Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/99

THE ANCESTOR 59 which we live ? In England, classes at first were nations super- imposed one upon another. The serf was a Briton,^ the villein a Saxon, the socager in many instances a Dane, the freeholder almost invariably a Norman. Here, for some reason never yet fully explained, social evolution ran a different course from that which it followed upon the continent. Here there was never the same gulf between the noble and the roturier ; here peasants and nobles stood together in resisting the encroach- ments of the Crown, and a sturdy race of yeomen-freeholders came into being, who proved their worth in the French wars of Edward III. and Henry V., and the campaigns of Cromwell and Marlborough. This bond of sympathy and mutual respect between the nobility and gentry on one hand and the poor freeholder on the other, founded, as Bishop Stubbs suggests, upon the possession of the parliamentary franchise, seems to me the most remarkable fact in English history, the national characteristic which differentiates political and social development in England from that which obtained in France or Germany, Italy or Spain. I imagine that few, even among students of history, have formed a clear idea of the stratification of medieval society. To deal first with the class of gentlemen, every one of course has heard of the rhyme which John Ball circulated in the peasant revolt of 138 1 : — When Adam delved and Eve span, Who vi^as then the gentleman ? Every one is acquainted with Tennyson's defence of the 'grand old name of gentleman,' and with the antique song which sings the praises of the ' good old English gentleman, all of the olden time.' Some have dipped into Shirley's Noble and Gentle Men of England^ wherein the author traces the history of three hundred families still existing and holding landed property, whose ancestors were of knightly or gentle rank before the commencement of the sixteenth century. A few perhaps have studied in Strutt's Dress and Habits of the People of England the illustrations, reproduced from illuminated manuscripts, which represent in their actual costume and sur- roundings ' gentlemen of the fourteenth century.' As to the origin of the class, Freeman traces it back at a very remote period into Normandy. 'Early in the eleventh century,' he 1 I am aware that this viev^^ is not generally accepted.