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 1¾." 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:

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 mediÃval 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.