THE WOMEN OF THE INDUSTRIAL CLASSES
The most remarkable fact of the twelfth century in England was the
growth of the towns. As has been already observed in a previous
chapter, the conquest of Britain by the Normans modified the
insularity of the people and brought them into closer communication
with the people of the continent. One of the most marked effects of
this change was the introduction into the country of skilled Norman
craftsmen. The stimulating effect of the influx of these specialized
workmen was in result not unlike the general awakening of trade and
commerce throughout Europe, at a later time, as the result of the
Crusades.
The expansion of England's industry was also favored by the vigorous
administrations of Henry I. and Henry II. Another contributive factor
was the decline in power of the barons. Henry I. pitted the town
against the castle in order to counterbalance the vast influence which
was exerted by each. Henry's policy of limiting the independence of
the barons was furthered by the introduction of scutage, by which
the king was enabled to call to his aid mercenary troops and did not
have to rely wholly upon the feudal forces. Then, too, the Assize of
Arms restored the national militia to its former importance. Such,
in brief, were the constitutional measures by which the towns were
advantaged and their position as related to the castles in a sense
reversed. The liberty of the latter became increasingly curtailed,
while that of the former was correspondingly augmented.
The town and the castle, however, were not antagonistic, the interests
of the former being furthered by the protection of the latter. The
monastery, also, aided the town by attracting trade. There was little
difference in conditions of life between the town and the country;
both engaged in agriculture as well as in trade, and both were
governed by a royal officer, or, it might be, by some lord's steward,
while, of course, the houses were somewhat more clustered in the town
than in the country, and the town possessed the merchant guild. It is
impossible to trace guilds to their origin, although Brentano seeks
to fix England as their birthplace. This is possible, however, only by
narrowing the definition of a guild to fit the English type.
The earliest unmistakable mention of the merchant guild is at the end
of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century. Under Henry
I., grants of merchant guilds appear in royal town charters, and are
frequently met with during succeeding reigns. By such charters the
original voluntary associations became exclusive bodies, to which
trade was confined. The retail trade of the town was restricted to
members of the guild individually, while the trade coming to the town
was shared by them all collectively. The burgesses generally found it
to their interest to become members of the guild, and all townsmen
of importance were traders. Ecclesiastics and women might also be
members of the guild, but they were, of course, debarred from becoming
burgesses.
The exclusive tendencies which the merchant guild developed made
it really an oligarchy, and so there grew up in the towns an ever
increasing population that did not share the guild privileges. As the
town and its trade developed, the complexity of trade regulations made
it a convenience to have guilds with specialized functions, to which
the merchant guild might deputize its powers. It was quite natural,
too, that men working at the same trade, and having social and
neighborhood association, should desire to have a guild which would
represent their distinctive interests. Thus the craft guild arose, not
in antagonism to the merchant guild, but as a special agent of it.
So, in the reign of Henry I., there came about the associations of
the weavers, cordwainers, and fullers. By the end of the fourteenth
century craft guilds were numerous, and in some places the merchant
guild was superseded by them. In their composition the guilds were
made up of masters, journeymen, and apprentices, from whom were
elected the officers and assistances. Women were members of these
craft guilds, although they do not appear to have taken part in
the business administration. "The charter of the Drapers speaks of
both brethren and sistren, and the list of members, as given on
the occasions of 'cessments' shows women-members, both wives of
corn-brethren, independent tradeswomen, and widows of deceased
brothers."
The relation of the women to some of the guilds seems to have been
largely a social one. Thus, we read in the rules of the Calendar
Guild, a religious fraternity, that the wives of guild members had
gone to such extremes in their entertainment of the guild as to cause
it to be stipulated that no woman should spend in excess of a certain
specified sum for hospitality toward the guilds; for these guilds were
formed for various purposes besides trade, and were in the nature of
friendly societies. In addition to their commercial side, they were
"associations for mutual help and social and religious intercourse
amongst the people." The proportion of women in the membership was
always large. In her introduction to _English Guilds_, Miss Toulmin
Smith says that "scarcely five out of five hundred were not formed
equally of men and women.... Even where the affairs were managed by a
company of priests, women were admitted as lay members, and they had
many of the same duties and claims upon the guilds as the men."
