smith worked at a common forge.’  His existence, moreover, was enlivened by a considerable number of sports.  A statute at the end of the fourteenth century (12 Ric.  II, c. 6) says he was fond of playing at tennis(!), football, quoits, dice, casting the stone, and other games, which this statute forbad him, and enacted that he should use his bow and arrows on Sundays and holidays instead of such idle sport.  This is a foretaste of the modern sentiment that seeks to wean him from watching football matches and take to miniature rifle clubs.  He was also, like some of his successors, fond of poaching, though he appears to have been rash enough to indulge in it by day. 13 Ric.  II, c. 13, says he was prone on holidays, when good Christian people be in church hearing divine service, to go hunting with greyhounds and other dogs, in the parks and warrens of the lord and of others, and sometimes these hunts were turned into conferences and conspiracies,’ for to rise and disobey their allegiance’, such as preceded the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; and accordingly no one who did not own lands worth 40s. a year was to keep a dog to hunt, or ferrets other ‘engines’:  the first game law on the English statute book.

FOOTNOTES: 

[127] Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 302.  No doubt the riches of the Berkeleys were considerably greater than those of many of the barons.

[128] Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 166.  There is no reason to doubt Smyth, as he wrote with the original accounts before him.

[129] Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 156.

[130] The yeoman is said to have made his appearance in the fifteenth century, but the small freeholders of the manor before that date were to all intents and purposes yeomen.  No doubt, as trade grew in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries successful tradesmen bought small freeholds in the country and swelled the numbers of yeomen.

[131] Harrison, Description of Britain, F.J.  Furnivall edn., p. 337.

[132] Domesday of S. Paul, Camden Society, p. 129.

[133] Turner, Domestic Architecture, i. 59.

[134] Domesday of S. Paul, p. 123.

[135] Historical MSS.  Commission Report, v. 444.

[136] Ormerod, History of Cheshire, i. 129.

[137] Domesday of S. Paul, p. xcvii.

[138] Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century.

[139] Eden, State of the Poor, i. 21.

[140] See Cullum, History of Hawsted.

[141] Harrison, Description of Britain, Appendix ii, lxxxi.  In some manors, however, there were careful regulations for public health.  According to the Durham Halmote Rolls, published by the Surtees Society, village officials watched over the water supply, prevented the fouling of streams; bye-laws were enacted as to the regulation of the common place for clothes washing, and the times for emptying and cleansing ponds and mill-dams.