Everywhere the modern centralised 91 bureaucratic nation was being developed. In France the long and fierce wars of the Burgundian and Armagnac factions gave opportunity for the consolidation of the monarchy, at last effected, as above said by Louis XI., the forerunner of the most successful king of France and the last successful one—Louis XIV. In England the Wars of the Roses were not so bitter as the French wars, and the people took small part in them, except as vassals or retainers of the households of the contending nobles; but they nevertheless played their part in the disruption of feudality, not only by the thinning-out of the nobles slain in battle or on the scaffold, but also by helping directly to draw England into the world-market.
Under the medieval system the workmen, oppressed and protected by the lords of the manor and the guilds, were not available for the needs of commerce. The serfs ate up the part of the produce spared them by their lords; the guild craftsmen sold the produce of their own hands to their neighbours without the help of a middleman. In neither case 92 was there anything left over for the supply of a great market.
But England, one of the best pasture countries of the world, had in her even then capacities for profit-grinding, if the tillage system of the manor and the yeoman’s holdings could be got rid of. The landowners, ruined by their long war, saw the demand for English wool, and set themselves to the task of helping evolution with much of the vigour and unscrupulous pettifogging which has since won for their race the temporary command of the world-market. The tenants were rack-rented, the yeomen were expropriated, the hinds were driven off the land into the towns, there to work as “free” labourers. England thus contributed her share to commerce, paying for it with nothing more important than the loss of the rough joviality, plenty, and independence of spirit, which once attracted the admiration of foreigners more crushed by the feudal system and by its abuses than were the English.