perhaps they would signify
Ceres; this they keep moving about, while men and women, men and
maid-servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud
as they can till they arrive at the barn.' Harrison[238] tells us, no
doubt with patriotic bias, that 'our oxen are such as the like are not
to be found in any country of Europe both for greatness of body and
sweetness of flesh, their horns a yard between the tips.' Cows had
doubled in price in his time, from 26s. 8d. to 53s. 4d. 'Our horses
are high, but not of such huge greatness as in other places,' yet
remarkable for the easiness of their pace; and 5 or 6 cart-horses will
draw 30 cwt. a long journey, and a pack-horse will carry 4 cwt.
without any hurt,--a statement which is one more proof of the poorness
of the roads. The chief horse fairs were at 'Ripon, Newportpond,
Wolfpit, and Harborow,' where horse dealers were as great rogues as
ever. Pigeons were still the curse of the farmer, and their cotes were
called dens of thieves.

By the end of the sixteenth century, certainly by the first quarter of
the seventeenth, the villein, who in the Middle Ages had formed the
bulk of the population, had disappeared.[239] It is probable that even
at the beginning of the Tudor period the great majority of the bondmen
had become free, and that the serf then only formed one per cent. of
the population, and many of those had left the country and become
artizans in the towns, for personal serfdom had outlasted demesne
farming; though even there the heavy hand of the lord was upon them
and enforced the ancient customs.

In the sixteenth century flax was apparently grown upon most farms,
the statutes 34 Hen. VIII, c. 4, and 5 Eliz., c. 5, obliging every
person occupying 60 acres of tillage to have a quarter of an acre in
flax or hemp, and Moryson says the husbandmen wore garments of coarse
cloth made at home, so did their wives, and 'in generall' their linen
was coarse and made at home.[240]

'Good flax and good hemp to have of her own
In Maie a good housewife will see it be sowne',

sings Tusser. The statute of Henry VIII enjoined the sowing of flax
and hemp because of the great increase of idle people in the realm, to
which the numerous imports, especially linen cloth, contributed.

Saffron also was much grown, that at Saffron Walden in Essex was said
to be the best in the world, the profit from it being reckoned at L13
an acre. Its virtues were innumerable,