Page:The English Peasant.djvu/31

 other articles in their houses were of wool, and that in great store. And if the sumptuary law of 1464 was not a malicious satire, the labourer indulged in broadcloth of which the yard sometimes reached the price of two shillings.

It is clear that the Statute of Labourers was frequently violated, and that the labourer's actual income was even better than the prices just quoted would suggest. Engaged by the year, and frequently living on the farm, he must often have saved money enough to become a husbandman himself. This position, though it involved harder living than that of the labourer, was the most happy in the realm. Too lowly to be troubled by the storms of jealousy which raged over the surface of society, he ate the bread of independence, and lived surrounded by such an England as Chaucer depicts.

A revolution had clearly taken place, a revolution which was completed by the Civil Wars in which this century closed, and which gave the coup de grace to feudalism. For the Day of Judgment had come for the old slave-holding baronage of Norman and Angevin England. In the wars of the Roses it committed the happy dispatch; and at the accession of Henry VII. the House of Lords had been reduced to twenty-eight members.

How envenomed the English barons were against each other, we may learn from what Stow tells us of the battle of Northampton, "The earls of March and Warwicke let crie through the field that no man should lay hand upon the king, ne on the common people, but on the lordes, knights, and esquires." As the war grew this could not be maintained. After the battle of Towton it is said that nearly 40,000 men lay dead on the field. These were not labouring men, but the retainers of the barons, a class of beings who were to the country what the vulture was to Prometheus. Towton and the Tudors cleared the air of these hawks and kites.