DISTRESS IN RURAL DISTRICTS 73 



who had eked out their harvest earnings by the produce of the 

 live-stock which they maintained on the commons, were ruined ; 

 servants in husbandry and labourers for weekly wages were thrown 

 out of work. The high prices of necessaries, combined with the loss 

 of commons, the ravages of the murrain, and a succession of dry 

 summers, had driven many small cultivators over the narrow 

 border-line which separated them from starvation. Rents rose 

 exorbitantly till, for farmers at rack-rent, existence became a 

 misery. There was an ominous growth of middlemen, " lease- 

 mongers, who take groundes by lease to the entente to lette them 

 againe for double and tripple the rente," l and battened on the 

 land-hunger of the people. Legislators were bewildered by currency 

 questions, and violent changes in the standard purity of the gold 

 and silver coinage aggravated the distress by raising or lowering 

 prices. As gold and silver poured into the Old World from America, /^^ 

 prices rose throughout Europe. The rise was in England attributed <^// 

 to every cause other than the cheapening of the precious metals. 

 While from one or the other of these causes the purchasing power 

 of wages rapidly diminished, their nominal value remained station- 

 ary, and labourers were forced to accept the statutory rates. 



It was on those agriculturists who were unwilling or unable to 

 adapt themselves to the tunes that the blow fell with the greatest 

 severity. The Husbandman in the Compendious Examination knew 

 several of his neighbours who had " turned ether part or all theire 

 arable grounde into pasture, and therby have wexed verie Rich 

 men." These were the men of whom Harrison and Sir Thomas 

 Smith speak as " coming to such wealth that they are able and 

 do daily buy lands of unthrifty gentlemen and make . . . their 

 sons gentlemen." But the Husbandman himself, having " enclosed 

 litle or nothinge of my grownd, could never be able to make up 

 my lorde's rent, weare it not for a litle brede of neate, shepe, swine, 

 gese and hens." Hence it is that, while Latimer laments the 

 degradation of small yeomen who, like his father, had farms of 

 " three to four pounds a year at the uttermost," Harrison describes 

 the rise of substantial farmers and of the middle classes, and their 

 improved standard of living. The distribution of wealth was * 

 becoming more and more unequal ; the problem of poverty was 

 acquiring a new significance. In the growing struggle for existence 



1 Robert Crowley's Way to Wealth (1550). See also his Epigrams "of 

 Leasemongars " and " of Rent raysers." 



