iven out and
done by each man at home. The gild-workmen preferred this method,
because their great rival was the newly developed proletariat, masses
of men who could only be accommodated in large buildings. The act,
under the guise of redressing the grievance, in reality confirmed the
powers of the capitalists, for, while forbidding the use of factories
outside of cities, it allowed them within towns and in the four
northern counties, thus fortifying the monopolists in those places
where they were strong, and hitting their rivals elsewhere. Further
legislation, like the Elizabethan Statute of Apprentices, [Sidenote:
1563] strengthened the hands of the masters at the expense of the
journeymen. Such examples are only typical; similar laws were enacted
throughout Europe. By act after act the employers were favored at the
expense of the laborers.

[Sidenote: Agriculture]

There remained agriculture, at that time by far the largest and most
important of all the means by which man wrings his sustenance from
nature. Even now the greater part of the population in most civilized
countries--and still more in semi-civilized--is rural, but four hundred
years ago the proportion was much larger. England was a predominantly
agricultural country until the eighteenth century,--England, the most
commercial and industrial of nations! Though {542} the last field to
be attacked by capital, agriculture was as thoroughly renovated in the
sixteenth century by this irrigating force as the other manners of
livelihood had been transformed before it.

Medieval agriculture was carried on by peasants holding small amounts
of land which would correspond to the small shops and slender capital
of the handicraftsman. Each local unit, whether free village or a
manor, was made up of different kinds of land,--arable, commons for
pasturing sheep and cattle, forests for gathering firewood and for
herding swine and meadows for growing hay. The arable land was divided
into three so-called "fields," or sections, each field partitioned into
smaller portions called in England "shots," and these in turn were
subdivided into acre strips. Each peasant possessed a certain number
of these tiny lots, generally about thirty, ten in each field.
Normally, one field would be left fallow each year in turn, one field
would be sown with winter wheat or rye (the bread crop), and one field
with barley for beer and oats for feeding the horses and cattle. Into
t