nd 5s. to a God's penny (earnest money);
next year he had L4 wages, and he was both a good seedsman,' before
the invention of drills a very valuable qualification, 'and did sow
all our seed both the years. When you are about to hire a servant you
are to call them aside and talk privately with them concerning their
wage, and if the servants stand in the churchyard they usually call
them aside and walk to the back side of the church and there treat of
their wage. I heard a servant asked what he could do, who made this
answer:

"I can sowe,
I can mowe,
And I can stacke;
And I can doe
My master too
When my master turns his backe".'

If we are to judge by the food provided for the thatchers, who were
little better than ordinary labourers, the Yorkshire farm-hand fared
well on plenty of simple food, his three meals a day consisting of
butter, milk, cheese, and either eggs, pies, or bacon, sometimes
porridge instead of milk.

Probably, however, few country gentlemen were such industrious farmers
as Best; many of them passed their days mostly in hunting and fowling
and their evenings in drinking, though we know too that there were
exceptions who did not care for this rude existence. Deer hunting, and
we must add deer poaching, was the great sport of the wealthy, but the
smaller gentry had to be content with simpler forms of the chase. For
fox hunting each squire had his own little pack, and hunted only over
his own estate and those of his friends. He had also the otter, the
badger, and the hare to amuse him. Fowling was conducted, as in the
Middle Ages, by hawk or net, for the shot gun had not yet come into
use, and was forbidden by an old law.[316] The partridge and pheasant,
as now, were the chief game birds. After the Restoration the country
gentlemen seem to have been infected by the dissipation of the Court,
and farming was left to the tenant farmer and yeoman: 'our gentry',
says Pepys, 'have grown ignorant of everything in good husbandry.'

The middle of the seventeenth century was the Golden Age of the
yeoman who owned and farmed his land; even at the end of the Stuart
period, when their decline had already begun, Gregory King estimated
their numbers at 160,000 families, or about one-seventh of the
population. The class included all those between the man who owned
freehold land worth 40s. a year and the wealthier yeoman who was
hardly distinguishable from the small gentleman. Owning