86 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the estate in searcli 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 accom- 

 plished, 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 w^hich 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 employ- 

 ment. 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 land- 

 owners and wealthier craftsmen were startled and terrified by " what 

 seemed in their age the extravagant demands of the new labor classes.'* 



