RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 129 



on the side of the poor is supported by ample 

 testimony from our country parishes. 



The clergy, with rare and noble exceptions, 

 like Bishop Latimer and Bernard Gilpin, 

 threw in their lot with the wealthy and power- 

 ful men who through the Enclosures period 

 gradually robbed the peasants of their land. 

 In earlier centuries, while the poor farmers and 

 serfs were outraged, pillaged, branded, slaugh- 

 tered by foreign mercenaries, hung in batches 

 from steeples and gallows and atrociously 

 mutilated, the Church of Christ looked on, 

 almost in silence. When hundreds of men 

 and boys were banished for ever from England 

 under the cruel sentences of the " Swing Riots " 

 period the cathedral clergy at Winchester 

 refused to sign the great petition for a merciful 

 mitigation of these inhuman penalties. The 

 traditional memories of this cruel past dimly 

 persist in our villages of to-day, and were 

 exemplified afresh when Joseph Arch did his 

 best to instil some measure of hope in the 

 breasts of the labourers. This whole-hearted 

 reformer succeeded in raising wages by 2/- a 

 week, but he accomplished this in the teeth of 

 bitter opposition, not only from farmers and 

 landlords, but from the parochial clergy I 

 Later on measures like the Small Holdings Act, 

 the Old- Age Pensions Act, the Insurance Act 



