He

Thus

people in the evenings is very remarkable. This looks as if, at least, some little promising action were set up. I mention the matter because such a change is within the reach of any parson. need not be a popular preacher, but he may depend upon finding boys in his national school, and members of his congregation, who will gladly form a choir, to lead the singing of the people. he draws them to church, not to hear a man deliver himself of a sermon, but to take part in the services. Such a change in the mode of conducting public worship as I refer to is possible anywhere, but most especially in large towns, and it has no necessary connexion whatever with any party in the Church. The growing love for and skill in music which is so remarkable among the working classes in these days, added to their inevitable appreciation of a free church, where no exclusive pews suggest unpleasant comparisons between the respect shown to rich and poor in the house of God, will I am sure, at least in the towns and cities of England, result in a remarkable change in the present usual mode of conducting public worship, and remove one great obstacle from the attendance of working people at church.

It is true that these are but external matters. Many intelligent artisans are, I fear, repelled by what they believe to be the proselytizing, illiberal spirit of the clergy. I do not say that I think they are right in their prejudice. They would find the great body of the clergy far different to what they imagine them to be. But they stand aloof, rendered suspicious of a whole class of men, whom they judge by the conspicuous patronizing and condemnatory voices of a few. Working men must be addressed as men, not lectured as children, or scolded as malignants. They sometimes read in the papers of their society being stigmatized as heathen and godless, and decline submitting themselves to teachers who seem to belong to a set which produces these provokingly-piteous censors.

One is reminded of the story of Lord P-, who, when an officious winemerchant sent him a sample of claret, hich he said was good for the gout,

66

replied that he was much obliged, but he preferred the gout." The sour meaning which some working men attach to the sweet exhortations aimed at them through the ecclesiastical press, determines them to decline the remedy offered, with no noisy, repellant bluster, but simply by keeping away from church. They will identify the worship of God with the preaching of man, and as they believe that preaching to be mainly con demnatory or professional, they spend the Sunday after their own fashion, in irreligious independence.

Space will not permit me to enter into the great question of the education of the working classes, whether of their children in elementary schools, or of adults in such institutions as combine instruction with amusement. I am inclined, however, to think that "Working Men's Clubs," as they are now supported, must have the element of the school rather than of the club. They are in a great measure educational, not so much in a direct as in an indirect manner. They are none of them, or at least none that I have heard of, clubs proper. They invite pecuniary assistance from the upper classes, and so associate themselves with those philanthropical institutions that contemplate the "elevation of the masses." I should rejoice to see clubs set up and supported by working men themselves; clubs which provided for social recreation, and delivered their members from the tempting atmosphere of the public-house. Their principle, too, should be exclusive; members should be balloted, not touted for. A club into which men are urged to enter for the sake of their own moral benefit is not a "club," as the word is generally understood. It is essentially educational; and, if we will detach its usual meaning from the name it goes by, is evidently calculated to do much good. Many sup porters of these "working men's clubs" as they are called, see, however, great difficulties in the way of their success in London. There is less fellow-feeling among working men here than in provincial towns. In the metropolis they are like an heap of sand which is blown about by the gusts of business, or massed

in trades. There is little parochial or residential esprit de corps, and yet a club, to be of use, must be within easy reach of all its members. If, however, you were to take the tenants of a dozen contiguous houses of the working classes in the thick of London, you would probably find that, like their richer neighbours, they were as much strangers to each other as if they lived miles apart, and moreover that most had their own special lodges, brotherhood, and houses. of call to which they belonged, which absorbed their spare money, and attached

them to various if not antagonistic interests. It is found difficult to set up a common action among these adjacent but independent atoms, much more to give them so great an interest in one thing as the members of a club must have, if it is to succeed at all. The experiment, however, is being made in various parts of London, and we shall see whether the fears of several of the friends of the working classes are confirmed by its failure. The attempt certainly deserves to be made.

Ir is obvious that these two subjects may be combined into widely different sets of economical facts. Wealth may be greatly divided-in other words, the general condition of a community may be prosperous and yet the area over which wealth is possessed may be bounded by districts which are scantily occupied, and therefore scantily productive; and, on the other hand, a country may be fully occupied, but wealth may be accumulated in few hands, the mass of the community may be poor and wretched, and, unless the real condition of the people be estimated, the semblance of prosperity may be a mere delusion. Again, the whole capacities of any country may be fully understood, and its whole area economically worked, and wealth may be generally distributed; or, on the contrary, it is possible to find instances where the country is scantily or insufficiently worked, where such wealth as is possessed is held by few persons, and where, by the conjoint causes of great riches enjoyed by some and great poverty endured by others, the economical progress of the nation is grievously crippled. The first of these social conditions may be represented by the United States and the Anglo-Saxon colonies; the second by Ireland and the

greater part of the Indian peninsula ; the third by the New England States and Western Lombardy; the fourth by Russia and Central Germany. Our own country presents a singular anomaly. All its laws favour accumulation, and protect the accumulations when made. Were it not for the extraordinary cir cumstances which develop and continue new industries, it cannot be doubted that the policy of our law would be absolutely destructive to economical progress. In this country we have at once the phenomena of gigantic wealth possessed by a few individuals, the perpetual creation of fortunes from successful mercantile pursuits, and a peasantry more sordid and hopeless than can perhaps be found in any other part of the civilized worlda peasantry which holds the plough, and hardly holds an inch of the soil.

