was brought back from Weyhill Fair in the
waggons which had carried down the hops; in short, to an extent hard to
realize, the town was independent of commerce as we know it now, and
looked to the farms and forests and the claypits and coppices of the
neighbourhood for its supplies. A leisurely yet steady traffic in rural
produce therefore passed along its streets, because it was the
life-centre, the heart, of its own countryside; and the village
labourer, going in and out upon his town tasks, or even working all day
in some secluded yard behind the street, still found a sort of
homeliness in the materials he handled, and was in touch with the ideas
and purposes of his employer.

Owing to these same circumstances, the wage-earners of that day enjoyed
what their descendants would consider a most blissful freedom from
anxiety. On the one side, the demand for labour was fairly steady. It
was the demand of a community not rapidly growing in numbers, nor yet
subject to crazes and sudden changes of a fashion--a community
patiently, nay, cheerfully, conservative in its ambitions, not given to
rash speculation, but contented to go plodding on in its time-honoured
and modest well-being. What the townsfolk wanted one year they wanted
the next, and so onwards with but quiet progress. And as the demand for
labour was thus steady, so on the other side was the supply of it. A
dissatisfied employer could not advertise, then, in a London daily
paper, and get scores of men applying to him for work at a day's notice;
nor, indeed, would strangers have been able to do the work in many
cases, so curiously was its character determined by local conditions.
Besides, town opinion, still prejudiced by memories of the old Poor Law,
would have viewed with extreme disfavour, had such an experiment ever
been tried, the importation of men and families whose coming must surely
result in pauperism for somebody, and in a consequent charge upon the
rates.

So, putting together the leading factors--namely, a steady demand for
countrified labour, a steady supply of it, and an employing class full
of country ideas--we get a rough idea of the conditions of wage-earning
in the neighbourhood, when the folk of this valley, fenced out from
their common, were forced to look to wage-earning as their sole means of
living. That the conditions were ideal it would be foolish to suppose;
but that, for villagers at least, they had certain advantages over
present cond