were mere receptacles for all uncleanness and lewdness; it is not true that the great revenues of the celibate clergy and the celibate recluses were squandered as a rule in riotous living. As a mere question of religion, Catholicism was as good as any creed which has ever found acceptance amongst men. Abuses doubtless there were, and most of them were bitterly attacked by members of the Church themselves; tyranny and persecution there were too in many forms; but the Church, as all know, was the one body in which equality of conditions was the rule from the start. There, at least, the man of ability, who outside her pale was forced to bow down before some Norman baron whose ruffianly ancestor had formed part of William's gang of marauders, could rise to a position in which this rough, unlettered swashbuckler grovelled before him. Sixtus V. was picked up out of the gutter; our Englishman, Nicholas Breakspear, Adrian IV., was a poor labourer's son; and these are but two instances, out of thousands, of distinguished ecclesiastics of humble birth.

However dangerous, also, the spiritual authority of the Church may appear to us, it was used for the most part, notwithstanding all the hideous corruptions of the papal court in the days of the Borgias and others, for the people and against the dominant class; and its influence, as history shows, was almost unbounded. Kings and barons alike bowed and trembled before it. The great art of the time, too, was, like all other great art, for public uses, and devoted to religion. But all this was trifling compared with the work done in the way of general education. The conventual establishments and the parish priests did far more than is commonly supposed in the direction of elementary teaching. But the higher education, the universities?

sign of more or less complete insanity. The idlers besides, at any rate, did not breed idlers, and their property went to the general church domain. The monkish ignorance and superstition of which we hear so much, the "drones" who slept away their lives in comfort and ease at the cost of other men's labour were no more ignorant and superstitious than a Church of England parson or a Wesleyan preacher, and were less dependent on the labour of their fellows. than Baptist orators or radical capitalists of to-day. Of the work which they did as chroniclers and copyists of manuscripts it is needless to speak. But to give an idea of their functions, let us take the evidence of Professor Thorold Rogers, a typical bourgeois economist, imbued with the bitterest hostility to the Catholic Church, and indeed to all forms of society or religion which do not fit in with huckster predominance. "The monasteries were the inns of the middle ages. They also fulfilled functions to a great extent identical with that of parochial relief. They were unpopular (?), and were therefore easy landlords. Some of them, as was asserted, were very important factors in the social economy of the time. They supplied students to the universities. The nuns were often leeches and midwives. The ditch round Godston nunnery is still full of the aristolochia which the nuns had introduced, because in the pharmacy of the middle ages it was supposed to assist women in childbirth. . . . . It was the interest of the monastic orders, whose property was often scattered, to keep the means of communication open; and as they were resident landlords who were consumers of their own market produce, it was their interest to keep the roads in good repair." This general employment which as landlords resident

"

"History of Agriculture and Prices in England,” vol. iv.

among the people they afforded, the improvements of the farms and of their own buildings which they carried out, the excellent work in road-making which they did a task specially necessary in those times-in addition to their action as public alms-givers, teachers, doctors, and nurses, show what useful people many of these much-abused monks and nuns really were. This will be made still more clearly manifest by the grave results which followed upon the suppression of the conventual establishments. That the church, as a whole, held its lands in great part in trust for the people cannot be disputed; and as the children of the people in great part formed the hierarchy of the Church, church property in land then meant something very different from church property in land now. To sigh for a restoration of Catholicism is as absurd as to mourn for yeomen and peasant proprietors, or to lament the destruction of the feudal system in its entirety; but the denunciations of Protestant historians and shopkeeper economists are quite as foolish on the other side.

To return to the more direct interests of the mass of the people. Already, even at the commencement of this period of prosperity and well-being for the many, efforts were being made to cut down the rate of wages in the interest of employers. The famous Statute of Labourers, 23 Edward III., was passed by the Parliament of landowners in order to reduce the "excessive" wages of the year 1349 to the amounts which had been paid before the great plague of the Black Death; another statute to a similar effect being passed a year later. In 1363 these enactments having proved vain, a further attempt was made against the prevailing high wages. This time Parliament struck at the high standard of life among the wage-earners, whether

profit; land was regarded as the means for raising food and stock, not as a capital to return so much rent or profit for money invested; and no one looked to international or even national markets as the great field for the disposal of his produce. Freedom of contract between employer and employed was then really possible to a great extent. But it was a period of small things in all respects, a period when in matters of business the individual counted for much when relations between landowner and tenant, between mastercraftsman and journeyman, between farmer and hind, were personal and not purely commercial, when rent was paid not as a result of bitter competition but in return for personal service on both sides, when tithes to the Church meant also payment for clerical aid and provision for the poor.

It was from this period that the sturdy character of Englishmen as a nation was developed, and the nature of the society was such as to encourage the growth of the finest qualities of self-reliance and independence among men. All the ideas of the mass of the people were different from those of our time, and many restrictions which seem to us harmful and injurious, as the stringent usury laws and the attempts to prevent free barter and sale, were meant to check the efforts of one portion of the community to get the better of the other. Granting that much existed that to us seems horribly rude, cruel, and disgusting, admitting that our ancestors suffered from plagues of a more deadly character than any known in modern times, the fact still remains that the common working Englishman of the fifteenth century fared better and was in every respect a more independent vigorous man than his descendant of any later age.

CHAPTER II.

THE IRON AGE.

THERE are few modern historians who do not speak of the sixteenth century as perhaps the most splendid period in the anuals of our country. The Glorious Reformation, as Henry VIII.'s strange ecclesiastical revolution is still called, the discovery of America, the grim rule of Philip and Mary, when Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were burnt at the stake, the long reign of good Queen Bess, with its defeat of the famous Spanish Armada, the wide extension of English piracy and commerce, and the formation of the noble literature which reached its highest embodiment in Shakspeare such are the chief events of an epoch which has so often been spoken of as one of true greatness, dignity, and glory. It was indeed a stirring time. A new world was being discovered in art and in science in Europe, as well as in actual existence on the other side of the Atlantic. Statesmen and thinkers, churchmen and courtiers, soldiers and navigators, poets and dramatists sweep past us in magnificent array. All is full of life and colour. Few groups stand out in bolder relief on the records of the past than the great men who gathered around the throne of the Tudors. Never before had so great an impulse been given to human enterprise and human imagination; never in England have nobler minds been ready to embrace great opportunities. From the point of view of the dominant class of our day