Historians, following the statements to be found in the earliest law books, have concluded of the fourteenth century, that England contained a few great and wealthy lords, temporal and spiritual, an indeterminate but probably scanty body of freeholders, and a mass of serfs, possessing, in respect of their feudal superiors, neither property nor rights. The towns, it is admitted, were occupied by freemen,

and engaged, under bye-laws and municipal regulations, in the production or sale of various commodities of home and foreign make. The most cherished and valued privileges of these towns were, government by local magistrates, generally elected by the citizens, and absolute freedom from feudal dependence on any superior besides the king. The upland or outlandish folk, therefore, were almost universally in a state of bondage; the townspeople were free, and capable of conferring freedom on all whom they chose to welcome and protect within their walls. It is acknowledged that the process by which the serfs continued to emancipate themselves is imperceptible, and that the change from absolute dependence and complete deprivation of civil and personal rights to the secure position of the copyholder was certain, but very gradual, because wholly insensible. And it is concluded that the grievances of their condition provoked the serfs to their outbreak in 1381, and that the insurrection of Tyler and his associates was identical in character with the uprising of the French Jacquerie in 1358. Many, however, of their views are unwarranted by facts.

Owing to the low rate of production from the soil-rarely exceeding, on an average, four times the seed sownpopulation was necessarily scanty; and most persons were, for certain times of the year, engaged in agricultural pursuits. During the harvest months, the townsfolk poured out into the country to aid in gathering the crops. When, as a result of the rise in wages consequent on the losses inflicted by the great plague of 1348, the Legislature strove to fix the price of labour by enactments, levying considerable fines on those who gave or received more than specified rates, and with much greater effect enacted a rigorous law of settlement; permission was given that the inhabitants of certain northern countries should travel as they had hitherto been wont in quest of harvest work. It is said that the duration of the long vacation of the universities and law courts, extending from the beginning

of July to the morrow of St. Dennis's Day, i.e. October 10th, was expressly intended to cover the time in which harvest operations might be completed, and so to liberate all persons from other avocations in order for the performance of this necessary labour.

It would be an error to imagine that the size of a medieval town, as measured by the surface contained within its walls, is any sure indication of the population which it comprised. It is true that our forefathers had no very exalted notions of what we should call domestic comfort, and that the huddling together of many persons in the same room, which is now recognised as the great hindrance to sanitary improve ment, was general in the Middle Ages. Wykeham, whose college was in all its particulars a more magnificent and commodious structure than any academical building which preceded it, put his warden, seventy fellows. and scholars, ten chaplains, and the various servants maintained by the college into what now forms the first quadrangle, with, however, one storey less than the present building contains. But, on the other hand, gardens were attached to most town houses, even in the city of London, where space was less plentiful. New College has possessed from its foundation certain tenements in Aldgate; and I have often seen in accounts of this college note taken of the purchase of old casks to form palings for the gardens annexed to these houses. So the site of New College itself was a void space within the walls, which the founder purchased of the city.

A small number of wealthy persons, the great barons, prelates, and abbots, formed the highest classes of the four. teenth century. These personages possessed large revenues, derived in some degree from the profits of land farmed by their bailiffs, but much more from the fines, quit-rents, and compositions levied on their tenants, from tolls of fairs, markets, and ferries, and from numerous other small sources of income,

issuing for the most part from manorial rights. These resources of the feudal baron-seldom, except he were a Church

man, adequate to his necessities--were expended in some few foreign luxuries, in ostentatious attendance, in military display, and occasionally in public charity.

Trivial as the items seem which made up the income of the lord, they formed a considerable sum when the recipient was the owner of many manors; and, as the value of money varied in no perceptible degree up to the beginning of the sixteenth century, these fixed payments were the most important source of revenue possessed by the feudal baron. Mr. Hallam, indeed, has expressed an opinion that the spirit of chivalry, cultivated by the habits of the English nobility, would have disdained such pitiful sources of income as the contri butions of their inferior tenants; and he infers that the gradual emancipation of the villains was due to the scorn which the lords would have felt at appropriating the poor accumulations of the lower classes. I cannot but think that Mr. Hallam has exaggerated the generosity of the chivalric spirit, and that his standard is wholly ideal. At any rate, I have never seen in any of the accounts which I have investigated -and they are derived from the estates of many great barons of the fourteenth century the smallest negligence in exacting the most trivial sums which might be due from their dependents.

--

A manor in the fourteenth century was generally divided into three portions The lord held one, with the capital mansion of the estate; the second was divided out among the tenants, free and serf; and the third was the common pasture-ground of the inhabitants. Such

an

arrangement, in the total absence of roots and artificial grasses, was abso lutely necessary for the subsistence of the cattle kept on the manor. It did not, indeed, follow that the pasture was always a separate portion of the estate. It was frequently the case that strips of arable were intermixed with pasture, that the ridges were sown, and a broad space between left for grass, and that the whole field was possessed in different shares by many occupiers.