Women's association with the guild was not a merely nominal one, for
they shared in all of its privileges and contributed to all of its
funds, although the payments asked of them were sometimes smaller. The
female as well as the male members had a right to wear the livery of
the guild. Women were engaged in trade and even in manufacture, and
so had direct interest in the craft guilds, aside from that which they
would naturally feel through the relations thereto of their husbands
and brothers. In the work of his trade a member was always allowed to
employ his wife, his children, and his maid, for the whole household
of the guild brother belonged to the guild. In later times this led to
the degeneration of the guilds into mere family monopolies.
The fraternal feature of the craft guild reminds one of the same
features of the benevolent orders of the present time. If a member of
the guild, male or female, became impoverished through mishap, they
were cared for, and, if need arose, were buried; dowerless daughters
were provided with marriage portions, or, in case they wished to enter
the religious life, they were provided with the means to do so. Nor
must we overlook the large influence which the guilds exerted on the
side of morality, attaching, as they did, the greatest importance to
the moral character of their members.
The great Drapers Company embraced in its membership many women who
trained apprentices and carried on business, as did the male members.
The rules of the company provided that "every brother or sister of the
fellowship taking an apprentice shall present him to the wardens, and
shall pay 13/4." The craft guilds exerted an admirable influence in
the raising of woman to the same plane of respect as that held by men.
The equality which was accorded them in these associations amounted to
a recognition of their intellectual and business capabilities as being
of the same order as those of the men. The respect which was shown
them is illustrated by a provision of the same company to which we
have just referred. It was ordered that when a "sister" died she
should be interred with fullest honors; the best pall was to be thrown
over her coffin, and the fraternity were to follow her to the grave
"with every respectful ceremony equally as the men." On the death of a
male member of a guild, his widow was privileged to carry on his trade
as one of the guild; and if a woman married a man of the same trade
who did not have the freedom of the guild, he acquired it by virtue of
the marriage; but should a woman marry a man of another trade, she was
thereby excluded from her guild connection. Such were the relations
of woman to the guilds. But Brentano notes an exception to the rule
that a widow who married again a man of the same trade conferred the
freedom of the guild upon him: "The wife of a poulterer may carry on
the said mystery after the death of her husband, quite as freely as if
her sire were alive; and if she marries a man not of the mystery, and
wishes to carry it on, she must buy the (right of carrying on the)
mystery in the above described manner; as she would be obliged to buy
the mystery, if her husband was of the mystery and had not yet bought
it; for the husband is not in the dominion of the wife, but the wife
is in the dominion of the husband."
The democratic nature of the guilds tended to lessen class
distinctions and to bring about a true fellowship on the plane of
equality. The associations, as has been said, provided for their
members with loving care, and followed them with love to the grave:
"the ordinances as to this last act breathed the same spirit of
equality among her sons on which all her regulations were founded, and
which constituted her strength." In cases of insolvency at death, the
funerals of poor members were to be respected equally with those of
the rich. "The honor paid to the dead was also associated with the
duty of benevolence;" thus, for instance, in the statutes of the
fullers of Lincoln, it is said: "When any of the brethren and sistren
die, the rest shall give a halfpenny each to buy bread to be given
to the poor, for the soul's sake of the dead." The Grocers Company
admitted women after marriage to membership in their fraternity, and
they "enter and are looked upon as of the fraternity for ever, and are
assisted and made as one of us; and after the death of the husband,
the widow shall come to the dinner and pay 40d. if she is able."
