DURING THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 105 



of a nation, the merely economical consequences of plagues are 

 far more marked and lasting than those of famines. Famine, 

 in the strict sense of the word, has rarely occurred in England, 

 owing to the practice which the inhabitants of this island have 

 persistently maintained of living mainly on the dearest kind 

 of corn. Every writer during the fifteenth and sixteenth 

 centuries, who comments on the habits of English life, adverts 

 to the profuseness of their diet, and the uncleanliness of their 

 habits. The floor of an ordinary Englishman's house, as de- 

 scribed in the letters of Erasmus, was immeasurably and in- 

 conceivably filthy, in London for many a year after these 

 events, filthier than elsewhere, and the streets and open ditches 

 of the city were even more polluted and noisome J . But it 

 should be remembered that, notwithstanding these drawbacks, 

 the people lived abundantly, and except when extraordinary 

 scarcity occurred, regularly on the best provisions which could 

 be procured. The contracts which Elizabeth makes for the 

 maintenance of her dockyard workmen are, as may be seen 

 from examining the prices paid for labour on royal works, 

 liberal and even bountiful. 



As the agriculturist throve in the fifteenth century, so the 

 mechanic and the artisan was also prosperous. This was the 

 age in which the property of the guilds was generally acquired. 

 The well-to-do burgher constantly devised land and tene- 

 ments to his guild, on condition that mass should be said 

 for him yearly on his obit, and the mass priest be paid, the 

 residue, if any, being devoted to the general purposes of the 

 guild, to the feast, or to the almshouse in which the widow 

 or worn out and impoverished trader was housed, or the 

 school in which the orphans of the guild were reared and 

 taught. 



It is not easy to trace the localities in which the various 

 textile industries were carried out. But Bristol linen is quoted 



1 The reader may note that in the Oxford Colleges, New and All Souls', one lotrix 

 does all the washing, and her remuneration at the latter society does not seem to denote 

 very hard work. 



