clamoured for their restoration. One could cite a good many
examples pointing to an upward movement. Large estates
are left at death by men who are legally villeins. Villeins,
especially in the eastern counties, buy up freehold land and
found considerable properties. A bond tenant in Lincoln-
shire marries into a knight's family. Bond tenants are
found leasing the manorial demesne in one block and
farming estates of several hundred acres. Nor must we
forget that the peasants of the sixteenth century are often
very substantial people, and that even when the taint of
personal villeinage is still upon them.

But isolated instances of this kind, suggestive though
they are, are not likely to carry conviction unless they
agree with what we know of the general economic situation.
Economists who live after the days of Samuel Smiles will
hesitate before they base optimistic conclusions as to the
conditions of any class on cases of good fortune among
individual members of it. We should be false to the spirit
of our period if we did not recognise that the economic ideal
of most men, an ideal often implied though not often formu-
lated, was less the opening of avenues to enterprise than
the maintenance of groups and communities at their custom-
ary level of prosperity. We shall have hereafter to speak
of the changes which overtook the English social system
in the course of the sixteenth century, in so far as they
were connected with changes in the methods of agriculture
and of land tenure. Before we do so we may pause for
a moment to look at the village of the later Middle Ages
as a social and economic unit.

The foundation of its whole life is the possession by the
majority of households of holdings of land. Land is so
widely distributed that the household, all of whose members
are entirely dependent for their living upon work for wages,
is the exception. Though this cannot be statistically
proved, it is rendered almost certain by several converging
lines of evidence. Turn first to the table on pp. 64 and 65,
which sets out the acreage of the customary tenants' hold-
ings. It will be seen that, when all the counties represented
are grouped together, the tenants who have only cottages
form less than one-tenth of the total number. In East

-99-