CHAPTER VII 

 COUNTRY LIFE IN THE TIME OF THE STUARTS 



^DURING the XVI Ith century the life of the country 

 continued in its gradual change from the old style to the 

 new. On the land, the open fields culti- 

 Continuation vatec j ty t h e peasant farmers of the old 

 change. school still predominated, whilst the en- 



closed fields were, as a rule, in the hands 

 of more enterprising men, who employed capital and 

 farmed the land on a larger scale. But the essential 

 mediaeval features of the life had died out. Serfdom 

 had gone : the people were free. The lord of the manor, 

 in so far as he was a governor of his estate, also dis- 

 appeared as the feudal and military conditions died out 

 or were put an end to by legislation. He was replaced 

 by the squire, who ruled his village, so far as he did 

 rule it, by force of his position as justice of the peace. 

 Moreover, the character of the landholding population 

 was changing. A good deal of the land had, it should 

 be observed, been bought up by farmers, and as a 

 result it appears that in this century the peasant 

 proprietors and other occupying owners were more 

 numerous than they had been before or have been 

 since. These men flourished and formed the backbone 

 of the important 'yeoman' class. Moreover, large 

 buyers belonging to a different class continued to come 



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