turer, tired of being thus trammelled and harassed, established himself outside the walls and installed his workmen in cottages around him.1 Thus the ancient centres of population showed no visible increase under the Tudors and the Stuarts. They appear on the map as a few black points scattered at wide intervals through the blank space which represents the country. The same proportion is maintained nearly down to the eighteenth century. At the end of the seventeenth century out of a population of five and a quarter millions, four millions dwelt in the country. There was not, with the exception of London, any town of 30,000 inhabitants, and there were only four of more than 10,000 each. Bristol, the second or third city in the kingdom, was said to be the only one in which from certain points the eye rested on nothing but houses.2 The numerous boroughs or cities upon which the Crown conferred the right of sending members to Parliament were for the most part overgrown and often very miserable country villages, to which the neighbouring squires and farmers carried their produce for sale. The interests of such places were purely agricultural, like those of the country proper ; the manners of their inhabitants were those of a rural population. In the time of Elizabeth, and even after the Revolution, the towns were still, speaking generally,

1 In this manner the woollen manufactures extended from Worcester through the whole of Worcestershire, the cloth manufacture spread through the villages of Somersetshire and Yorkshire, and the manufacture of iron through the villages of the Sussex weald. Brodrick, English Land and English Landlords, p. 31. Macaulay, History of England, i. 335.

2

in a state of dependence upon the country districts, and their society, like their trade and manufactures, lacked stability, energy, and volume; they were in no position to make head against the time-honoured supremacy of the rural classes.

III

THE COUNTRY GENTLEMEN

THIS bird's-eye view of the distribution of economic forces hardly takes in more than the principal features and the most salient points. We must come down from our position of vantage and examine more closely the actual state of the people and the arrangement of the various classes.

At the head of the agricultural and pastoral community, the only class of any importance, the "country gentlemen" stands prominently forward, the most original and the most influential of the social elements which went to form the national character.

We know that the feudal nobility was nearly extinct at the end of the fifteenth century, and that it had been necessary to reconstruct the peerage with materials taken from the stratum immediately below it. The new peers never severed their connection with the class from which they sprang, they merely took up a position somewhat in advance of it. They looked upon their fellow landowners as their equals of yesterday and their possible equals of to-morrow, while the simple landowners felt themselves very little inferior to the titled

members of their own class. Each member of that class felt that he was enjoying something analogous to the noblesse graduelle of the French, that is, nobility conferred by the honourable discharge during two generations of the duties of a public office. In England the public office consisted of the management of a great estate with the duties incident to it-social intercourse, the dispensing of patronage, and an active share in local business. All the rich squires were, so to speak, peers in expectation. In the fifteenth century the superior social unit was not the peerage, it was the rural gentry including the peerage.1 The peer's dignity did no more than confer precedence as amongst "gentlemen." The latter word which came into common use at the time of Elizabeth is not the equivalent,-Macaulay has proved it in a famous passage, of the French word gentilhomme ; it is rather the converse of it. A feudal tenure or a formal process of ennobling were not at the outset indispensable in order to confer the quality of gentleman, and birth alone could not transmit it. The ownership of a great estate, municipal rank, knowledge, and ability as a lawyer, all alike procured admission into this species of open nobility: poverty alone acted as a disqualification. The nobility enjoyed no privilege and was exempt

1 Speaking of the nobles who alone, according to Fortescue, could afford to educate their sons at the Inns of Court, Waterhouse adds (p. 520): These by the text are said to be "nobiles," and their sons sent thither "nobilium filii" which is to be understood not of the high nobility, the peerage (though often their sons were thither sent), but of the sons of the lower nobility, knights, esquires, gentlemen's sons, who are chiefly the " "nobiles here.

from no public burden. At a later period there was no need of any violent change in custom nor of any statutory innovation to enable any man, who united a certain degree of education, and above all certain habits of life, to the necessary amount of wealth, to claim as of full right his admission to the order.

In the sixteenth century the ranks of the nobility were filled with new men; all the evidence goes to prove it. They were merchants, borough magistrates, lawyers, or even wealthy manufacturers, who had acquired or had been presented with estates in the country, especially property which had been taken from the Church. They "scented our needy heirs," they "purchased wards of noble birth" and married them to their daughters or their sons.1 These self-made men had only one object-to wring from their land the highest possible return. With them came upon the scene the gentleman and the farmer, who looked upon farming as a commercial venture and a speculation. The landowner who himself examined his bullocks to see that they were fit for the butcher, the lady who carried her own butter to market or who let off her husband's sporting rights, were types of a new period; men of the old school were at first astonished and scandalized at methods which before long they were destined to adopt.2

1 See Crowley's Select Works (1550), and Harrison's Description of England (1577).

2 The people of the North held longer to old customs and ancient methods of cultivation, just as they kept up a feeling of loyalty to their local chiefs and adhered to them in their numberless revolts; they too, in their turn, were to be carried onward by the tide of progress.