By Sir Charles Robhouse, Bart. 



209 



living, bad language, gossipping, gambling, tippling, breaking 

 bounds, stealing wood, forfeitures, neglecting Church, and so forth. 

 Perhaps, too, we had onr Sunday closing of ale-houses, and our 

 prohibitions of nuisances. 



In fact we were very much a law unto ourselves, but the effect of 

 centralization has changed all this. We still till the soil ; we have* 

 in addition, the f c irritamenta malorum " in the dug-up treasures of 

 our stone quarries ; we have a parson, a carpenter, and a blacksmith, 

 but jurisdiction we have none left ; and for almost every want of 

 daily life we have to resort to the nearest town. And so, as a rule, 

 the population of our rural parishes is everywhere decreasing, and 

 that of our towns increasing. Perhaps, unless new industries or 

 new systems of old industries spring up, the time may come when 

 the parish may be represented by the manor house,, when all its 

 wants may be supplied entirely from the nearest town, and when 

 the parson and the squire may have the parish Church to them- 

 selves. Meantime I haste to record what remains of our population, 

 and I append to it a list of names of families gone and existing. 

 Appendix E. 



Condition of our Villagers. 



According to the return made in 1535, our village was then made 

 up of agricultural laborers only, .and it is not until the year 1700 

 that I find in our registers any specific mention of occupations or 

 trades of any kind, but inasmuch as in those days the son usually 

 followed the occupation of the father, no doubt we had other occu- 

 pations beside that of the agricultural laborer in vogue in our parish 

 long before the year 1700. This, indeed, would follow, ex necessitate 

 rei. ( 



But I imagine that the condition of a non-agricultural laborer in 

 a rural parish would not, in the first instance at least, be any better 

 than that of the agricultural laborer, and that so Harrison's des- 

 cription of the latter would apply equally to the former. 



The agricultural laborer, he says, as he now is, first began to 

 appear towards the close of the sixteenth century, and this was his 

 then condition : — he had a daily wage of 4 d. (equal to 20<s. of our 