In the fourteenth century it was by no means unusual for women, even
though they were married, to carry on successfully large commercial
enterprises in their own name and by their individual effort. In the
_Liber Albus of London_, which was compiled in the fourteenth century,
there occurs an ordinance relating to this subject: "and where a
woman _coverte de baron_ follows craft within the said city by herself
apart, with which the husband in no way intermeddles, such woman shall
be bound as a single woman as to all that concerns her said craft.
And if the husband and wife are impleaded in such case, the wife shall
plead as a single woman in the Court of Record, and shall have her law
and other advantages by way of plea just as a single woman. And if she
is condemned, she shall be committed to prison until she shall have
made satisfaction; and neither the husband nor his goods shall in such
case be charged or interfered with." It will be seen from this that
women were accorded wide liberty in the conduct of business and,
whether married or single, preserved their independence of action and
control of property. The right that woman enjoyed before the courts of
being sued and of suing was, however, a negative one.
The distresses to which women were subjected by the peculiar form of
liberty which they enjoyed is illustrated by the following quotation
from an enactment in the Statute of Laborers in the reign of Edward
III: "Every man and woman of our realm of England, of what condition
he be, free or bond, able of body and within the age of threescore
years, not living in merchandise, not exercising any craft nor having
of his own whereof he may live, nor proper land about whose tillage
he may himself occupy, and serving any other, if he be in convenient
service (his estate considered), be required to serve, he shall be
bounden to serve him which so shall him require.... And if any such
man or woman being so required to serve will not the same do,... he
shall be committed to the next gaol, there to remain under strait
keeping, till he find surety to serve in the form aforesaid."
All of the oppressive enactments regulating the wages of laborers
and fixing the maximum of the sum that they were at liberty to accept
affected women equally with men. An enactment of Richard II. provided
"that no artificer, labourer, servant, nor victualler, man or woman,
should travel out of the hundred, rape, or wapentake where he is
dwelling, without a letter-patent under the King's seal, stating why
he is wandering, and that the term for which he or she had been hired
has been completed." Otherwise the offender might be put in a pair of
stocks, which was to be provided in every town.
The guild system, despite its attitude toward women, was the beginning
of the narrowing of her industrial sphere. Prior to the importation
of skilled laborers in textile and other branches of industry, such
activities were identified with the homes of the people, not merely in
that the industry itself was conducted in them, but that the product
was limited to the needs of the household, the demands of charity, and
such surplus as was used in trade. The guild broadened the meaning of
industry to meet the demands of a rising commercial system whose trade
routes became clearly established and extended throughout Europe and
into the East. So that, while the industry of the women artificers
became limited in that many things which had largely occupied their
hands became the settled occupations of men, the products which still
depended mainly upon their industrial activity became much more widely
dispersed, and made them factors in the developing industries to
which England is so deeply indebted for her trade supremacy. With the
decline of guilds, there was a return on a very large scale to the
system of home industry, when every farmstead and rural cottage became
a manufacturing centre. The development of the factory system of the
eighteenth century, upon the introduction of improved machinery for
manufacture, completely removed industry from the home and created the
modern factory town.
It is not our purpose to do more than suggest the influence which the
guilds exerted in bringing woman into the larger stream of English
life by the definition of her legal status which her industrial
consequence and activities made necessary. It has been already
remarked that the statutes of the times made her personally
responsible before the law as an industrial factor. In this way, woman
became increasingly regarded as a social integer rather than as simply
a domestic incident. This was a distinct gain in the end, however
crude the conception at first. The complex questions of woman's social
status are still largely centred about the question of her industrial
place. The insistent claim of the sex that they shall be regarded as
worthy of a part in the world's work projects into the discussion
of the place that she shall occupy many other questions concerning
matters which are immediately involved. It is not too much to say that
all of the issues which arose during the modern period, and together
form the specifications of the platform of "woman's rights," find
their beginning in this first responsible relation of woman to the
industry of the nation. Society is established upon an economic basis,
and so the problem of the duties and responsibilities of woman in a
public way must be centred about industry. It will not do to criticise
the crudeness of the early legislation regarding woman when she first
stepped into the arena of associated industry, and to remain oblivious
to the fact that the question of her industrial status is no more
satisfactorily determined after the lapse of centuries. It is true
that the question during these centuries became greatly involved
at times, as, for instance, at the period of the great industrial
revolution; but, with all the aspects which the question assumes
to-day and the problems which are related to it, the crux of the
matter is the same as it was at the time of the rise of the guilds.
