68 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



human life was so callous that we can hardly conceive it ; there 

 was everything to harden, nothing to soften ; everywhere 

 oppression, greed, and fierceness.' l The truth seems to be that 

 the fifteenth century was a period of general distress ; the pro- 

 gress of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was checked by 

 the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War, and it is no 

 wonder that the fifteenth, aggravated by the Wars of the Roses, 

 was a period of ruin and decay in town and country. Many 

 parishes were exempted from the payment of taxes, because 

 ' there are no sheep or lambs at present ', or because the lands 

 were untilled, or murrain had destroyed the stock, or the lands 

 were waste. 2 Pestilence was as frequent as in the preceding 

 century ; in 1477 the plague swept off in four months three 

 times as many people as had perished during the Wars of the 

 Roses, and as the bulk of the working classes were agricultural 

 labourers it is no wonder that wages went up. We have a con- 

 vincing proof of the devastation wrought by the wars and 

 plagues of the time in the words of a statute of I42I, 3 which 

 says that at the making of an Act of 1340 there were sufficient 

 of proper men in each county to execute every office, ' but that 

 owing to pestilence and wars there are not now a sufficiency of 

 responsible persons to act as sheriffs, coroners, and escheators.' 

 It is a fact not sufficiently admitted that the depopulation of/ 

 the countryside at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the 

 sixteenth centuries was largely due to war and pestilence, rather 

 than enclosure. The roads, too, bad as they were, grew worse 

 with the decrease in the villein class, who had repaired them under 

 the supervision of the manorial courts ; while the impoverish- 

 ment of the monasteries, very marked some time before their 

 dissolution, prevented them from giving their accustomed care 

 and attention to them. The records of the time are full of riots, 

 which show that the labourer was not contented with his lot in 



1 Nineteenth Century, February, 1884. 



2 Denton, op. cit. 21 Sussex Archaeological Collections, \. 63. 



3 9 Hen. V, c. 5. 



