66 THE ANCESTOR and esquires, not gentlemen, but ' persons having lands and rents to the value of £4.0 per annum or above.' ^ In Sir John Fortescue's treatise on the laws of England, written about the year 1470, he dwells upon the wealth of the rural districts and the wide distribution of landed property. No hamlet, he tells us, was so small that there was not to be found in it a knight, an esquire or a franklin, and also other free tenants and many yeomen. In a poem on England's commercial policy com- posed in the latter half of the fifteenth century, ' alle maner of men ' are explained as consisting of ' knyghtis, squyers and alle the comynalte.'^ The Cheshire Petition of 1450 was pre- sented in the name of the ^Abbotes, Priours and all the Clergy, Barons, Knyghtis, Squiers and all the comminaltee ' of the county palatine.^ In a curious certificate of non-villeinage, granted in 1446 by John, Lord Darcy, to a certain John of the Hall of Temple Newsome in Yorkshire, the recipient is made to protest against certain reports which had been spread abroad to his disadvantage. It has been commonly said, he complains, that he is Lord Darcy's villein and bondman regardant, 'amongez estatz, knyghtes, squyers and comyners.'^ The London and Middlesex subsidy rolls of 1435-6 and 141 2 show that there were in those years many knights and esquires resi- dent in the city and county, but not a single gentleman.^ In Higden's Polycbronicon (before 1363), and in the two English translations made in 1387 and 1432-50, it is stated as charac- teristic of our fellow countrymen that every class aped the manners and costume of that immediately above it, ' wherefore hit is seen oftetymes that a yoman^ dothe represente as the state of a esqwier, an esqwier of a knyghte, a knyghte of a lorde, a lorde of a duke, a duke off a kynge.'^ In the Com- mission of May I, 1434,^ and the Petition against Livery of 1400,^ a scale is laid down whereby offenders are to be fined according to their status. It is proposed that a knight shall forfeit ;^40 for offending against the statute ; an esquire, £20 ; a yoman ou vadlet^ £10, In the poll-tax of 1379, and in the statute which lays down the method of assessment, the different ranks in life are carefully distinguished from each other. 1 Statute 4 Hen. VIII. c. 19. 2 Wright, ii. 287. 2 Jrch^o/ogia, Ivii. 75. ^ ro?-h Archaol iv. 158. 5 Archceol. Journal, xliv. 56, and Subsidy Roll ^ Vemaculus, more properly a countryman. ii. 171. « Rot. Pari. iv. 456. ^ Ibid. iii. 478.
