Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/54

40 cloth of gold; none but a knight any velvet, damask, or silk in their gowns and doublets; none beneath an esquire or gentleman, gowns of camlet. The dress of the citizens was regulated, by Act of Parliament, in the same manner. The lord mayor and his lady were permitted to wear the same degree of clothing as knights and their ladies; and the aldermen and recorder of London, and the mayors of other cities, ranked with the esquires and gentlemen.

All this marks the fact that the lower classes were gaining in substance and importance, and were pressing on the higher in their apparel and mode of living; and it required stringent repression on the part of the higher grades to maintain exclusive licence in these respects. The same regulations extended to diet as well as clothing. It was ordered that servants and grooms, whether of lords or gentlemen, should not have milk or fish more than once a day, but should content themselves at other meals with milk, bread, butter, cheese, &c.

If we are to believe Sir John Fortescue, the great lawyer and Chancellor of England, who lived so many years in France at the court of Margaret of Anjou, and who, therefore, had ample opportunity of comparing the style of living in the two countries, the food and clothing of the ordinary class of English were much better than amongst the same class of French. "The French," he says, "weryn no wollyn; but if it be a pore cote, under their uttermost garment, made of grete canvas, and call it a frok. Their hosyn be of like canvas, and passin not to their knee; wherefor they be gartered, and their thyghs bare, their wifs and children goine bare fote. But the English wear fine wollen cloth in all their apparell. They have also abundanco of bed-coverings in their houses, and of all other wollen stuffe."

He says the English people "drink no water, except when they abstain from other drinks, by way of penance, and from a principle of devotion. They eat plentifully of all kinds, fish and flesh, with which their country abounds; but the commons in France be so impoverished and destroyed, that they may unith lyve. They drynke water; they eate apples with bread right brown, made of rye; they eate no flesche, but if it be seldom, a litill larde, or of the intrails or heds of bests sclayne for the nobles and merchaunts of the land."

There is much in these statements characteristic of the two nations to the present day. It is quite certain that France at that period was reduced to a dreadful condition by our repeated invasions. At home, spite of the drain for those wars, and of the succeeding wars on our own soil, there seems to have been a wonderful amount of wealth and prosperity amongst the people. Yet at the same time there was much misery and a growing amount of mendicity. Æneas Silvius, afterwards Pope Pius II., assures us that none of the inhabitants of a populous village in Northumberland, in which he lodged in 1437, had ever seen wine or wheaten bread, and were greatly astonished when they saw them on his table.

It is from the century preceding the one now under review that the era of pauperism commences. In fact, the moment that villenage began to give way, pauperism and mendicity appeared. So long as the inhabitants of the large estates, whether of the church or the laity, were so much property, they must be maintained just as the cattle were; but so soon as they became free men, and received not food, clothing, and lodging, but wages for their work, they became liable to the destitution which times of scarcity, sickness, or old age naturally brought. If they could make no provision against these seasons, they were necessitated to beg or receive alms. So early, therefore, as 1349, the number of beggars, thieves, and vagabonds had so increased under the plea of destitution and want of employment, that legislative enactment became necessary, and Government resorted to that which continued to be attempted without effect till the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth, namely, to coerce these tribes into orderly and laborious habits. But this new liberty of roaming over the country, and of abstaining from labour, was too sweet to be readily resigned, and flocks of idle fellows roved about in idleness, insolence, and robbery.

In the year mentioned the statute issued stated, "That because many valiant beggars, as long as they may live of begging, do refuse to labour, giving themselves to idleness and vice, and sometimes to theft and other abominations, none, upon pain of imprisonment, shall, under the colour of pity and alms, give anything to such which may labour, or presume to favour them in their sloth, so that thereby they may be compelled to labour for their necessary living." But this was an evil only in its infancy, and destined to become one of the great difficulties of the land for a century yet. Staff-strikers, sturdy rogues, and vagabonds, became a terror and a nuisance, and Act after Act, ordering whipping, branding, imprisoning, and other punishments, were passed to put them down in vain. Besides these, there gradually accumulated large shoals of really infirm and destitute poor, whose employers were no longer forced to support them. These were thrown chiefly on the towns and on the church, which, with its wealthy endowments, was bound to devote one-fourth to the payments of the state, one-fourth to the repair and maintenance of the ecclesiastical buildings, one-fourth to their own support, and the remaining fourth to the relief of the poor. We shall see, that when the church became deprived of the estates of its monasteries, the poor were then thrown in such hosts on the public as to compel the introduction of the poor law. Meantime, pressed by this new social evil, the Government, in the fifteenth century, actually had recourse to tickets-of-leave. These tickets were not indeed given to convicted criminals, but to persons for whom there was no employment in their own hundred, rape, wapentake, city, or borough. They had then a letter-patent given them, authorising them to travel in quest of labour; and without such letter, or ticket-of-leave, they were liable to be seized and clapped in the stocks, and after due punishment sent away, liable to the same treatment in every place they came to. But we shall obtain further insight into the social condition of the nation at this period, under the different sections of our review of it, and not the least under that of

We have described in our last chapter on the Progress of the Nation, the steps by which the Parliament of England finally resolved itself into the three great branches of King, Lords, and Commons. During this century, amid all the troubles and strifes of the nation, these powers were further defined and consolidated. The