Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/126

106 the population of England lay dead. The whole organisation of the country was disturbed, cultivation was at a standstill. "Sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and corn, and there were none left who could drive them." Harvests lay rotting on the ground, fields were unploughed, crops ungathered, seeds unsown: the sound of the grinding was low, and mourners went about the streets.

It was this wholesale destruction of life that gave rise to a new social order of things in the land, creating for the first time that discord between the employer and employed which has been so marked a feature of economic England from the fourteenth century even to the present time. Already the system of cultivation by forced service had given way to payments in kind, which in the reign of Edward III. had become yet more general. But now half the labourers had disappeared from the face of the land, and those who remained alive demanded higher wages. They had suddenly become indispensable to the large landowners and were in a position for the first time to dictate their own terms. Women who had worked in the fields for a penny a day now demanded twopence. With