strictness and severity, as did much obscure the king's mercy in sparing of blood, with the bleeding of so much. treasure."

FOOD AND WAGES IN THE SIXTEENTH
CENTURY.

There is fair evidence that the land system of England in the sixteenth century worked efficiently and well. It worked well for the support of a sturdy, high-hearted race, sound in body and fierce in spirit, and furnished. with thews and sinews which, under the stimulus of those "great shins of beef," their common diet, were the wonder of the age. "What comyn folke in all this world," says a state paper in 1515, "may compare with the comyns of England in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folke is so mighty, so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?" . . . The relative numbers of the French and English armies which fought at Cressy and Agincourt may have been exaggerated, but no allowance for exaggeration will affect the greatness of those exploits. . . . Again and again a few thousand Englishmen carried dismay into the heart of France. Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices from London, who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for years the terror of Normandy. In the very frolic of conscious power they fought and plundered, without pay, without reward, except what they could win for themselves; and when they fell at last, they fell only when surrounded by six times their number, and were cut to pieces in careless desperation. Invariably by friend and enemy alike the English are described as the fiercest people in all Europe; and this great physical

power they owed to the profuse abundance in which they lived, and to the soldier's training in which every man of them was bred from childhood.

...

The state of the working classes can, however, be more certainly determined by a comparison of their wages with the prices of food. Both were regulated, as far as regulation was possible, by act of Parliament, and we have therefore data of the clearest kind by which to judge. . . Beef and pork were a halfpenny a pound; mutton was three farthings. . . The butchers of London sold penny pieces of beef for the relief of the poor-every piece two pound and a half; and thirteen or fourteen of these pieces for twelvepence. . . . Other articles of food were in the same proportion. The best pig or goose in a country market could be bought for fourpence; a chicken for a penny; a hen for twopence. Strong beer, such as we now buy for eighteenpence a gallon, was then a penny a gallon, and table beer less than a halfpenny. French and German wines were eightpence the gallon; Spanish and Portuguese wines a shilling. . . . Rent, another important consideration, cannot be fixed so accurately, but even in this we are not without tolerable evidence. "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. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath Field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the king's majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds each, having brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours

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and some alms he gave to the poor, and all this he did off the said farm." If "three or four pounds at the uttermost" was the rent of a farm yielding such results, the rent of labourers' cottages is not likely to have been considerable. Some uncertainty is unavoidable in all. calculations of the present nature; yet, after making the utmost allowance for errors, we may conclude from such a table of prices that a penny must have been nearly equal in the reign of Henry VIII. to the present shilling. For a penny the labourer could buy as much bread, beef, beer, and wine; he could do as much towards finding lodging for himself and his family, as the labourer of the nineteenth century can for a shilling. Turning, then, to the table of wages, it will be easy to ascertain his position. In the reign of Henry VIII. it was enacted that master carpenters, masons, bricklayers, and other employers of skilled workmen, should give to each of their journeymen, if no meat or drink was allowed, sixpence a day for the half year, fivepence a day for the other half; or fivepence halfpenny for the yearly average. The common labourers were to receive fourpence a day for half the year; for the remaining half threepence.

In the harvest months they were allowed to work by the piece, and might earn considerably more; so that, in fact, the day labourer, if in full employment, received on an average fourpence a day for the whole year. Allowing a deduction of one day in a fortnight for a saint's day or a holiday, he received, therefore, an equivalent of something near to twenty shillings a week, the wages at present paid in English colonies; and this is far from being a full account of his advantages. Except in rare instances, the agricultural labourer held land in connection with his house, while in most parishes, if not in all, there were large ranges of common and uninclosed forest land, which

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furnished his fuel to him gratis, where pigs might range and ducks and geese; where, if he could afford a cow, he was in no danger of being unable to feed it. So important was this privilege considered, that when the commons began to be largely inclosed, Parliament insisted that the working man should not be without some piece of ground on which he could employ his own and his family's industry. In the thirty-first year of Elizabeth's reign it was ordered that no cottage should be built for residence without four acres of land at lowest being attached to it for the sole use of the occupants of such cottage.-Froude.

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.

The closing years of the fifteenth century were rendered famous by the many discoveries made by Spanish and Portuguese navigators. But more famous than all other discoverers was Christopher Colon or Columbus, a subject of the republic of Genoa. At the age of fourteen he went to sea, sailing to the various ports in the Mediterranean; but in 1467 he made an excursion to the northern seas, and visited the coasts of Iceland, to which the English and other nations had begun to resort on account of its fishery. He then settled at Lisbon, and married the daughter of one of the captains who had discovered and colonized the Madeira Islands. Columbus thus gained possession of journals and charts, the study of which soothed and inflamed his favourite passion.

The great desire of navigators was to discover a passage by sea to the East Indies. The Portuguese were steadily pushing their discoveries down the western coast of Africa, but they had not yet reached the Cape of Good

Hope, and Columbus believed that a voyage due west would be a shorter passage to India. It was known that the world was round, and India was believed to be so vast that it would be found to extend to within a moderate distance of Africa. Aristotle thought it probable that the Pillars of Hercules or Straits of Gibraltar were not far removed from the East Indies; and Seneca had affirmed that with a fair wind one might sail from Spain to India in a few days.

Columbus first sought the means of realizing his design from the senate of Genoa, but they rejected his proposal as a wild dream. At the court of Lisbon he was no more successful, for there all hopes were centered on the southward voyage round Africa.

Finally Columbus sought aid at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Spain was at that time engaged in a dangerous war with Granada, the last of the Moorish kingdoms in that country, and Ferdinand took but little interest in promises of discoveries in distant lands. But in January, 1492, Granada surrendered, Ferdinand and Isabella entered in triumph, and a little later Columbus, after weary waiting, was furnished with the means of making his voyage.

It con

The armament provided was not a great one. sisted of three vessels. The largest, a vessel of no considerable burden, was commanded by Columbus, as admiral, who gave it the name of Santa Maria. The two others were light vessels hardly superior in burden or force to large boats. This squadron, if it merits that name, was victualled for twelve months, and had on board ninety men, mostly sailors, together with a few adventurers, who followed the fortunes of Columbus. Before starting they marched in solemn procession to the monastery of Rabida. There they confessed their sins, obtained