C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Social Life in the Fifteenth Century
By William Stubbs (18251901)
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Besides these influences, which without much affecting the local sympathies of the citizen class joined them on to the rank above them, must be considered the fact that two of the most exclusive and “professional” of modern professions were not in the Middle Ages professions at all. Every man was to some extent a soldier, and every man was to some extent a lawyer; for there was no distinctly military profession, and of lawyers only a very small and somewhat dignified number. Thus although the burgher might be a mere mercer, or a mere saddler, and have very indistinct notions of commerce beyond his own warehouse or workshop, he was trained in warlike exercises; and he could keep his own accounts, draw up his own briefs, and make his own will, with the aid of a scrivener or a chaplain who could supply an outline of form, with but little fear of transgressing the rules of the court of law or of probate. In this point he was like the baron,—liable to be called at very short notice to very different sorts of work. Finally, the townsman whose borough was not represented in Parliament, or did not enjoy such municipal organization as placed the whole administration in the hands of the inhabitants, was a fully qualified member of the county court of his shire, and shared, there and in the corresponding institutions, everything that gave a political coloring to the life of the country gentleman or the yeoman.
Many of the points here enumerated belong, it may be said, to the rich merchant or great burgher, rather than to the ordinary tradesman and craftsman. This is true; but it must be remembered always that there was no such gulf between the rich merchant and the ordinary craftsman in the town as existed between the country knight and the yeoman, or between the yeoman and the laborer. In the city it was merely the distinction of wealth; and the poorest apprentice might look forward to becoming a master of his craft, a member of the livery of his company, to a place in the council, an aldermanship, a mayoralty, the right of becoming an esquire for his life and leaving an honorable coat-of-arms for his children. The yeoman had no such straight road before him: he might improve his chances as they came; might lay field to field, might send his sons to war or to the universities: but for him also the shortest way to make one of them a gentleman was to send him to trade; and there even the villein might find liberty, and a new life that was not hopeless. But the yeoman, with fewer chances, had as a rule less ambition; possibly also more of that loyal feeling towards his nearest superior, which formed so marked a feature of mediæval country life. The townsman knew no superior to whose place he might not aspire: the yeoman was attached by ties of hereditary attachment to a great neighbor, whose superiority never occurred to him as a thing to be coveted or grudged. The factions of the town were class factions, and political or dynastic factions: the factions of the country were the factions of the lords and gentry. Once perhaps in a century there was a rising in the country: in every great town there was, every few years, something of a struggle, something of a crisis,—if not between capital and labor in the modern sense, at least between trade and craft, or craft and craft, or magistracy and commons, between excess of control and excess of license.
In town and country alike there existed another class of men, who, although possessing most of the other benefits of freedom, lay altogether outside political life. In the towns there were the artificers, and in the country the laborers, who lived from hand to mouth, and were to all intents and purposes “the poor who never cease out of the land.” There were the craftsmen who could or would never aspire to become masters, or to take up their freedom as citizens; and the cottagers who had no chance of acquiring a rood of ground to till and leave to their children: two classes alike keenly sensitive to all changes in the seasons and in the prices of the necessaries of life; very indifferently clad and housed; in good times well fed, but in bad times not fed at all. In some respects these classes differed from that which in the present day furnishes the bulk of the mass of pauperism. The evils which are commonly, however erroneously it may be, regarded as resulting from redundant population, had not in the Middle Ages the shape which they have taken in modern times. Except in the walled towns, and then only in exceptional times, there could have been no necessary overcrowding of houses. The very roughness and uncleanliness of the country laborer’s life was to some extent a safeguard: if he lived, as foreigners reported, like a hog, he did not fare or lodge worse than the beasts that he tended. In the towns, the restraints on building, which were absolutely necessary to keep the limited area of the streets open for traffic, prevented any great variation in the number of inhabited houses: for although in some great towns, like Oxford, there were considerable vacant spaces which were apt to become a sort of gipsy camping-ground for the waifs and strays of a mixed population, most of them were closely packed; the rich men would not dispense with their courts and gardens, and the very poor had to lodge outside the walls. In the country townships, again, there was no such liberty as has in more modern times been somewhat imprudently used, of building or not building cottage dwellings without due consideration of place or proportion to the demand for useful labor. Every manor had its constitution, and its recognized classes and number of holdings on the demesne and the freehold, the village and the waste; the common arable and the common pasture were a village property that warned off all interlopers and all superfluous competition. So strict were the barriers, that it seems impossible to suppose that any great increase of population ever presented itself as a fact to the mediæval economist; or if he thought of it at all, he must have regarded the recurrence of wars and pestilences as a providential arrangement for the readjustment of the conditions of his problem. As a fact, whatever the cause may have been, the population of England during the Middle Ages did not vary in anything like the proportion in which it has increased since the beginning of the last century; and there is no reason to think that any vast difference existed between the supply and demand of homes for the poor. Still there were many poor; if only the old, the diseased, the widows, and the orphans are to be counted in the number. There were too in England, as everywhere else, besides the absolutely helpless, whole classes of laborers and artisans whose earnings never furnished more than the mere requisites of life; and besides these, idle and worthless beggars, who preferred the freedom of vagrancy to the restrictions of ill-remunerated labor. All these classes were to be found in town and country alike.