may have been exaggerated, but no allowance for exaggeration will affect the greatness of those exploits; and in stories of authentic actions under Henry VIII., where the accuracy of the account is undeniable, no disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies wherever they could meet them. Again and again a few thousands of them carried dismay into the heart of France. Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices, from London,[1] 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 (the English wild beasts, Benvenuto Cellini calls them); 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, so far as regulation was possible, by act of parliament, and we have therefore data of the clearest kind by which to judge. The majority of agricultural labourers lived,
- ↑ Hall, p. 646.
