Z\K niM^ble Bgc0. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 



THE LAXD BURDENS OF THE ERA. 



The Black Death appeared on August 1st, 1318, in Dorsetshire, 

 reached London the following November, and within a year 

 had exterminated one-third of the entire population. Villeins 

 were no longer able to perform their boon service, farms were 

 let at half their usual rents, sheep and cattle stalked gaunt and 

 hungry through the corn-fields, crops rotted on the ground, 

 lands went out of cultivation, provisions and labour grew 

 scarcer and scarcer, starvation added its list of victims to the 

 long deathroll of pestilence, and the occupiers of the soil la^'' 

 down in thousands to die in those ditches and furrows which 

 their own hands had fashioned. 



Notwithstanding all this, the people would have suffered 

 and perished without a murmur. Divided into two antago- 

 nistic classes of Labour and Capital as the landed interest had 

 now become, and harshly and arbitrarily as the former had 

 been treated by the latter, there were as yet no angry storm 

 mutterings to direct men's eyes to a lowering horizon. 



As long as the Commons were glutted with the pride of 

 Edward's foreign triumphs, they kept quiet and submitted to 

 every preposterous vagary of legislation affecting their food, 

 labour, pastimes, and clothing. Englishmen, alas, have deteri- 

 orated since those days when doughty deeds stirred the heart 

 of even the serf to its very depths, and it is to be feared that 

 the Tower guns might roar " Victory " many a day before the 

 more educated, but less patriotic, nineteenth-century rustic 

 forgot his own woes in the thought of his country's triumph. 



238 



