These humble people have their idealisms. They produce martyrs for the new religion and for the old, Lollards who suffer persecution for upholding the Wycliffite tradition in the quiet villages of Buckinghamshire, Catholics who follow Aske in that wonderful movement of northern England, the last of the crusades, in 1536, or fall in Devonshire thirteen years later before the artillery of Herbert. Nor are they altogether cut off from the springs of learning. For at the beginning of the sixteenth century the upper classes have not yet begun to covet education for themselves sufficiently to withhold it from the poor. Bequests[260] show that the sons of well-to-do peasants may have been among those godly yeomanry whom Latimer[261] described as once, in happier social conditions than those amid which he preached, frequenting the older universities, and the records of some sixteenth century grammar-schools tell a similar story. Among the first twenty-two names on the register of Repton[262] there are five gentlemen, four husbandmen, nine yeomen, two websters or weavers, a carpenter, and a tanner.
But by that time much had changed, and for seventy years before these documents begin the peasantry in many parts of England had had sterner things to think of than the schooling of their children.[Next Chapter]
FOOTNOTES
[208] Fortescue on the Governance of England (Plummer), chapter xii.: “But oure commons be riche, and therefore thai give to thair kynge, at somme times quinsimes and dessimes, and ofte tymes other grate subsidies.”
[209] Russell, Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 48 foll.; see passage quoted below, pp. [335–337]. For the sentences immediately following, see Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, p. 233: “A serf ... is said to have left at his death in 1435 chattels estimated at 3000 marks or £2000.” Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls, int. xxix.; Davenport, History of a Norfolk Manor, p. 53.
[210] Statute of Artificers, 5 Eliz. c. 4.
[211] See below, pp. [277–279], and Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 784, pp. 322–323. Presentment by the grand jury, Worcestershire, 1661, April 23: “We desire that servants' wages may be rated according to the statute, for we find the unreasonableness of servants' wages a great grievance, so that the servants are grown so proud and idle that the master cannot be known from the servant except it be because the servant wears better clothes than his master. We desire that the statute for setting poor men’s children to apprenticeship be more duly observed, for we find the usual course is that if any are apprenticed it is to some paltry trade, and when they have served their apprenticeship they are not able to live by their trades, whereby not being bred to labour they are not fit for husbandry. We therefore desire that such children may be set to husbandry for the benefit of tillage and the good of the Commonwealth.” See also Britannia Languens (1680) for remarks on the scarcity of labour even at the end of the seventeenth century.
[212] R.O. Duchy of Lancaster, Special Commissions, No. 398.
[213] See Dekker’s The Witch of Edmonton. I have ventured to assume that in this play “yeoman” is used in its wide non-technical sense.
[214] See e.g. Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 5567, pp. 106–107, and below, pp. [159–162].