10 INTRODUCTORY. 



facts as may be collected, and such inferences as may be made 

 from them, will be relative to the social progress, and occa- 

 sionally to the social retrogression, of the people. 



We shall find that, commencing with a period in which 

 population was, when compared with the rate of production, 

 large, the nation was affected by great scarcity in the begin- 

 ning, and unexampled mortality at the middle, of the fourteenth 

 century. The effects of the former visitation were transient, 

 of the latter permanent, and, as might be expected on grounds 

 of antecedent probability, the condition of the masses of the 

 community was greatly elevated by the calamity of the plague. 

 With these changes the present volumes close, at an epoch 

 in which the feudal aristocracy was seriously embarrassed, and 

 the yeomanry was acquiring strength and importance. 



If I may be permitted to anticipate the facts of the centu- 

 ries which follow those which I have now to lay before my 

 reader, it may be stated, that the husbandman reaped the 

 harvest of the internecine struggle which commenced in the 

 middle of the fifteenth century. The great war of succession 

 almost destroyed the feudal aristocracy, by its expences, its 

 forfeitures, its proscriptions. It was carried on by the barons; 

 for the crown, the possession of which was the ostensible ob- 

 ject of the conflict, was utterly impoverished. After this 

 suicide of the aristocracy, the crown became all powerful, 

 and created a new nobility on the ruins of the church. By 

 causes wholly different from those which ruled before, the 

 mass of the people were losers by the Reformation. They 

 recovered themselves slightly in the seventeenth century, and 

 had a golden age during the first half of the eighteenth. But 

 within the time of our fathers they have been depressed again, 

 and the peasant has again become a serf, and the yeoman 

 has disappeared in the absorption of nearly all the land of 

 England by a small number of great proprietors. 



