At the outskirts of every town in England of any size there
were crawling about emaciated creatures covered with loathsome sores,
living heaven knows how. They were called by the common name of
lepers, and probably the leprosy strictly so called was awfully
common. But the children must have swarmed with vermin; and the itch,
and the scurvy, and the ringworm, with other hideous eruptions, must
have played fearful havoc with the weak and sickly.
As for the dress of the working classes, it was hardly dress at all.
I doubt whether the great mass of the labourers in Norfolk had more
than a single garment--a kind of tunic leaving the arms and legs
bare, with a girdle of rope or leather round the waist, in which a
man's knife was stuck, to use sometimes for hacking his bread,
sometimes for stabbing an enemy in a quarrel. As for any cotton
goods, such as are familiar to you all, they had never been dreamt
of, and I suspect that no more people in Norfolk wore linen
habitually than now wear silk.
Money was almost inconceivably scarce. The labourer's wages were paid
partly in rations of food, partly in other allowances, and only
partly in money; he had to take what he could get. Even the quit-
rent, or what I have called the ground rent, was frequently
compounded for by the tenant being required to find a pair of gloves,
or a pound of cummin, or some other acknowledgment in lieu of a money
payment; and one instance occurs among the Rougham charters of a man
buying as much as 11-1/2 acres, and paying for them partly in money
and partly in barley.
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