drought the cattle had to
be driven five or six miles to find water in the well or pool which served
for the whole district. If by any chance disease broke out, the wearied
beasts that met at the watering or drank of the tainted pool carried it
far and wide, and plague soon raged from end to end of the country. Even
in the days of Henry VIII. shrewd observers noted that the new grazing
farms, where the cattle were better fed and kept separate, alone escaped
these ravages, and that it was these farms whence came the only meat to be
found in the country through the long winter months or in time of murrain.
This purpose was doubtless served earlier by the great monastic estates,
but means of transport scarcely existed; each district had to live on its
own resources, and vast tracts of country were with every unfavourable
season stricken by hunger and by the plague and famine fever that
followed it.

One source of later misery was indeed unknown. The war of classes had not
yet begun. The lawyers had not been at work hardening and defining vague
traditions, and legally the position of the serf was far better than it
was a hundred years later. The feudal system still preserved relations
between the lord and his dependents, which were more easy and familiar
than anything we know. The lord of the manor had not begun to encroach on
the privileges or the "common" rights of the tenant, nor had the merchant
guilds of the towns attacked the liberties of the craftsmen and lesser
folk. For a century to come the battle for lands or rights was mainly
waged between the lord or the men of one township or manor with the men
of a neighbouring township or manor; and it was not till these had fairly
ended their quarrel that lords and burghers turned to fight against the
liberties and privileges of serfs and craftsmen. There are indications,
on the other hand, that one effect of the new administration of justice,
as it told on the poor, began early to show itself in the growth of an
"outlaw" class. Crimes of violence were surprisingly common. Dead bodies
were found in the wood, in the field, in the fold, in the barn. In an
extraordinary number of cases the judges' records of a little later time
tell of houses broken into by night and robbed, and every living thing
within them slain, and no clue was ever found to the plunderers. There
were stories in Henry's days of a new crime-of men wearing religious
dress who joined themselves to wayfarers,