Page:The English Peasant.djvu/20

 whose services were limited to seed-time and harvest, were bound to do the work needed on their lord's private domain. By them his land was ploughed, dunged, and dyked, his harvests reaped, his barns filled with sheaves, his stables provided with stubble, his cattle, sheep, and pigs tended, his grain turned into malt, his nuts gathered, his woods cut, his fires kept alive with fuel. A whole army of slaves toiled for him as ploughmen, herdsmen, shepherds, malsters, woodmen, carpenters, and smiths, while the borderers scattered on the edges of the commons were bound to provide him with a good stock of poultry and eggs.

The sole reward for all this labour was the right to existence and protection. The only consolations the labourers enjoyed, were the pleasures in which they could indulge on holidays, or the mystic hopes which the services of the Church inspired. Dwelling in dark cottages made of wattles and daubed with mud, they lived on salt meat half the year, and for vegetables, ate onions, cabbages, and nettles.

How the lords fared we may judge from an account Holingshed has preserved of the Earl of Leicester's expenses in 1313. By that time there were labourers in the country working for daily wages; a thatcher in this same year received 3¼d. a day. If we deduct Sundays and Holidays, such a labourer would have been able to earn about £4 a year; and as the Earl's expenses reached £7,309, less £8, 16s. 7d. given in charity, it appears that the latter spent on his family and people an amount equal to the wages of 1825 labourers. More than half of this went on eating alone, while an idea of the revelry indulged in may be gathered from the fact that the Earl's household drank 371 pipes of wine, and burnt 2,319 pounds of tallow candles as well as 1,870 pounds of Paris candles.

Well might a deep-seated ill-will exist between the oppressor and the oppressed. It comes out in the legendary Vision of Henry I., who one night dreamt that he saw gathered round him a number of labourers bearing scythes, spades, and pitchforks, looking angry and threatening. And reason enough they had, if Walter Mapes, a clerical pluralist, royal favourite, friend of Beket, and author of the "Quest of the Holy Graal," is an example of the feeling with which they were regarded. He would not have a