Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/14

 great risings, however, of the fourteenth century, secured for the mass of our people that freedom and well-being which made common Englishmen for at least two centuries the envy of Europe. Serfdom was almost entirely done away, men were masters of themselves, their land, and their labour. Labourers and craftsmen were alike well-paid, well-fed people, who were not only in possession of the land which they might occupy and till, but were also entitled to rights of pasturage over large tracts of common land, since robbed from their descendants by the meanness of an usurping class who made laws in their own favour to sanctify pillage.

England, far more densely peopled at that time than is generally supposed, was in fact inhabited by perhaps the most vigorous, freedom-loving set of men the world ever saw, who, having shaken themselves free from the slavery of the feudal system, were still untrammelled by the worse slavery of commercialism and capital. The economical forms, the methods of production, were the direct cause of this universal well-being and sturdy independence. Instead of men working under the control of the landlord or the landlord-capitalist as slaves or serfs for the sake of wealth and profit for their owners, the yeomen were owners themselves of their own means of production, and produced for the use of the family, only paying a portion of such production as tithes, or dues, or taxes. Rent, in the sense of a competition price paid for the occupation of land, was at this period almost unknown in Northern and Western Europe as well as in these islands.

Production therefore being carried on for use, though