The historian says that at that time the most numerous class in England were the “villains.”  This need not surprise us, when we remember that it was as much as a man’s life was worth to be anything else.

There were also twenty-five thousand serfs.  A serf was required to be at hand night or day when the baron needed some one to kick.  He was generally attached to the realty, like a hornet’s nest, but not necessary to it.

In the following chapter knighthood and the early hardware trade will be touched upon.

[Illustration:  “IN HOC SIGNO VINCES.”]

CHAPTER X.

THE AGE OF CHIVALRY:  LIGHT DISSERTATION ON THE KNIGHTS-ERRANT, MAIDS, FOOLS, PRELATES, AND OTHER NOTORIOUS CHARACTERS OF THAT PERIOD.

The age of chivalry, which yielded such good material to the poet and romancer, was no doubt essential to the growth of civilization, but it must have been an unhappy period for legitimate business.  How could trade, commerce, or even the professions, arts, or sciences, flourish while the entire population spread itself over the bleaching-boards, day after day, to watch the process of “jousting,” while the corn was “in the grass,” and everybody’s notes went to protest?

Then came the days of knight-errantry, when parties in malleable-iron clothing and shirts of mail—­which were worn without change—­rode up and down the country seeking for maids in distress.  A pretty maid in those days who lived on the main road could put on her riding-habit, go to the window up-stairs, shed a tear, wave her kerchief in the air, and in half an hour have the front lawn full of knights-errant tramping over the peony beds and castor-oil plants.

[Illustration:  A PRETTY MAID IN THOSE DAYS.]

In this way a new rescuer from day to day during the “errant” season might be expected.  Scarcely would the fair maid reach her destination and get her wraps hung up, when a rattle of gravel on the window would attract her attention, and outside she would see, with swelling heart, another knight-errant, who crooked his Russia-iron elbow and murmured, “Miss, may I have the pleasure of this escape with you?”

“But I do not recognize you, sir,” she would straightway make reply; and well she might, for, with his steel-shod countenance and corrugated-iron clothes, he was generally so thoroughly incog. that his crest, on a new shield freshly painted and grained and bearing a motto, was his only introduction.  Imagine a sweet girl, who for years had been under the eagle eye of a middle-weight chaperon, suddenly espying in the moonlight a disguised man under the window on horseback, in the act of asking her to join him for a few weeks at his shooting-box in the swamp.  Then, if you please, imagine her asking for his card, whereupon he exposes the side of his new tin shield, on which is painted in large Old English letters a Latin motto meaning, “It is the early bird that catches the worm,” with bird rampant, worm couchant on a field uncultivated.