dren, 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 eviden