, where he received from the University the title of Doctor Evangelicua. In imitation of Aquinas, perhaps with the purpose of superseding him among his Oxford pupils, WikU^ before his political career began, wrote his Summa Theologise, under the title of "De Doininio civih." Some of the tenets promulgated in this work were famiharly quoted, notably his famous maxim that Dominion is founded in Grace. I felt convinced many years ago that he meant by this that all human authority was conditioned by the worthiness of the person exercising it, and that proved unworthiness was a valid reason for withdrawing one's allegiance. I can well imagine that as long as this was supposed to refer only to the French Pope at Avignon, who was making incessant claims on England and EngHsh benefices, the language might pass unchallenged, atid be even acceptable. Eut when, in course of time, the tenet was apphed to authorities nearer home, it excited at first a reasonable alarm, and ultimately •undisguised hostility. This work of Wiklif s was long supposed to be lost. Most of his "writings have perished, for after his memory was condemned at the Council of Constance, some thirty years after his death, and his bones dug out of his grave at Lutterworth and burnt, diligent search -was made for his writings, and those which were found were destroyed. Still, as- late as 1453, books of Wiklif s were bought at Oxford, and for high prices too, for Oxford University in the fifteenth •century was reputed to be full of Lollards. But the original work has latterly been found at Vienna, and has been partly published. Many of his works, it is well known, were taken to Bohemia by some Oxford students, where they were eagerly studied by the sect who were afterwards known as the Hussites. After the battle of the White Mountain in 1620, the Hussite books were captured and •carried to Vienna, where they probably owe their preservation to neglect. I have read what has been published of this treatise, and I confess ■that Wiklif s style is not attractive. It is iavolved, full of iteration, and is disappoiutiag from the frequent hesitation, not to say evasions, ■of the author in stating the conclusion ■