The guild ordinances took the view of woman as an industrial unit,
without regard to her personal relations. If she became a merchant
and associated herself with the guild, she was under the same laws
regarding financial responsibility as was any other member. The fact
that she was a woman, or that she was married and had children, did
not constitute a plea in her behalf for different treatment from that
accorded a guild brother. If a woman-merchant became a debtor, she had
to answer in court as any other merchant, and "an accyon of dette be
mayntend agenst her, to be conceyved aft' the custom of the seid lite,
w[^t] out nemyng her husband in the seid accyon."
The legislation of the period generally recognized the equality of the
sexes in the matter of labor. An ordinance of Edward IV., made in the
borough of Wells, provided that both male and female apprentices to
burgesses should themselves become burgesses at the expiration of
their term of service. Similar statutes relating to apprentices
in London likewise made no distinction between boys and girls. The
problems centring about woman's relation to industry not having
arisen, the fact of her employment presented no serious difficulties.
When the proclamation of 1271, relating to the woollen industry, was
issued, it permitted "all workers of woolen cloths, male and female,
as well of Flanders as of other lands, to come to England to follow
their craft." Indeed, the women were less fettered than the men in
their industrial avocations, for, while by the statute of 1363 the men
were limited to the pursuit of one craft, women were left free in the
matter.
In this connection, it is interesting to refer to the development of
the silk industry as a typical occupation of woman. It is impossible
to determine the time when "the arts of spinning, throwing, and
weaving of silk" were first brought into England. We do know, however,
that, when first established, they were pursued by a company of women
called "silk women." The fabrics of their skill were in the many forms
of laces, ribbons, girdles, and other narrow goods. Toward the middle
of the fifteenth century, these women were greatly distressed by the
Lombards and other Italians, who imported into the country the same
sort of goods, and in such quantities that their sale was hindered and
the workers placed in danger of starvation. This led to a reference
of their complaint to Parliament, with a statement of the grievances
for which they desired redress. This document bore the title:
_The petition of the silk women and throwesters of the craftes and
occupation of silk-work within the city of London, which be, and
have been, craftes of women within the same city of time that no
man remembereth the contrary_. The petition then goes on to set
forth "that by this business many reputable families have been well
supported; and young women kept from idleness by learning the same
business, and put into a way of living with credit, and many have
thereby grown to great worship; and never any thing of silk brought
into this land, concerning the same craftes and occupations in any
wise wrought but in the raw silk alone, unwrought, until now of late
that divers Lombards and others, aliens and strangers, with a view
of destroying the silk-working in this kingdom, and transferring the
manufactories to foreign countries, do daily bring into this land,"
etc. Then follows a statement of the inferior grades of fabrics thus
introduced, which the complaint said was "to the great detriment and
utter destruction of the said craftes; which is like to cause great
idleness among the young gentlewomen and other apprentices to the same
craftes." The petition that the importation of these goods should be
prohibited was granted, and we hear no more of these estimable ladies
and little of their infant industry. It was then thought no disgrace
for a lady of quality to conduct such household manufactories.
The town-dwelling woman looked down upon her rural sister, a fact that
is not at all surprising when the difference in the condition of the
two classes of women is considered. The town-dwelling woman had the
privileges of guild association and the liberties which it gave her,
while the woman in the agricultural districts was but a drudge.
