ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN ENGLAND, &C. 7 1 



fifteenth century is proved, if we had no other means of proof, 

 by the large number of handsome fifteenth-century churches 

 which invite the attention of every one who travels through 

 that county. 



I have already adverted to the fact, that some of the 

 incidents of villenage lingered till the conclusion of the 

 fifteenth century, and are treated of as existing facts in 

 Fitzherbert's other work on the duties of a surveyor, to which 

 I shall have presently to call my reader's attention, and are 

 even traceable to the age of Elizabeth 1 . But these liabilities 

 had shrunk to a mere unit; and from the curious award on 

 behalf of the base tenants of the manor of Cheltenham on the 

 one side, and the abbess of Sion on the other, it is clear that 

 the lords of manors found it difficult, or even impossible to 

 insist on those rights, which law books, with their customary 

 pedantry, spoke of as still valid 2 . The best proof of the material 

 progress made by the working classes is to be found in the 

 wages of labour, as interpreted by the price of the necessaries 

 of life ; but no small evidence is gathered from the discontent 

 of employers, and the efforts which they made through the 

 legislature to keep down the rate of wages. For cheap as 

 manual labour seems in the later middle ages, it was the 

 costliest element in production ; whereas in our time, the 

 costliest element is the labour of superintendence, the wages 

 of the intermediary, the so-called profits of capital, whether it 

 be the capital of the manufacturer or that of the dealer. 



At the beginning of Henry the Fourth's reign, Parliament 

 petitions the king to the effect that no child shall be ap- 

 prenticed to a trade or mystery, unless his parents have forty 

 shillings clear in lands, or forty pounds' worth of goods. It 

 may, I think, be reasonably inferred that at this time these 

 values were relative, and that forty pounds in money would 

 purchase land worth forty shillings a year. In less than half a 

 century, land in Norfolk, as will be seen from the valuation of 

 Lord Cromwell's estate, was worth twenty years' purchase. 



1 Rymer's Foedera, v. xv. p. 371. 2 Vol. Hi. p. 739. 



