Several unpopular ministers were taken and beheaded, the queen's father and brother among them. The king himself was obliged to surrender, whereupon Warwick dismissed the people, who returned home. The fruits of the victory remained in the hands of Warwick and Clarence, just where the people wished to put them. Just as the rising in 1450 ushered in the wars of the roses, announcing the general favor of the nation for the house of York, that of 1469 announced a great revulsion against a king of that house, guided by Warwick, the people's friend. A change now comes over the scene. In the latter part of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth the face of England was transformed from plow to pasture land. Sheep farming was introduced, because wool brought higher prices than wheat and required little labor to raise. Contrary to all law and right, landlords evicted their tenants and inclosed the common pastures. The land was filled with vagabonds and beggars; at the same time prices were enhanced by the debasement of the currency under Henry VIII and his successors, whereas wages were slower to rise. A little before, the dissolution of the monasteries had put a band of merciless land-grabbers in the place of the monks, who were often easy landlords. Parliament has done its utmost against illegal inclosures and evictions, but in vain. Another rising of the peasants in 1549, but which does not come under the scope of this paper, failed to effect the same purpose. Since then the fortunes of the English workman steadily declined, until only the nineteenth century brought about a change for the better. None of the great reformers or statesmen favored him; not a single law was made for his benefit. The much-lauded poor laws of queen Elizabeth only forced the landlord to maintain as a pauper him whom he had deprived of his land. The law of parochial settlement, passed under Charles II, made him a serf without land. Hostile legislation thwarted the relief that would otherwise have been afforded by the invention of steam, so that at the end of the seventeenth century the workman could buy just one-eighth as much wheat for his wages as in the fifteenth. The middle ages, then, were not so disastrous for the people. England has progressed, it is true, but the laborer has not received a corresponding share of the advancement. Merchant and landholder have fared far better than he. His condition is in many respects superior to that of the medieval serf, but not absolutely so; for the latter, at least, had plenty to eat and a hut to protect him from the weather, whereas our outcasts often starve and have not where to lay their heads. There are more starving, homeless wretches in the great cities of England to-day than there ever were serfs in the whole island. They live in far more squalid and abject poverty than the meanest mediæval bondman. Not until the masses enjoy more economic in additional to personal freedom may we vaunt our absolute social superiority over the middle ages. Oh, that we might add some of the prosperity of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the culture and progress of the nineteenth!* # For the economical development of England throughout the period see Thorold Rogers' Six Centuries of Work and Wages. S. Mis. 104-11 |