m medieval ways
throughout the fifteenth century. With the beginning of the sixteenth
the rate of emergence had greatly quickened. The soil-bound peasant who
produced enough food for his family from his thirty acres was being
gradually replaced by the well-to-do yeoman who tilled a hundred acres
and upwards. Such holdings produced a substantial surplus for the
market. This increased the national wealth, which, in its turn,
increased both home and foreign trade. The peasant merely raised a
little wheat and barley, kept a cow, and perhaps some sheep. The yeoman
or tenant farmer had sheep enough for the wool trade besides some
butter, cheese, and meat for the nearest growing town. He began to
'garnish his cupboards with pewter and his joined beds with tapestry and
silk hangings, and his tables with carpets and fine napery.' He could
even feast his neighbors and servants after shearing day with
new-fangled foreign luxuries like dates, mace, raisins, currants, and
sugar.

But Elizabethan society presented striking contrasts. In parts of
England, the practice of engrossing and enclosing holdings was
increasing, as sheep-raising became more profitable than farming. The
tenants thus dispossessed either swelled the ranks of the vagabonds who
infested the highways or sought their livelihood at sea or in London,
which provided the two best openings for adventurous young men. The
smaller provincial towns afforded them little opportunity, for there the
trades were largely in the hands of close corporations descended from
the medieval craft guilds. These were eventually to be swept away by the
general trend of business. Their dissolution had indeed already begun;
for smart village craftsmen were even then forming the new industrial
settlements from which most of the great manufacturing towns of England
have sprung. Camden the historian found Birmingham full of ringing
anvils, Sheffield 'a town of great name for the smiths therein,' Leeds
renowned for cloth, and Manchester already a sort of cottonopolis,
though the 'cottons' of those days were still made of wool.

There was a wages question then as now. There were demands for a minimum
living wage. The influx of gold and silver from America had sent all
prices soaring. Meat became almost prohibitive for the 'submerged
tenth'--there was a rapidly submerging tenth. Beef rose from one cent a
pound in the forties to four in 1588, the year of the Armada. How would
the lowest paid of craf