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64 THE ANCESTOR the great pestilence of 1349, which by increasing the price of labour compelled the abandonment of landlord cultivation and led to the practice of letting lands on lease ; that the ' order of gentleman as a separate class was forming as something new,' not, as Freeman imagined, in the twelfth century, but in the fifteenth ; that, deserted by the wealthier families, the franklin class fell into decay, lost its political importance and sank into the yeomanry ; that its members, as not being of ' gentill berth e,' were excluded by law from Parliament and by preju- dice from the shrievalty, and that the poorer free-tenants, as ' persons of small substance and no value,' were deprived of the franchise and rendered incapable of serving upon juries. Let us assume that as time went on and the heralds preached their evil gospel of gentility, the gulf widened between rich and poor ; that the gentry ceased to intermarry with the yeomanry, to visit them at their houses, to attend their weddings and stand as sponsors at the christening of their children ; that a bitter and jealous feeling grew up which made itself felt at last in the wars of the Cavaliers and Roundheads. If this were a true theory of classes, should we not be obliged to reconsider our whole view of English history ? Would not such dis- coveries throw a new light upon the stability of our institu- tions, the military strength of the nation, the absence of aristo- cratic feeling, the friendliness and want of ceremony which marked the relations between barons, knights and free- holders ? We are dealing then with something more than a mere verbal distinction between esquires and gentlemen, yeomen and franklins. I hope to show that in the struggle for English liberty the poorer freeholders were drawn to the side of the barons and knights not, as Stubbs has suggested,^ by the acci- dent of the parliamentary franchise, but by the fellow-feeling which naturally exists amongst members of the same class. A wide gulf, as regards both birth and tenure, was stretched between freeholder and villein, but from the earls and barons down to the richer franklin who served as sheriff for his county or represented it in Parliament, and the poorest freeholder who drew a bow at Poitiers or Agincourt, we have to do with but a single class, differenced only by undetermined gradations of wealth and position and power. It may sound a sweeping statement, but there were no 1 Constit. Hist, (1878) iii. 554.