towns afforded them little opportunity, for there the trades were largely in the hands of close corporations descended from the medieval craft guilds.  These were eventually to be swept away by the general trend of business.  Their dissolution had indeed already begun; for smart village craftsmen were even then forming the new industrial settlements from which most of the great manufacturing towns of England have sprung.  Camden the historian found Birmingham full of ringing anvils, Sheffield ‘a town of great name for the smiths therein,’ Leeds renowned for cloth, and Manchester already a sort of cottonopolis, though the ‘cottons’ of those days were still made of wool.

There was a wages question then as now.  There were demands for a minimum living wage.  The influx of gold and silver from America had sent all prices soaring.  Meat became almost prohibitive for the ’submerged tenth’—­there was a rapidly submerging tenth.  Beef rose from one cent a pound in the forties to four in 1588, the year of the Armada.  How would the lowest paid of craftsmen fare on twelve cents a day, with butter at ten cents a pound?  Efforts were made, again and again, to readjust the ratio between prices and wages.  But, as a rule, prices increased much faster than wages.

All these things—­the increase of surplus hands, the high cost of living, grievances about wages and interest—­tended to make the farms and workshops of England recruiting-grounds for the sea; and the young men would strike out for themselves as freighters, traders, privateers, or downright pirates, lured by the dazzling chance of great and sudden wealth.

‘The gamble of it’ was as potent then as now, probably more potent still.  It was an age of wild speculation accompanied by all the usual evils that follow frenzied ways.  It was also an age of monopoly.  Both monopoly and speculation sent recruits into the sea-dog ranks.  Elizabeth would grant, say, to Sir Walter Raleigh, the monopoly of sweet wines.  Raleigh would naturally want as much sweet wine imported as England could be induced to swallow.  So, too, would Elizabeth, who got the duty.  Crews would be wanted for the monopolistic ships.  They would also be wanted for ‘free-trading’ vessels, that is, for the ships of the smugglers who underbid, undersold, and tried to overreach the monopolist, who represented law, though not quite justice.  But speculation ran to greater extremes than either monopoly or smuggling.  Shakespeare’s ‘Putter-out of five for one’ was a typical Elizabethan speculator exploiting the riskiest form of sea-dog trade for all—­and sometimes for more than all—­that it was worth.  A merchant-adventurer would pay a capitalist, say, a thousand pounds as a premium to be forfeited if his ship should be lost, but to be repaid by the capitalist fivefold to the merchant if it returned.  Incredible as it may seem to us, there were shrewd money-lenders always ready for this sort of deal in life—­or life-and-death—­insurance:  an eloquent testimony to the risks encountered in sailing unknown seas in the midst of well-known dangers.