ked well for the support of a sturdy high-hearted race, sound
in body and fierce in spirit, and furnished with thews and sinews which,
under the stimulus of those "great shins of beef,"[12] their common diet,
were the wonder of the age. "What comyn folke in all this world," says a
state paper in 1515[13] "may compare with the comyns of England in riches,
freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folke is so
mighty, so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?" The relative
numbers of the French and English armies which fought at Cressy and
Agincourt may have been exaggerated, but no allowance for exaggeration will
effect the greatness of those exploits; and in stories of authentic actions
under Henry VIII., where the accuracy of the account is undeniable, no
disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies wherever they could
meet them. Again and again a few thousands of them carried dismay into the
heart of France. Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices, from
London,[14] who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for
years the terror of Normandy. In the very frolic of conscious power they
fought and plundered, without pay, without reward, except what they could
win for themselves; and when they fell at last they fell only when
surrounded by six times their number, and were cut to pieces in careless
desperation. Invariably, by friend and enemy alike, the English are
described as the fiercest people in all Europe (the English wild beasts,
Benvenuto Cellini calls them); and this great physical power they owed to
the profuse abundance in which they lived, and to the soldier's training in
which every man of them was bred from childhood. The state of the working
classes can, however, be more certainly determined by a comparison of their
wages with the prices of food. Both were regulated, so far as regulation
was possible, by act of parliament, and we have therefore data of the
clearest kind by which to judge. The majority of agricultural labourers
lived, as I have said, in the houses of their employers; this, however, was
not the case with all, and if we can satisfy ourselves as to the rate at
which those among the poor were able to live who had cottages of their own,
we may be assured that the rest did not live worse at their masters'
tables.

Wheat, the price of which necessarily varied, averaged in the middle of the
fourteenth century tenpence the bushel;[15] barley averagin