speedily worked up by the still scanty 106 manufactures of the country, but made a sort of semi-vagabond population, troublesome enough to the upper and middle classes. The laws made against such paupers in the time of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. were absolutely ferocious, and men were hanged out of the way by the thousand.
But in the reign of Elizabeth it was found out that even this was not enough to cure the evil, which of course had been much aggravated by the suppression of the religious houses, part of whose function was the housing and feeding of any part of the workmen temporarily displaced. A Poor Law, therefore, was passed (1601) for dealing with this misery, and, strange to say, it was far more humane than might have been expected from the way in which the poor had been dealt with up to that time; so much so, indeed, that the utilitarian philanthropists of the beginning of this century felt themselves obliged to deal with it in a drastic way, which left us a Poor Law as inhumane as could well be. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century 107 things began to improve with our working population: the growth of the towns stimulated agriculture, and tillage began to revive again, though of course under the new system of cultivation for profit. Matters were in fact settling down, and preparing the country by a time of something like prosperity for the new revolution in industry.81
The condition of the people was on the whole worse on the Continent than in England. Serfdom was by no means extinct in France, Hungary, or Germany, and that serfdom was far more burdensome and searching side by side with the exploitation of the market than it had been in the feudal period. Other survivals of the medieval epoch there were also—thus in Germany the guilds had still some life and power, and the people were not utterly divorced from the land as in England, although the predominant competition: of the markets destroyed much of the good that lingered in these half-extinct 108 customs. At the same time the populations were crushed by the frightful wars which passed over them—in all which religion was the immediate excuse.