THE ANCESTOR 77 instances, a younger son took his share of the stock, bought or hired land from his elder brother, and settled down quietly to an agricultural life in his native village.^ The Great Plague of 1349 put an end to this state of things. Owing to the increased cost of labour landlord cultivation became impossible, and the ' stock and land lease ' was introduced, which always ran the same course and ended in the landlord being left with the experience, the tenant with the stock. The later practice of leasing to a capitalist farmer, and the invention of trusts and uses, turned the younger son into a pauper, and he became a soldier of fortune, not a bad profession while the French wars lasted. From France he returned, when peace was con- cluded, to stir up strife at home, to idle about his brother's hall, or to be a hanger-on at the castle of some great peer, where he learnt to prosecute with zeal and acrimony the feuds and quarrels in which his patron was involved. Such men were placed in an invidious position by the statute of 141 3, which compelled them for the first time to declare their profession, dignity or degree. It was an insult to suggest that they were franklins or husbandmen or yeomen ; they were not earls or barons, or even like their elder brothers, knights or esquires, but they too were of noble blood ; they too were ' gentille- men of auncestrey,' and as ' gentillemen ' they chose to be described. In the fifteenth century it was considered to be bad manners to argue about a man's position, and I suspect that the young man Page, with whose unhappy end the reader is already ac- quainted, may have offended against this rule of etiquette. If Robert Erdeswyke had asked to be put down as a duke, no sensible clerk or collector or man of law would have said him nay. II ARMS AND THE GENTLEMAN Our enquiry, so far, has dealt only with medieval classes. We have seen that the title of gentilbomme, or gentleman, was applicable to earls and barons as well as to commoners of good birth, and that the change of meaning which restricted it to the latter did not begin until the fifteenth century had opened. I propose to deal now with the more interesting and delicate 1 Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 52, 293 ; Economic Interpretation of Hist. p. 264,
