BEFORE AND AFTER THE PLAGUE. 669 



cient capital for a lease of the manor farm. And indeed, had 

 most of the inhabitants of the villages been sunk in poverty, 

 had they been the serfs of the law books, bondsmen destitute 

 of property and rights, it might have been possible to have 

 revived the ancient system as soon as the void made by the 

 Plague had been filled up, by the force of those statutes which 

 attempted to rigidly define the rates of labour. But the facts 

 of society at that time do not countenance such an hypothesis. 

 The greater part of the upland folk were in a condition of 

 comparative independence; and we may be sure that not only 

 were the numbers of such labourers as, surviving the Plague, 

 were ready to take service with landowners, considerably dimi- 

 nished, but the surviving members of those families who held 

 parcels of land by suit and service must have found their own 

 material prospects considerably bettered by succession to the 

 tenements of their deceased relatives. 



The reader will observe from the court rolls of Cuxham and 

 Ibstone, printed in the second volume, pp. 653-659, how land 

 was distributed in those manors, and how few were the inha- / 

 bitants who did not possess the means of support from labour 

 employed on their own land. Such a distribution was by no 

 means exceptional, but might be paralleled out of many other 

 rentals of the same character and epoch. Tenants of this kind 

 would be very likely to exhibit considerable independence, 

 would be able to offer a very vigorous and sustained resistance 

 to any attempts made to coerce their labour, might combine 

 together, and even subscribe funds for purposes of mutual 

 defence and protection, in short, might do all those things 

 which are reported to have been done by the villains as a 

 preparation to their insurrection. Nor can we wonder, even 

 after the uprising was put down, that these small proprietors 

 really vindicated all the claims which they put forward, that 

 they began to assume an interest in the management of 

 public affairs, that they took advantage of the liberal statute 

 of Henry the Fourth and crowded tumultuously to the elec- 

 tions, that they became thoroughly saturated with those tenets 



