60 AGRICULTURE IN THE 



quarrel with his foolish nephew, who was called very unde- 

 servedly the good duke Humphrey, as many other people have 

 been rashly called good, has gained, and probably will keep, an 

 equally undeserved reprobation. 



The prudent husbandman of the fifteenth century devoted 

 himself to every branch of his art, in so far as the art was 

 known. He was thrifty, for apart from the incentives which he 

 had, and the prospect before him when peace was finally settled, 

 and indeed during the progress of the civil war, the risk of 

 securing an adequate livelihood or going to ruin made him 

 prudent. In the history of civilisation every one must notice 

 how necessary it has been to enforce civil contracts with rigour 

 in the early days of a nation's progress. There is no reason to 

 conclude that this was the outcome of an aristocratic age, for 

 the landowners were great borrowers, though they contrived, at 

 a very early date, to induce the doctrine of equity over mort- 

 gages, and to secure their own ends by a priority of distress. 

 But the remedy by distress was not so severe in its operation 

 as the result of an action for debt, if the action were successful, 

 and the debtor were unable to pay. He was imprisoned till he 

 could satisfy his creditor, or as Fitzherbert tells us, till he paid 

 or died. When society becomes safe enough to allow itself 

 to be humane, the rigour of the law of contract is relaxed, 

 and the lot of the debtor becomes easier. It becomes too easy, 

 when the machinery by which a trade fraud was exceptionally and 

 severely punished becomes an arrangement by which a fraudu- 

 lent debtor may escape with impunity. If any one is at the 

 pains to compare the old law of mercantile debt and bank- 

 ruptcy from its beginnings under Edward the First, and its 

 extension under Henry the Eighth, with its present develop- 

 ments, he will see how the misdeeds of the trader were liable to 

 far sharper surgery than those of the farmer, however severe 

 and unfair the law of distress may seem. 



The prudence and thrift of the husbandman who possessed 

 no land, and who could not therefore protect himself by a 

 mortgage, and the concurrent equity of redemption, were further 



