GENERAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 95 



due to the same causes, particularly since the circumstances 

 were so different. The Kent and Norfolk rising began almost 

 on the same day; can we ascribe such a concert to mere 

 accident ? We have seen from the unmistakeable evidence 

 of prices, from the rates of wages, and from the language of 

 rentals, that the condition of the peasantry was not that of 

 oppressed serfs, destitute of any rights in their property and 

 their labour, hopeless of improving their material or social 

 prospects, and goaded to a passionate vengeance by fury and 

 despair. 



Mr. Hallam has lamented the obscurity which hangs over 

 the social history of this as well as over other countries, and 

 compared it with the clearness with which he can trace genea- 

 logies, campaigns, and diplomatic action. We know but little 

 of the machinery by which social changes have been effected. 

 The stream of time, as Bacon says, has brought down to us 

 a mass of superficial rubbish, while the more important events 

 have been irretrievably submerged. 



We cannot doubt, however, that the principal means of 

 communication between the malcontents of widely separated 

 regions was found in the itinerant priests. These men, privi- 

 leged by their order, wandered about the country preaching, 

 and subsisting partly on the alms of their hearers, partly on 

 their gains as scribes. The accounts of which I have been 

 able to make so large a use are regularly engrossed by clerks, 

 who received what in these times would have been considered 

 handsome payment for the service, in the customary fee of 

 half a mark. That this work was performed by migratory 

 writers is, I think, clear from the facts that the character 

 of the medieval handwriting is so singularly uniform, although 

 accounts may be taken from very distant places, and also 

 that any change in the form of the letters is as sudden as it 

 is universal. It would be a great error to suppose that com- 

 munication between places was rare or difficult. Estates, as 

 I have elsewhere said, were very scattered, inspection was 

 general, inns were frequent, and even when these were 