The former were identified with manufactures and commerce, while
the latter were tied to the soil. Even after the rise of copyhold
tenure of land, the grievances of the agricultural population were
considerable, and of many sorts. While the villains flocked to London
to demand legal exemption from the old labor obligations which went
along with such servile condition, the cottars claimed freedom from
labor rents for their homes, and the copyholders of all kinds demanded
that they should not be compelled to grind at the lord's mill the
corn which they raised for their household needs. The rising tide of
industrial revolution represented a climax of centuries of grievance;
and when the revolt did come, it was as a demand for the manumission
of property held in villanage. There was at the time hardly any
personal servitude demanding such strenuous measures for betterment.
The popular agitation seemed to be enlisted against class impositions,
and so the following lines:
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
became the slogan of the insurgents.
It is not possible to ascertain how particular grievances in Kent and
Essex became identified with the general movements of the peasantry
south of the Thames and in many parts of the midland. The vast
movement, however, extended throughout the agricultural districts, and
included burgesses of towns, rural priests, yeomen and farm laborers.
It is unlikely that a personal grievance should have caused it, but it
was precipitated by such. The immediate occasion was the indignation
which was aroused at an outrage committed by one of the tax collectors
on the daughter of Wat the Tyler. As the indignation which centred
in the sentiment against this act served to cement the feeling of
injustice which was prevalent among the peasantry, so it is probable
that the act itself was not a solitary instance, but only one of many
indignities which were suffered by the peasantry at the hands of the
representatives of those above them. Although the insurrection soon
came to an end, and those who were responsible for it suffered the
severest penalties, nevertheless the various "statutes of laborers"
which from this date appear on the statute book show that the day had
gone by when the lords of manors could require the personal services
of tenants in return for the lands they held; so that the one thousand
five hundred persons who were executed for this social uprising died
as a protest against grievances of the poor tenantry, which were
corrected by legislation.
By the close of the fourteenth century the manorial courts had lost
much of their former vigor; and there were frequent instances of
villain tenants sending their daughters to service beyond the bounds
of the manors, in spite of the requirement of a license so to
do. Daughters were also married without reference to the lord, or
obtaining his permission, or paying the fee. As a result of their
extended liberties, women as well as men deserted the country in
large numbers and resorted to the towns. The population thus became
much more mobile, and among the people there was a wider degree of
intelligence because of this fact and of their more varied experience.
As women are the progenitors of the race, it is always important for
the intelligence of a people that the mothers shall not be stupid
and inane creatures such as were for the most part the women of the
agricultural classes in England during the greater part of the Middle
Ages. They were limited to the narrow confines of homes, humble
indeed, and yet homes which they could not feel were their own, and
they could not leave these habitations excepting under conditions
which were practically prohibitive. Their days were spent in an
unvarying monotony of domestic duties and farm labor, which afforded
no stimulus to the mind or food for the soul. It is not strange that
morals were as depraved as manners were uncouth. In the imagination,
superstition took the place that was unoccupied by intelligence; and
the world of the peasant woman, who went about her round of daily
hardship, was peopled by a throng of supernatural creatures, and her
life spent in fear of violation of some of those strange rules of
conduct which now form interesting matter for the student of folklore.
It is difficult to exaggerate the hardship of the agriculturist of
the Middle Ages; and as she was an active participant in such labors,
besides having upon her the burdens which commonly belong to the
mother of a household, the woman of the times had to bear duties much
beyond those of a woman in a similar grade of life in England to-day.
