ast, there was no room in
such a community for the modern landless labourer. Where all the workers
were paid by their tenancy of land, where, in other words, fixity and
stability of possession were the very basis of social life, the fluidity
of labour was impossible. Men could not wander from place to place
offering to employers the hire of their toil. Yet we feel sure that, in
actual fact, wherever the population increased, there must have grown up
in the process of time a number of persons who could find neither work
nor maintenance on their father's property. Younger sons, or more remote
descendants, must gradually have found that there was no scope for them,
unless, like an artisan class, they worked for wages. Exactly at what
date began the rise of this agricultural and industrial class of fee
labourers we cannot very clearly tell. But in England--and probably the
same holds good elsewhere--between 1200 and 1350 there are traces of its
great development. There is evidence, which each year becomes more ample
and more definite, that during that period there was an increasingly
large number of people pressing on the means of subsistence. Though the
land itself might be capable of supporting a far greater number of
inhabitants, the part under cultivation could only just have been enough
to keep the actually existing population from the margin of destitution.
The statutes in English law which protest against a wholesale occupation
of the common-land by individuals were not directed merely against the
practices of a landlord class, for the makers of the law were themselves
landlords. It is far more likely that this invasion of village rights
was due to the action of these "landless men," who could not otherwise
be accommodated. The superfluous population was endeavouring to find for
itself local maintenance.

Precisely at this time, too, in England--where the steps in the
evolution from mediaeval to modern conditions have been more clearly
worked out than elsewhere--increase of trade helped to further the same
development. Money, species, in greater abundance was coming into
circulation. The traders were beginning to take their place in the
national life. The Guilds were springing into power, and endeavouring to
capture the machinery of municipal government. As a result of all this
commercial activity money payments became more frequent. The villein was
able to pay his lord instead of working for him, and by the sale of t