om of captives. So intense
was the greed of gain that in the later years of the war only a threat of
death could keep the fighting-men in their ranks, and the results of
victory after victory were lost through the anxiety of the conquerors to
deposit their booty and captives safely at home. The moment the hand of
such leaders as Henry the Fifth or Bedford was removed the war died down
into mere massacre and brigandage. "If God had been a captain now-a-days,"
exclaimed a French general, "he would have turned marauder."

[Sidenote: Grant of Liveries]

The temper thus nursed on the fields of France found at last scope for
action in England itself. Even before the outbreak of the War of the Roses
the nobles had become as lawless and dissolute at home as they were greedy
and cruel abroad. But with the struggle of York and Lancaster and the
paralysis of government which it brought with it, all hold over the
baronage was gone; and the lawlessness and brutality of their temper
showed itself without a check. The disorder which their violence wrought
in a single district of the country is brought home by the Paston Letters,
an invaluable series of domestic correspondence which lifts for us a
corner of the veil that hides the social state of England in the fifteenth
century. We see houses sacked, judges overawed or driven from the bench,
peaceful men hewn down by assassins or plundered by armed bands, women
carried off to forced marriages, elections controlled by brute force,
parliaments degraded into camps of armed retainers. As the number of their
actual vassals declined with the progress of enfranchisement and the
upgrowth of the freeholder, the nobles had found a substitute for them in
the grant of their "liveries," the badges of their households, to the
smaller gentry and farmers of their neighbourhood, and this artificial
revival of the dying feudalism became one of the curses of the day. The
outlaw, the broken soldier returning penniless from the wars, found
shelter and wages in the train of the greater barons, and furnished them
with a force ready at any moment for violence or civil strife. The same
motives which brought the freeman of the tenth century to commend himself
to thegn or baron forced the yeoman or smaller gentleman of the fifteenth
to don the cognizance of his powerful neighbour, and ask for a grant of
"livery," or to seek at his hand "maintenance" in the law-courts, and thus
secure his aid and patronage in