would suppose, to join the armies of tramps who figure so
largely in the pages of the writers of the period. As the
bailiff's accounts of some manors show, the demesne farm had
sometimes employed a quite considerable staff of workmen of
different kinds, and though no clear instance of a reduction
of the number of employees, consequent on the transition
to pasture farming, has come to light, one can occasionally
compare the demand for labour under the old régime and
under the new in a way which does something to substantiate
the lamentations of contemporaries. ¹ It is this which gives
point to their complaints as to the decay of "hospitality."
Hospitality in the sixteenth century does not merely mean
a general attitude of open-handed friendliness. When the
Government intervenes to enjoin hospitality, we are not to
think that, even in that age of grandmotherly legislation, it
is going out of its way to insist that every man shall provide
his neighbour with a glass of beer and a bed for the night.
Hospitality has a quite precise meaning and a quite definite
social importance. It is, in the most literal sense, house-
keeping, and the household does not merely imply what we
mean by "the family," a group of persons connected by
blood but pursuing often quite separate occupations, and,
except in the small number of cases where property owned
by the head of the family supplies a financial basis for unity,
possessing quite separate economic interests. It is, on the
contrary, a miniature co-operative society, housed under
one roof, dependent upon one industry, and including not
only man and wife and children, but servants and labourers,
ploughmen and threshers, cowherds and milkmaids, who
live together, work together, and play together, just as one
can see them doing in parts of Norway and Switzerland at
the present day. When the economic foundations of this
small organism are swept away by a change in the method
of farming, the effect is not merely to ruin a family, it is
to break up a business. It is analogous not to the un-
employment of an individual householder, but to the
bankruptcy of a firm.

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