Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/305

 strangers: "Surrounded with impassable roads," he says, "no intercourse with man to humanise the mind, nor commerce to smooth their rugged manners, they continue to be boors of nature." Assaults were not infrequent, and we hear of noses and ears being actually bitten off in a barbarous rage that might well belong to an earlier age. True, the wandering pedlar who travelled from village to village would sometimes bring a stained and tattered newspaper, which was read and re-read to a gaping and ignorant set of country folk. But, if spicy and interesting, it contained nothing edifying or relating to the great affairs of state. It told how "a boy was killed by falling upon iron spikes from a lamppost, which he had climbed to see Mother Needham stand in the pillory"; how a "poor man was found hanging in a gentleman's stables at Bungay in Suffolk by a person who cut him down, and running for assistance, left his penknife behind him"; how the best loaf sugar sold for 9d. a pound, Pekoe tea for 18s., and in what way the Queen was dressed on her forty-ninth birthday. Life was trivial and interests limited, centering for the most part around the monotonous doings of the country squire. Even if the saying that the