28 THE GREAT PLAGUE AND ITS RESULTS II 



and of the Statute of Labourers were great. ' By them 

 the old manorial system based on custom was weakened, 

 and the relation of employer to employee took the place 

 of lord and villein. The Statute of Labourers introduced 

 the agents of the king, and the law entered into the 

 sacred precincts of the manor/ A vagrant villein could 

 be forced to work by statute, and his lord could not 

 reclaim him till the end of his labour contract, and infinite 

 collisions of rights based on the manorial customs and those 

 given by statute arose. 1 



Yet even these effects, both direct and indirect, would not 

 probably have been permanent had the economic conditions 

 of the country remained the same. In all probability the 

 lords would in that case again have found labourers who 

 would pay labour services for their lands, although the 

 amount of service might have been reduced, and villeinage 

 itself could not be exactly re-established. 2 The economic 

 arrangements of the manor might have been restored, and 

 the poor man might not have severed his connexion with 

 the land. That this is not a wild supposition is surely 

 shown by the fact that in other countries like France and 

 Germany, which suffered from the plague apparently as 

 heavily as did England, the manorial system was not 

 broken up, that villeinage continued till much later, and 

 that the poor man, however miserable his condition may 

 have been, was not at least divorced from the soil. 



That in this respect England differed is due primarily 

 to that industrial revolution caused by the transition from 

 an agricultural to a trading and manufacturing country) 

 which had already begun and was in the future to have 

 such a profound effect upon her social fabric. 



1 Of. Transactions Royal Hist. Soc. xvii. 252. Quoting from Pre- 

 trushevsky, Wat Tyler's Rebellion. 



2 A villein tenure when it had once lapsed to the lord could not be 

 revived, according to the strict legal theory. 