The great pestilences of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
swept away so many lives that, for two centuries and a half before the
accession of Henry VII., the growth of population was so slight as
to be scarcely calculable. The unsanitary condition of the homes in
general was greatly injurious to health; but this was especially
so of the homes of the humble, the women of which had no ideas of
cleanliness, either in person or surroundings. The weekly shilling
or ninepence of the agricultural laborer must have been distressingly
inadequate for the needs of the household. These included wheat or
rye, which formed the staple of living, the rent of the cottage, the
usual manor dues, the national tax, something for clothing, medicine
for the children, and occasional items which would enter into a
complete enumeration. Even if the wife, as was frequently the case,
had to bear the burden of her own support by engaging in some form of
industrial activity in connection with her other duties, the wage of
the husband was barely enough to meet the needs of the remainder of
the family, and he had not a farthing left for "rainy days," which
were of frequent occurrence, or for those common and extraordinary
exactions which could not be evaded. So rigidly were the taxes levied,
even upon the poorest, that every form of possession came under
tribute; thus, the pet lamb of a poor man, which may have been the one
source of joy to his children and pleasure to his wife, appears in
an inventory of Colchester as amerced for sixpence. In the fifteenth
century, to which this entry refers, the master of a tenant was
forbidden by the Statutes of Laborers to assist him by relieving his
poverty; and even in case of illness of his wife or children, the
master could not legally furnish him aid. So onerous was the income
tax, levied to meet the expenses of foreign wars, that it was not
uncommon for bequests of money to be made for the relief of the poor
in paying it. The laborer had attached to his cottage a small piece
of ground, which his wife and himself tilled; he might also feed his
goose or his sheep upon the manor waste, but only on the sufferance of
his master.
By the end of the fifteenth century the lot of this class of England's
population became almost unendurable. The women, who bore more than
their share of the burden of work in an attempt to provide the bare
necessities of existence, were bowed under a weight of misery which
made that existence endurable only because they knew of none better,
or none which could possibly come within the range of their narrow
hopes. The wretched condition of life among those whose possessions
were so limited is well summed up in the following quotation from an
article by Dr. Augustus Jessup in the _Nineteenth Century_, February,
1884; he says: such people "were more wretched in their poverty,
incomparably less prosperous in their prosperity, worse clad, worse
fed, worse housed, worse taught, worse tended, worse governed," than
the peasants of the present day; "they were sufferers from loathsome
diseases their descendants know nothing of; the very beasts of the
field were dwarfed and stunted in their growth; the death rate among
children was tremendous; the disregard of human life was so callous
that we can hardly conceive it; there was everything to harden,
nothing to soften; everywhere oppression, greed, and fierceness."
Although wages were higher by the end of the century, reaching
fourpence a day, meat, cheese, and butter were much dearer than at its
beginning, so that it is doubtful if the last of the century found the
condition of the laborer at all improved in this respect. As labor was
suspended on the holidays of the Church and for a half-day on the eves
of those holidays, and as the laborer was forbidden to receive more
than a half-day's wage every Saturday, the men and women most anxious
to work, even if they could obtain constant employment, could not
average more than four and one-half profitable days per week. It is
not surprising that, for want of nutrition, there was throughout the
Middle Ages a wide prevalence of fever, the large death rate of women
and children from this cause affording evidence of their physical
weakness.
The wage of women employed in agricultural labor in the first half
of the fourteenth century was at the rate of a penny a day, although
this was not uniform; and in some parts of the kingdom they received
considerably more. Their duties on the farm consisted, in part, in
"dibbling beans, in weeding corn, in making hay, in assisting the
sheep shearers and washing the sheep, in filling the muck carts with
manure and in spreading it upon the lands, in shearing corn, but
especially in reaping stubble after the ears of corn had been cut off
by the shearers, in binding and stacking sheaves, in thatching ricks
and houses, in watching in the fields to prevent cattle straying into
the corn, or, armed with a sling, in scaring birds from the seed or
ripening corn, and similar occupations. That they might not fail of
employment to fill up the measure of the hours, there was the winding
and spinning of wool to stop a gap." But these were not the sole
employments of the wives and daughters of the mediaeval farmer, for
they took their part in all farmwork together with their husbands and
fathers. After the "black death" had made such terrible inroads upon
the rural population of England, a woman received a wage that seldom
went below twopence for a day's work; but this amount was diminished
by the effect of one of the Statutes of Laborers, which required
that every woman not having a craft--that is, not a town dweller, nor
possessed of property of her own--should work on a farm equally with a
man, and, like the man, she should not leave the manor or the district
in which she customarily lived, to seek work elsewhere. It was
difficult for a woman of the agricultural classes to pass out of the
dreary sphere in which she lived, for it was enjoined that if a girl
before the age of twelve years--significant of the time when she was
supposed to be a woman--put her hands to works of industry, she must
remain for the rest of her life an agricultural laborer, and was not
permitted to be apprenticed to learn a trade. These regulations were,
of course, very often honored in the breach, but nevertheless they
were frequently enforced.
