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over from their primeval forests to ravage and butcher, and finally to settle themselves in that foggy island, which was naturally only a little more habitable than their own muddy swamps in Jutland. Mr. Taine has described them in language which it may be worth while to repeat: "Huge white bodies, cold blooded, with fierce blue eyes, reddish flaxen hair, ravenous stomachs, filled with meat and cheese; of a cold temperament, prone to brutal drunkenness! Pirates! They had found that of all kinds of hunting, the man-hunt was the most profitable and the most noble! From that moment, sea-faring, war, and pillage became their ideal of a freeman's work. So they left the care of their land and flocks to the women, and in wretched boats of hide dashed to sea in their two sailed barks, and landed anywhere; killed everything; and having sacrificed in honor of Odin and Thor the tithe of their prisoners, and leaving behind them the red light of their burnings, went further on to begin again. Lord,'-says a certain litany'deliver us from the fury of the Jutes!' Of all barbarians, they were the strongest of body, the most formidable, and the most cruelly ferocious." For centuries the descendants of these vikings had fought with the Britons, and fought with each other, and there had been little to elevate or refine them. In due time, they had accepted the Christian religion, and they had made some considerable advances towards civilization; but a state of things still existed among them in the fourteenth century which to us at the present day seems little better than anarchy. It was the period of the "hundred years war" waged in France by the English kings for the possession of the throne of that country. During that war, English soldiers had become accustomed to deeds of outrage, and had been trained to the work of plunder, in all its various forms,the pillage of farm houses, the sack of cities, the ransom of captives! The feeling common among them was expressed by the soldier who exclaimed: "If God had been a soldier nowadays, he would have been a marauder!" It is not surprising that on the return of these men to England, lawlessness and brutality reigned without check. The historian Green says of this period, that houses were sacked, judges were overawed or driven from the bench, peaceful men were hewn

down by assassins or plundered by armed bands, women were carried off to forced marriages, elections were controlled by brute force, parliaments were degraded into camps of armed retainers. Hume Hume says, "No subject could trust to the laws for protection. Men openly associated themselves, under the patronage of some great baron, for their mutual defence. They wore public badges, by which their confederacy was distinguished. They supported each other in all quarrels, iniquities, extortions, murders, robberies, and other crimes. Their chief was more their sovereign than the king himself. There was perpetual turbulence, disorder, and faction." Jessop, an English antiquary, says: "If a man had a claim on another for a debt, or a piece of land, or a right which was denied him, or even if he thought he had, he found no difficulty in getting together a score or two of ruffians to back him in taking the law into his own hands." The books are full of the stories of outrage and savagery, that were constantly occurring. The villein who had run away from his lord and become an outlaw, the broken soldier returning penniless from the wars, found shelter and wages in the homes of the greater barons, and furnished them with a force ready at any moment for violence or strife. It was the recognized custom of the time. It was even reduced to a system, and was known by the name of "maintenance." England was divided into numberless hostile camps. The state of things was little better than that of an armed truce. Every one was attached to some one of the warring factions, and these might come to blows any day on the slightest provocation. The yeomen and even the lords of the manor everywhere put on the livery of some powerful baron in order to be able to secure aid and patronage in any fray or suit in which they might be engaged. Mr. Green says that, even in Parliament itself, "the White Rose of the house of York, the Red Rose of the house of Lancaster, the portcullis of the Beauforts, the pied bull of the Nevils, the bear and ragged staff of the Beauchamps, were seen on hundreds of breasts."

In further illustration of the condition of things in England at this time, Dr. Jessop says that in a small parish in Norfolk a certain John de la Wade got together a band of men,

invaded the manor of Hamon de Cleure, seized the grain, threshed it, cut down the timber, and carried off the whole. He then describes at length two other cases of a precisely similar kind which happened the same year in the same parish. He tells us also that two gentlemen of position went with twenty-five of their retainers to the Hall at Little Barningham, where lived an old lady, Petronilla de Gros, set fire to the house in five places, dragged the old lady out with brutal violence, and so worked upon her fears as to compel her to tell them where were her jewels and money. In another little parish, which he describes, he says the catalogue of crime for the year is so ghastly,-I use his own words,—“ as positively to stagger one." I will not take any account of the minor offenses which, as he says, were brought to trial before the courts, or give the details of the worst crimes which he describes; but he says that, in that small parish, in one year, eight men and four women were murdered, and that there were besides five fatal fights.

