Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/96

86 the estate in search of trade or hire, and a refusal to return on recall by his owner would have ended in his pursuit as a fugitive outlaw." But the advance of society silently worked to free the laborer from this local bondage. The runaway serf gained freedom by residence in a chartered town for a year and a day. The influence of the church was directed toward his emancipation, at least on all estates outside of its own, but the main cause was the growing tendency to commute labor services for money payments. As Mr. Green says: "The luxury of the castle hall, the splendor and pomp of chivalry, the cost of campaigns, drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom to a serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an easy and tempting mode of refilling them. In this process even kings took part. Edward III sent commissioners to royal estates for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the king's serfs, and we still possess the names of those who were enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard cash in aid of the exhausted exchequer." The Crusades, whatever else they may have accomplished, aided in this freedom for the serf. Those costly expeditions dissipated the estates of the barons, and, to use Hume's somewhat strained expression, "Their poverty extorted from their pride those charters of freedom which unlocked the fetters of the slave." And so, following the rise of the farmer, came this new class—the free laborer. By the latter part of the fourteenth century labor was no longer, as a rule, "bound to one spot or one master; it was free to hire itself to what employer and to choose what field of employment it would."

This is the beginning of the labor class as we know it. In those times labor was abundant and therefore cheap. The landowners in the country and the craftsmen in the town found plenty of help, and the new class then coming upon the stage could go where it was needed. From a serf the common laborer had become his own master as far as choosing his own employer and the place of his employment. But just at this time a condition of affairs arose which put an end to this state of things. In 1348 came the Great Plague. That swept away more than half of the three or four millions who then made up the population of England. The plague and the sudden rise of wages which followed, although coupled with an increase in the cost of living, quite naturally brought on an outburst of lawless self-indulgence which told especially upon the laborer looking for work. He easily became the "sturdy beggar" or "bandit of the woods." "While harvests rotted to the ground from lack of hands, in the towns labor was just as scarce and equally as independent. The landowners and wealthier craftsmen were startled and terrified by "what seemed in their age the extravagant demands of the new labor classes."