FORMATION OF NEW CLASSES 49 



scale ; the labourer, if the possession of land alone measured his 

 position in society, had fallen. Mediaeval organisations of trade 

 were undergoing a similar transformation. Guilds, like village 

 farms, had maintained a certain equality of wealth and position 

 among the master craftsmen, and apprentices and journeymen not 

 only looked to become masters themselves, but shared in the 

 advantages of membership of the organised crafts. At the close 

 of the fifteenth century, the wealthier liveried masters began, like 

 capitalist tenant-farmers, to form a higher rank within the guild, 

 and to control and administer its policy. Below them in the scale 

 a new class was coming into existence. Independent journeymen 

 were increasing in number hired artisans who derived no benefits 

 from the guilds, enjoyed no prospect of becoming master-craftsmen, 

 and depended for their livelihood, like the free labourer divorced 

 from the soil, on employment and wages. For the rising classes, 

 the fifteenth century may have been a period of prosperity ; for 

 the classes which were in some respects falling, it was probably 

 a time of adversity. Only thus can the rose-coloured descriptions 

 of writers like Sir John Fortescue be reconciled with the darker 

 accounts which might be put together from other sources. It is 

 not in the gay holiday scenes of a Chaucer, but in the grimly realistic 

 pictures of a Langland that the features of rural life are most truly 

 painted. 



Leaseholders and copyholders in separate occupation of farms 

 had increased rapidly in number as well as in importance. Their 

 ranks were swollen by the tenants of the reclaimed wastes, by those 

 among whom the demesne was now divided, and by holders of the 

 " stock and land " leases who had saved sufficient capital to stand 

 on their own feet ; by men of capacity and enterprise, who realised 

 the superior advantages of a separate holding, however small ; by 

 hundreds of the old customary tenants, who found that the rents 

 for which their personal services had been commuted were higher 

 than the competitive money rents which land could command when 

 the supply was excessive. The terms for which leases ran grew 

 longer. They advanced from a year to five years, then to seven 

 years, then to ten years, then to twenty- one, then to lives, and often 

 to fee farm. The increasingly prolonged term illustrates the greater 

 confidence in the stability of the government. It also indicates, 

 on the part of the farmer, a growing sense of the legal security 

 which leases afforded ; on the part of landowners, the wish to retain 



P 