The degree of civilization to which the people of England had then attained can be estimated from the way in which. they lived. Dr. Jessop tells us that the greater part of the people lived in houses which were no better than what we should call hovels. They were covered with turf, and sometimes with thatch. None of them had chimneys. They had not even windows. The hole in the roof which let out the smoke rendered windows unnecessary. Even in the houses of the nobility, windows were rare. Oiled linen cloth served to admit a feeble semblance of light and keep out the rain. In the houses of the laborers, the fire was in the middle, and around it the laborer and his wife and children huddled. Going to bed meant flinging themselves down on the straw, as now in a gypsy's tent. Dr. Jessop says that the food of the majority of the people of England was of the coarsest description. The poor man's loaf was black as mud and as tough as shoe leather. In the winter time, turf was burned; but the horse and sheep and cattle were half starved for at least four months in the year, and one and all were much smaller than they are now. There were no potatoes, and the absence of vegetables for the greater part of the year, together with the

utter disregard of all hygienic laws, made diseases of all kinds frightfully common. As for the laborer's dress, it was a single garment, a kind of tunic leaving the arms and legs bare, with a girdle of rope or leather tied round the waist, in which a knife was stuck to use sometimes in hacking his bread, sometimes for stabbing an enemy in a quarrel.

Dr. Jessop adds that if the houses of the laborers were squalid, and dirty, and dark, the homes of the employers of labor were not much better. In the homes of the nobles and of the gentry, and in some of the more richly endowed of the monasteries, there might be more provision for comfort; but, even centuries later, fresh straw was laid down daily in the palace of the king. Coarseness and want of refinement characterized the gentry and the nobles. Their ignorance was great. Their tastes were low. Anthony Wood, the historian of the University of Oxford, tells a story of a baron of that day at whose castle two students presented themselves and sought an introduction by sending in their academical credentials, in which, among other accomplishments, they were described as gifted with a poetical vein. But so far was the baron disposed to treat them with the slightest respect, that he ordered that they should be put in two buckets over a well and be dipped alternately into the water until each should produce a couplet on his awkward situation. The historian says that it was not till after a considerable number of duckings that the unfortunate students finished the rhymes, while the baron and his retainers stood around during the process of concoction, and made themselves merry over these involuntary ascents and descents.

I have carried you back with me in English history just about as far before the time of the landing on these shores of the founders of this town, as the period of their landing is before this anniversary occasion. I have done this because in order to form any adequate conception of what they and the other men of the seventeenth century were, it is necessary to understand what the men of England were who preceded them in the fourteenth century. Just as to have any proper appreciation of the sun in its early dawn, while it is still struggling

with the mists of morning and its rays are obscured and the air is damp and chill, it is necessary to go back, in thought at least, to the thick darkness that one short hour before covered all. It would seem as if it were hardly necessary to remind you that, according to the unalterable laws of nature, the dawn with all its incompleteness must ever precede the day. Yet there have always been, and always will be, sentimental people, who dissatisfied with the dull routine of their lives, will delight to deceive themselves, and will plaintively sigh for the good old days, and imagine that, at some remote period in the past, there was a fabulous age, in which the early dawn lighted up and gilded the world as gloriously as the sun in mid heavens. But this is all a dream. The facts stubbornly refuse to countenance a belief in any such period. They point to the future as the only golden age. It is because so many persons have not understood this, that they have actually supposed when they have heard of the darkness of the past, of its narrowness, its bigotry, its cruelty, that these were the special characteristics of the Puritans, that it was the Puritans who were in some way responsible for all that is so repulsive; when it was the Puritans who, although not entirely free from the effects of the influences under which they had been educated, grappled, with resolute and intrepid spirit, with the abuses of their time, and sought to clear them away and bring in something better.

Yet

The description I have given of England in the fourteenth century is very imperfect. Any description, so brief as such an hour as this allows, must be entirely inadequate. perhaps it has served to remind you what thick darkness then covered England. That century and the centuries before it have been called the centuries of death. They were so indeed! Yet perhaps they might better be called centuries of birth. But the processes by which the development of life proceeded were so painfully slow that we grow weary as we trace them in our histories, and even from century to century we can hardly assure ourselves that there has been any substantial progress; or scarcely that there is any life at all,-death and life seem to contend together so long for the mastery. To watch the struggle between the new life and the old death is like watching the slow coming on of the belated spring.