ce 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 man