The lord, as I have observed, cul

tivated his estate by a bailiff, who gave in an annual account of receipts and expenses. He collected for the most part, the quit-rents and fines, the customary payments from the villains, and the dues of the manor court. In the roll of the court, all residents were registered before they reached adolescence, and were called on to serve in the various offices of the manor-as jurymen for instance, and ale-tasters. In accordance with the view of frankpledge, the free tenant was perpetually open to supervision in reference to the conduct of his guests and dependents; he was liable to fine for breaches of police regulations, and was constantly hound to be answerable for the due discharge of amercements levied on any unruly or slanderous members of his household. It may be doubted whether, up to very late times, at least, any local regulations have been the differences of information on sanitary and similar questions considered and accounted formore energetic and effective than were those in the ancient manor court. It is certain that the precautions taken to prevent fraudulent adulteration and dishonest, weights, and to secure general order, were exceedingly practical under this obsolete machinery.

But

I have before me the rentals of two parishes in Oxfordshire and Bucks, Cuxham and Ibstone-the area of the former being at the present time 487, of the latter 1,112, statute acres. the parochial and manorial limits are not identical, the latter being wider than the former. The date of the rolls is 1299, but they have been corrected in the margin for a century and a half later.

AtCuxham there are four free tenants: two hold a fourth of a knight's fee, both situate in Chalgrove, and worth, according to the valuation of a knight's fee, 51. a year. One holds 3 acres with a house in frank-marriage, and 9 acres with another house. The rector of the parish holds a small piece. The prior of Holy Trinity, in Wallingford, has a. mill, a house, and six acres in free alms; and another person holds a cottage on condition of keeping two lights

in the church. Another mill is held by a tenant at will. Besides the freeholders, there are thirteen villains or nativi, each of whom holds at least a house with half a virgate of land, and some more. A virgate is variously computed from 25 to 40 acres. The services payable annually for this portion of land amount, on the larger estimate, to something less than sixpence an acre, when reckoned in money value. sides these villains, there are 8 coterells or cottagers, four of whom are women, and probably widows.

Be

At Ibstone there are eight freeholders holding half a virgate and more, and twelve others holding smaller parcels. There are also four villains, each tenant of more than half a virgate, and four coterells.

I have adverted to the facts contained in these records, at the risk of being tedious, because, being illustrative of the custom which generally ruled in thousands of other manors, they indicate that the land was, on the whole, largely subdivided. The owner of twenty acres of land in these parishes (where the soil was better than the average), might, in addition to his right of common pasture, reckon on reaping, in ordinary years, about twenty quarters of different kinds of grain, if, indeed, the smaller husbandry was not more productive than the larger. Of these, perhaps, two quarters represent the permanent liabilities of his tenure, his quitrent, and his payments to the manor court. labour needful for cultivating his small estate was that of his own household; and we cannot doubt that, as is always the case with the peasant proprietor, his toil and care were unremitting. He contributed to the wages of the knights of the shire; and he must have watched with much eagerness those perpetual remonstrances against arbitrary taxation and purveyance which formed the burden of most of the complaints of Parliament in the fourteenth century.

The

He won with his bow and axe the great battles over the French chivalry, and spread the reputation of English steadiness and courage through the length and breadth of Europe. And when, in the course of

time, events put the means of extending his holding into his hands, and, in addition to his patrimony, he rented, and ultimately bought up, much of the land which had formed the estate of the wealthier franklins and barons, he became the rich yeoman of the fifteenth century, whose prosperity is lauded so highly by Fortescue and Fuller.

Again, it would be a great error to conceive that the condition of the serf was one of hopeless bondage--of complete annexation to the limits of a manor to which, if he quitted it, he could be recalled by force; on which, while he resided, he had neither property nor civil rights. I do not pretend to say that servitude, in the sense given to it in the law books, did not exist under some of the Plantagenet or Angevine kings; but in the time for which we have contemporaneous testimony it is virtually extinct, and the tenancy in villenage is characterized by the incidents of labour rents, and the contingency of certain special disabilities. The villain of the fourteenth century was liable to fixed service only-such service being invariably compensated by the possession of land; and the service was as universally commutable for a low money payment. It was natural, indeed, that the lord, when the service was fixed, should accede to such a payment in lieu of actual service. Labour payments are never very heartily rendered, and money was always acceptable in the Middle Ages; the more so, because so much significance was given to

treasure.

I have been at the pains to calculate the average money value of the labour rents levied on the Cuxham and Ibstone tenants. Taking the half virgate at twenty acres, the quantity to which I incline, the highest value which can be annexed to the service of the villain amounts to little more than sixpence an acre, in money of the time, on his land. Now, though this is a high rent, even for land the rate of production on which was so considerable, relatively speaking, as at Cuxham, yet it represents a state far removed from the condition of bondage