the rough black bread which was their main food.  The low wet grounds were still undrained, and the number of cases of eye-disease which we find in the legends of miraculous cures point to the prevalence of ophthalmia brought on by damp and low living, as the army of lepers points to the filth and misery of the poor .The “common fields” and pastures of the villages must have lain on the higher grounds which were not mere swamps during half the year.  But to these a dry season brought ruin.  In time of drought the cattle had to be driven five or six miles to find water in the well or pool which served for the whole district.  If by any chance disease broke out, the wearied beasts that met at the watering or drank of the tainted pool carried it far and wide, and plague soon raged from end to end of the country.  Even in the days of Henry VIII. shrewd observers noted that the new grazing farms, where the cattle were better fed and kept separate, alone escaped these ravages, and that it was these farms whence came the only meat to be found in the country through the long winter months or in time of murrain.  This purpose was doubtless served earlier by the great monastic estates, but means of transport scarcely existed; each district had to live on its own resources, and vast tracts of country were with every unfavourable season stricken by hunger and by the plague and famine fever that followed it.

One source of later misery was indeed unknown.  The war of classes had not yet begun.  The lawyers had not been at work hardening and defining vague traditions, and legally the position of the serf was far better than it was a hundred years later.  The feudal system still preserved relations between the lord and his dependents, which were more easy and familiar than anything we know.  The lord of the manor had not begun to encroach on the privileges or the “common” rights of the tenant, nor had the merchant guilds of the towns attacked the liberties of the craftsmen and lesser folk.  For a century to come the battle for lands or rights was mainly waged between the lord or the men of one township or manor with the men of a neighbouring township or manor; and it was not till these had fairly ended their quarrel that lords and burghers turned to fight against the liberties and privileges of serfs and craftsmen.  There are indications, on the other hand, that one effect of the new administration of justice, as it told on the poor, began early to show itself in the growth of an “outlaw” class.  Crimes of violence were surprisingly common.  Dead bodies were found in the wood, in the field, in the fold, in the barn.  In an extraordinary number of cases the judges’ records of a little later time tell of houses broken into by night and robbed, and every living thing within them slain, and no clue was ever found to the plunderers.  There were stories in Henry’s days of a new crime-of men wearing religious dress who joined themselves to wayfarers, and in such a case the traveller was never seen again