xxxii INTRODUCTION 



heinous crime of killing the king's venison were made punishable 

 only by fine or imprisonment. Thus the nobles, ecclesiastics, 

 yeomanry and free peasantry were granted full liberty of sporting 

 upon their own territories, provided they abstained from the 

 king's forests. This applied to the winged, interdicted by King 

 John, as well as the four-footed creation, and implied lands en- 

 closed, improved and cultivated, while the ruminant and rodent 

 animals, other than domesticated flocks and herds, naturally 

 fled into woody and desert tracks, which were called forests. 



Town Charters granted under the reign of Henry II, 11.54-89, 

 which freed the towns from the direct influence of the barons, con- 

 ferred no Parliamentary privileges until Magna Charta, 1215, 

 which compelled the king to obtain the consent of the enfranchised 

 classes before levying taxes, and the extension of the Parliament 

 to include the Commons, or burgesses (voters in corporation 

 towns), in the first House of Commons in 1265. The lowest forrft 

 of franchise, however, was that of the members of close corpora- 

 tions or burgesses of towns, so that the great mass of the people 

 were practically serfs, without political or legal rights, whose duty 

 it was to render certain services to the lord of the manor in return 

 for the privilege of obtaining their own living from the land which 

 they were not allowed to leave. But as the towns grew up and 

 industry developed, merchants and artizans began to organise 

 themselves into guilds, practically "trade unions," in order to 

 further the particular interest involved, and because the feudal 

 system was found too local in character and unfitted for the ex- 

 pansion of the national life the growth of prosperity amongst 

 the people from both manufacture and agriculture. The richer 

 tenants, feeling the feudal obligation to render services in labour 

 to their lords was unbearable, began to commute them for money 

 payments, which they found more economical, and the poorer 

 began to earn their living by hiring themselves out as wage-paid 

 labourers to others, besides working on their own land. 



The GREAT PLAGUE, called on account of its terrible effects 

 the " Black Death," in 1348, destroyed nearly half of the popu- 

 lation, and there was a sudden and complete disorganisation of 

 industrial life. Labourers, because of scarcity, could command 

 high wages, and tenants obtain low rents from landlords, who 

 were anxious to let their land and who were compelled to remit, 

 the traditional services. Albeit, King and Parliament strove to 

 make the labourers take the same wages as before the Plague, 

 enacting dire penalties in the Statute of Labourers, 1350, and 

 the landowners did their best to tie down the labourers to the 

 soil. Free labourers and tenants who had commuted their services 

 for money payments, were attacked, lawyers employed as stewards 

 on manors, and their ingenuity exercised in trying to restore the 

 landowners' right to customary labour, while former exemptions 