The poverty of the peasantry made it necessary for them to make for
themselves almost everything that entered into the needs of their
life,--their houses, their clothing, their agricultural implements,
and most of their household articles. Flax was raised, and from it
the women manufactured the linen for the ladies of the hall; from hemp
they made the coarse sackcloth for their underclothing, and they spun
and wove the wool shorn from the backs of their few sheep for their
outer clothing. The women of this class frequently could not afford an
oven of their own, and so the flour which was made from the grain that
was required to be ground at the lord's mill was also baked in his
oven. The simple medicines were brewed by the housewife from the herbs
which grew by the copse side or on the commons or in the ditches. When
the manufacture of wool and flax was withdrawn to the towns, the labor
of the women was to that extent lightened, although their income was
correspondingly lessened.
The condition of the very poor was pitiful in the extreme; as there
had been no opportunity for the laying up of provision for old age,
the only recourse for the women and men alike, when indigency and age
overtook them, was to seek shelter in the almshouses which had been
founded for the decrepit and the destitute. Many yielded to their
"miserable cares and troubles," and died from starvation. By the
fifteenth century the monasteries had ceased to be important centres
for the dispensing of charity, so that relief from destitution could
not be looked for from that source. The conventual orders, in common
with the rest of the nation, had become burdened with debt through the
wars at home and abroad. The numerous regulations for the control of
beggars, and the licenses which were issued to regulate the practice,
show the great prevalence of real poverty and want during the whole of
the fifteenth century, although throughout the Middle Ages mendicancy
was familiar enough.
Such was the condition of the women of the industrial classes during
the Middle Ages. The period that witnessed the transition from the
Middle Ages into modern times, the breakup of feudalism, and the
construction of society upon a different basis, was, as transitional
periods are apt to be, one of peculiar stress. And as this period in
England was marked by severe wars, with all the blight and desolation
which they bring to a land, it was one of especial severity upon those
who had to bear the burden of such undertakings. Not only was the
standard of living brought low, and the comforts of life reduced to
the bare necessities, but manners were as disastrously affected as
was the economy of the realm. Crime and violence stalked through the
country, seemingly under no restraint; and from the prevalence of
deeds of violence, it is very clear that law was not only ineffectual,
but that public sentiment was not strong enough to create a better
state of affairs. The condition was not unlike that which prevailed
in Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Women were
the chief sufferers from the prevalent lawlessness. They were seized
at night, and, after being dishonored, were compelled to go to the
church, where the priest, under threats and despite the protests
of the victims, performed the ceremony which linked them to their
captors. It mattered little if the woman happened to be already
married, as such proceedings were supposed by many to constitute
a sufficient divorce. Rent riots were of everyday occurrence, and
murders were not unusual. It was not altogether the poor who were
involved in such deeds of violence, as there were among them agitators
from the upper classes, who not only urged them on, but themselves
took part in all such outrages. Often murders and other forms of
violence grew out of the practice of men of quality having about them
bands of retainers who were frequently the roughest of characters,
including men under indictment for capital offences. No class was
quite secure from the disorderly elements of the population, but the
women of the country districts were more frequently the sufferers than
were their sisters of the towns.
The great increase of sensuality, the low esteem in which women were
held, and the little regard they manifested for their own characters,
showed the decadence into which the spirit of chivalry had fallen.
Being a child of feudalism, with the decay of that system it went
into eclipse. Nevertheless, chivalry contributed to English life
real benefits, apart from the elevation of women, and these remained
permanent factors in the character of the nation.