The Land Burdens of the Era. 247 



people of sucli places could not support them, witlidraw to 

 other towns within the hundred, or to the towns in which 

 they were born, together with what is practically a repetition 

 of the same in Henry VII, 's reign, are the only two other 

 allusions in the national statute book to the impotent poor up 

 to the reign of Edward VI. 



When we turn to culpable poverty, we are struck most with 

 the ingenuity by which our forefathers avoided the expenses 

 of imprisonment. A rogue or vagrant, in fact any one coming 

 under the category contained in the third degree of poverty 

 mentioned above, found but little mercy. He was quickly 

 branded with a V and turned over for a year's serfdom to 

 any one who would be troubled with him ; when any further 

 delinquency on his part was punished with chains, flogging, or 

 death. 



It is the more important to understand clearly the provision 

 made for the poor prior to the suppression of the monasteries, 

 so that the reader may be prepared to recognise the fact that 

 ever since the first Elizabethan Poor Law, the land has been 

 twice charged with the burden of the national poverty. 

 Clearly when the first tithe provisions were made there was 

 little property except land to tax ; but even at the period now 

 reached, there was growing up the great English middle class, 

 which in Elizabeth's reign had become one of the chief factors 

 in the kingdom. 



This leads the reader back to the events with which this 

 chapter commenced. The Black Death, though it failed at the 

 time to arouse the apathetic villein to any violent exhibition 

 of his discontent, had in the long run proved his friend, in that 

 it entirely altered the social and political economy of the land ; 

 and the Peasants' War, though it failed miserably, had opened 

 moderate men's eyes to the anachronism of slavery.^ Emanci- 

 pated serfs were flocking into the towns, there to form the 

 nucleus of that class which ultimately wrested the political 

 supremacy from the land by the repeal of the Corn Laws. 



* Professor Rogers holds that the insurrection, though suppressed, 

 scared the authorities into surrender. — Six Centuries of Work and 

 Wages, p. 271. 



