emolished by war, and where
the mischief of it falls on those who make the war." The ruin and
bloodshed were limited in fact to the great lords and their feudal
retainers. If the towns once or twice threw themselves, as at Towton, into
the struggle, the trading and agricultural classes for the most part stood
wholly apart from it. While the baronage was dashing itself to pieces in
battle after battle justice went on undisturbed. The law-courts sat at
Westminster. The judges rode on circuit as of old. The system of jury
trial took more and more its modern form by the separation of the jurors
from the witnesses.

But beneath this outer order and prosperity the growth of wealth in the
trading classes was fast bringing about a social revolution which tended
as strongly as the outrages of the baronage to the profit of the crown.
The rise in the price of wool was giving a fresh impulse to the changes in
agriculture which had begun with the Black Death and were to go steadily
on for a hundred years to come. These changes were the throwing together
of the smaller holdings, and the introduction of sheep-farming on an
enormous scale. The new wealth of the merchant classes helped on the
change. They began to invest largely in land, and these "farming gentlemen
and clerking knights," as Latimer bitterly styled them, were restrained by
few traditions or associations in their eviction of the smaller tenants.
The land indeed had been greatly underlet, and as its value rose with the
peace and firm government of the early Tudors the temptation to raise the
customary rents became irresistible. "That which went heretofore for
twenty or forty pounds a year," we learn in Henry the Eighth's day, "now
is let for fifty or a hundred." But it had been only by this low scale of
rent that the small yeomanry class had been enabled to exist. "My father,"
says Latimer, "was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a
farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he
tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep,
and my mother milked thirty kine; he was able and did find the king a
harness with himself and his horse while he came to the place that he
should receive the king's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness
when he went to Blackheath Field. He kept me to school: he married my
sisters with five pounds apiece, so that he brought them up in godliness
and fear of God. He kept hos