ny-ale pleased them, no piece of good bacon,
Only fresh flesh or fish, well-fried or well-baked,
Ever hot and still hotter to heat well their maw."

And he speaks elsewhere of their laziness:

"Bewailing his lot as a workman to live,
He grumbles against God and grieves without reason,
And curses the king and his council after
Who licence the laws that the labourers grieve."

That the poor could thus become fastidious was a good sign of the rising
standard of comfort.

But for all that life was hard, and much at the mercy of the weather,
and of the assaults of man's own fellows. The houses of the better folk
were of brick and stone, and glass windows were just becoming known,
whereas the substitute of oiled paper had been neither cheerful nor of
very much protection. But the huts of the poor were of plastered mud;
and even the walls of a quite respectable man's abode, we know from one
court summons to have been pierced by arrows shot at him by a pugnacious
neighbour. The plaintiff offered to take judge and jury then and there
and show them these "horrid weapons" still sticking to the exterior. In
the larger houses the hall had branched off, by the fourteenth century,
into withdrawing-rooms, and parlours, and bedrooms, such as the Paston
Letters describe with much curious wealth of detail. Lady Milicent
Falstolf, we are told, was the only one in her father's household who
had a ewer and washing-basin.

Yet with all the lack of the modern necessities of life, human nature
was still much the same. The antagonism between rich and poor, which the
collapse of feudal relations had strained to breaking-point, was not
perhaps normally so intense as it is to-day; yet there was certainly
much oppression and unnecessary hardships to be suffered by the weak,
even in that age. The Ancren Riwle, that quaint form of life for
ankeresses drawn up by a Dominican in the thirteenth century, shows
that even then, despite the distance of years and the passing of so many
generations, the manners and ways and mental attitudes of people
depended very much as to whether they were among those who had, or who
had not; the pious author in one passage of homely wit compares certain
of the sisters to "those artful children of rich parents who purposely
tear their clothes that they may have new ones."

There have always been wanton waste and destitution side by side; and on
the prophecy of the One to whom all t