lt out toward all
sorts of offenders made him the object of the deepest vengeance. In a
lonely hollow of his woods, watching at midnight with two of his men,
there came a sturdy knot of poachers. An affray ensued. The men perceived
that their old enemy, Sir Roger, was there: and the blow of a hedge-stake
stretched him on the earth. His keepers fled--and thus ignominiously
terminated the long line of the Rockvilles. Sir Roger was the last of his
line, but not of his class. There is a feudal art of sinking, which
requires no study; and the Rockvilles are but one family among thousands
who have perished in its practice.

CHAPTER II.

In Great Stockington there lived a race of paupers. From the year of the
42d of Elizabeth, or 1601, down to the present generation, this race
maintained an uninterrupted descent. They were a steady and unbroken line
of paupers, as the parish books testify. From generation to generation
their demands on the parish funds stand recorded. There were no _lacunae_
in their career; there never failed an heir to these families; fed on the
bread of idleness and legal provision, these people flourished, increased
and multiplied. Sometimes compelled to work for the weekly dole which
they received, they never acquired a taste for labor, or lost the taste
for the bread for which they did not labor. These paupers regarded this
maintenance by no means as a disgrace. They claimed it as a right,--as
their patrimony. They contended that one-third of the property of the
Church had been given by benevolent individuals for the support of the
poor, and that what the Reformation wrongfully deprived them of, the
great enactment of Elizabeth rightfully--and only rightfully--restored.

Those who imagine that all paupers merely claimed parish relief because
the law ordained it, commit a great error. There were numbers who were
hereditary paupers, and that on a tradition carefully handed down, that
they were only manfully claiming their own. They traced their claims from
the most ancient feudal times, when the lord was as much bound to
maintain his villein in gross, as the villein was to work for the lord.
These paupers were, in fact, or claimed to be, the original _adscripti
glebae_, and to have as much a claim to parish support as the landed
proprietor had to his land. For this reason, in the old Catholic times,
after they had escaped from villenage by running away and remaining
absent from their hundred for a