sow:  “Upon the 23rd of August, the high altar of Christ Church in Oxford was trimly decked up after the popish manner and about the middest of evensong, a sow cometh into the quire, and pulled all to the ground; for which heinous fact, it is said she was afterwards beheaded; but to that I am not privy.”  Think of the condition of Oxford when pigs went to mass!  Four years after this there was a sickness in England, of which a third part of the people did taste, and many clergymen, who had prayed not to live after the death of Queen Mary, had their desire, the Lord hearing their prayer, says Harrison, “and intending thereby to give his church a breathing time.”

There were four classes in England—­gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and artificers or laborers.  Besides the nobles, any one can call himself a gentleman who can live without work and buy a coat of arms—­though some of them “bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain.”  The complaint of sending abroad youth to be educated is an old one; Harrison says the sons of gentlemen went into Italy, and brought nothing home but mere atheism, infidelity, vicious conversation, and ambitious, proud behavior, and retained neither religion nor patriotism.  Among citizens were the merchants, of whom Harrison thought there were too many; for, like the lawyers, they were no furtherance to the commonwealth, but raised the price of all commodities.  In former, free-trade times, sugar was sixpence a pound, now it is two shillings sixpence; raisins were one penny, and now sixpence.  Not content with the old European trade, they have sought out the East and West Indies, and likewise Cathay and Tartary, whence they pretend, from their now and then suspicious voyages, they bring home great commodities.  But Harrison cannot see that prices are one whit abated by this enormity, and certainly they carry out of England the best of its wares.

The yeomen are the stable, free men, who for the most part stay in one place, working the farms of gentlemen, are diligent, sometimes buy the land of unthrifty gentlemen, educate their sons to the schools and the law courts, and leave them money to live without labor.  These are the men that made France afraid.  Below these are the laborers and men who work at trades, who have no voice in the commonwealth, and crowds of young serving-men who become old beggars, highway-robbers, idle fellows, and spreaders of all vices.  There was a complaint then, as now, that in many trades men scamped their work, but, on the whole, husbandmen and artificers had never been so good; only there were too many of them, too many handicrafts of which the country had no need.  It appears to be a fault all along in history that there are too many of almost every sort of people.