ked up
after the popish manner and about the middest of evensong, a sow cometh
into the quire, and pulled all to the ground; for which heinous fact, it
is said she was afterwards beheaded; but to that I am not privy." Think
of the condition of Oxford when pigs went to mass! Four years after this
there was a sickness in England, of which a third part of the people did
taste, and many clergymen, who had prayed not to live after the death of
Queen Mary, had their desire, the Lord hearing their prayer, says
Harrison, "and intending thereby to give his church a breathing time."

There were four classes in England--gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and
artificers or laborers. Besides the nobles, any one can call himself a
gentleman who can live without work and buy a coat of arms--though some
of them "bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain." The
complaint of sending abroad youth to be educated is an old one; Harrison
says the sons of gentlemen went into Italy, and brought nothing home but
mere atheism, infidelity, vicious conversation, and ambitious, proud
behavior, and retained neither religion nor patriotism. Among citizens
were the merchants, of whom Harrison thought there were too many; for,
like the lawyers, they were no furtherance to the commonwealth, but
raised the price of all commodities. In former, free-trade times, sugar
was sixpence a pound, now it is two shillings sixpence; raisins were one
penny, and now sixpence. Not content with the old European trade, they
have sought out the East and West Indies, and likewise Cathay and
Tartary, whence they pretend, from their now and then suspicious voyages,
they bring home great commodities. But Harrison cannot see that prices
are one whit abated by this enormity, and certainly they carry out of
England the best of its wares.

The yeomen are the stable, free men, who for the most part stay in one
place, working the farms of gentlemen, are diligent, sometimes buy the
land of unthrifty gentlemen, educate their sons to the schools and the
law courts, and leave them money to live without labor. These are the men
that made France afraid. Below these are the laborers and men who work at
trades, who have no voice in the commonwealth, and crowds of young
serving-men who become old beggars, highway-robbers, idle fellows, and
spreaders of all vices. There was a complaint then, as now, that in many
trades men scamped their work, but, on the whole, husbandmen and
artificers