In spite of the high wages of agricultural labourers, the movement towards the towns noticed by Richard II continued.  The statute 7 Hen.  IV, c. 17, asserts that there is a great scarcity of labourers in husbandry and that gentlemen are much impoverished by the rate of wages; the cause of the scarcity lying in the fact that many people were becoming weavers,[181] and it therefore re-enacted 12 Ric.  II, c. 5, which ordained that no one who had been a servant in husbandry until 12 years old should be bound apprentice, and further enacted that no person with less than 20s. a year in land should be able to apprentice his son.  Like many other statutes of the time this seems to have been inoperative, for we find 23 Hen.  VI, c. 12 (1444), enacting that if a servant in husbandry purposed leaving his master he was to give him warning, and was obliged either to engage with a new one or continue with the old.  It also regulated the wages anew, those fixed showing a substantial increase since the statute of 1388.  By the year:—­

  A bailiff was to have L1 3s. 4d., and 5s. worth of clothes. 
  A chief hind, carter, or shepherd, L1, and 4s. worth of clothes. 
  A common servant in husbandry, 15s., and 3s. 4d. worth of clothes. 
  A woman servant, 10s., and 4s. worth of clothes. 
  All with meat and drink.

By the day, in harvest, wages were to be:—­

  A mower, with meat and drink, 4d.; without, 6d. 
  A reaper or carter, with meat and drink, 3d.; without, 5d. 
  A woman or labourer, with meat and drink, 2d.; without, 4d.

In the next reign the labourer’s dress was again regulated for him, and he was forbidden to wear any cloth exceeding 2s. a yard in price, nor any ‘close hosen’, apparently tight long stockings, nor any hosen at all which cost more than 14d.[182] Yeomen and those below them were forbidden to wear any bolsters or stuff of wool, cotton wadding, or other stuff in their doublets, but only lining; and somewhat gratuitously it was ordered that no one under the degree of a gentleman should wear pikes to his shoes.

In 1455 England’s Thirty Years’ War, the War of the Roses, began, and agriculture received another set back.  The view that the war was a mere faction fight between nobles and their retainers, while the rest of the country went about their business, is somewhat exaggerated.  No doubt, the mass of Englishmen, as in the civil war of the seventeenth century, preferred to ‘sit still’, as Clarendon said, but the business of many must have been very much upset.  The various armies were compelled to obtain their supplies from the country, and with the lawless habits of the times plundered friend and foe alike, as Cavalier and Roundhead did afterwards; and many a farmer must have seen all his stock driven off and his grain seized to feed the combatants.  For instance, it was said before the battle called Easter Day Field that all the tenants of Abbot’s Ripton in Huntingdonshire were copyholders of the