Page:The English Peasant.djvu/33

 master, in the stocks three days and three nights with no sustenance but bread and water.

In former times the chief object had been to retain the labourer in servitude, but now he was free; the point was to extract from him as much labour as possible. Thus it is that the Tudor cry is always, "Ye are idle, ye are idle." "Go therefore now and work."

The Tudors gave themselves to the work of ruling with all the ardour of the founders of a new and successful business. Henry the Eighth is said himself to have written the Act relating to labour passed in the 27th year of his reign, as he probably did that of the 22nd. Sympathy with his vigorous efforts to extirpate "Ydelnesse, mother and rote of all vyces" from the land will be lessened when we reflect what a bitter tyranny we should feel it to be if we were bound down to a certain spot, compelled to pursue an occupation we disliked, and that, during the whole of our lifetime, on penalty of being tied to the cart's tail, whipped until our bodies were bloody, with the prospect of being hanged if we were so foolhardy as to be caught more than twice loitering in parishes other than our own.

But all the Acts made from the time of Richard II. downwards concerning the returning and departure of labourers from the hundred in which they dwelt were in force, so that any person so wilful as to assert his natural liberty came under the title of vagabond. The refusal of Parliament to pass a general Act of Emancipation, as advised by Richard the Second's Council, had led to hundreds, perhaps thousands defying the law, and being branded as criminals at the outset. The villein who fled from servitude was by that fact a "vagabond and a sturdy rogue." And our feeling concerning these Tudor laws will change considerably when we understand that they are simply such decrees as Pharaoh would have issued against the fugitive Israelites.

To compare the Tudor tyranny to that under which the Hebrews groaned in Egypt is to give an inadequate view of the case. That under which the poor Englishman suffered was far worse because it was practised under the sanction of the religion in which he believed. Never, perhaps, in all history has there been a race of monarchs who attempted so to mould the consciences of