72 ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN ENGLAND, 



The object of this petition, which Henry granted in a statute 

 to be commented on hereafter, was to keep down the wages of 

 farm hands, who in the general distribution of manufactures 

 were able to follow a handicraft without being necessarily 

 enrolled among the guild fellows of a corporate town. This 

 must have been particularly the case in the eastern counties 

 and especially in Norfolk, where villages which never obtained 

 municipal privileges, though some acquired representation in 

 Parliament, were distinguished for an abundant population 

 and thriving manufactures. Now such a market for labour 

 would be sure to occasion a comparative scarcity of farm 

 hands ; and it was therefore the interest of the landowners to 

 check the extension of apprenticeship from the point of view 

 of low labour prices, and it was the interest of the chartered 

 towns to abet them from the point of view of high prices for 

 manufactured goods, the profit of which would be lowered if 

 a wider range of artisans were engaged in their production, 

 especially of artisans who, by living in upland, were free from 

 the burdens imposed on town folk in their double capacity of 

 burghers and members of a guild l . 



The general spread of Lollardy, about which all the theo- 

 logians of the age complain, was at once the cause and the 

 effect of progressive opulence. It cannot be by accident that 

 all the wealthiest parts of Europe, one district only excepted, 

 and that for very sufficient reasons, were suspected, during 

 the middle ages, of theological nonconformity. Before the 

 campaigns of Simon de Montfort, in the first half of the 

 thirteenth century, Provence was the garden and workshop of 

 Europe. The sturdiest advocates of the Reformation were 

 the burghers of the Low Countries, and half this region was 

 rendered desolate in the sixteenth century by the Spanish in- 

 heritors of the house of Burgundy, while the other half brought 



1 My reader will see, on looking at the payments made to the burgesses representing 

 Norwich in Parliament for wages, that parliamentary representation was a matter of 

 considerable cost to the borough, and that to detain a Parliament long over business was 

 a very effectual spur towards making a Parliamentary grant. See Gascoigne, Liber Veri- 

 tatum, p. 189 ; Hollinshed, 531 ; Parl. Hist. ii. 106. 



