FREE LABOUR AND CONTRACT. 501 



were hanged wholesale, or were seized, and by penal enact 

 ments forced to serve at fixed rates of wages. This treatment 

 of drifting beggars who had, in fact, been deprived of the 

 means of living by those above them, went, in the time of 

 Edward YI, to the extent of branding them with Y or S, as 

 vagrants or slaves. Meanwhile, by successive steps each 

 locality was made responsible for the maintenance of its 

 poor. That is to say, there revived in a qualified way the 

 attachment of men to the soil, and the claim to a share 

 in the produce of the soil. Though nominally free, the 

 labourer was coerced not only by restraints on his locomo 

 tion, and by the obligation to accept specified sums for his 

 labour, but by the limitation of his liberty to labour. For 

 he could not choose his occupation; as is shown by a law 

 which enabled a disbanded soldier to work at what he liked. 

 But the many limitations on freedom in those days can 

 not be appreciated until we have pictured to ourselves the 

 social regime then passing away by slow steps. The groups 

 out of which large societies have been compounded, are 

 now so completely amalgamated that we have difficulty 

 in imagining the degree of discreteness which once existed, 

 and the traits which resulted from separateness of parts. 

 The original antagonisms long survived in such ways that 

 each simple group defended itself against other simple 

 groups, and each compound group against other compound 

 groups. Be it in the Highland clan, the Irish sept, the 

 Welsh tyddin, or the old English mark, we see everywhere 

 within the larger societies held together by a central govern 

 ment, these smaller societies held together originally by 

 bonds of blood, and afterwards by other bonds mixed with 

 them. Everywhere there was a reciprocal protection of the 

 members by the group and restraint by the group of its 

 members: the result being that nowhere was the individual 

 really free. Athelstan, when ordering concerning &quot; a lord- 

 less man &quot; that they should &quot; find him a lord in the folk- 

 moot,&quot; did but give one of its forms to the generalusage ; and 



