Читать книгу The Industrial History of England - Henry de Beltgens Gibbins - Страница 29

—The inhabitants of the towns were of all classes of society. There was the noble who held the castle, or the abbot and monks in the monastery, with their retainers and personal dependants; there were the busy merchants, active both in the management of their trade and of civic affairs; and there were artisans and master workmen in different crafts. There were free tenants, or tenants in socage, including all the burgesses, or burgage-tenants, as they were called; and there was the lower class of villeins, which, however, always tended to rise into free men as they were admitted into the gilds. “To and fro went our forefathers in the quiet, quaint, narrow streets, or worked at some handicraft in their houses, or exposed their goods round the market-cross. And in those old streets and houses, in the town-mead and market-place, amid the murmur of the mill beside the stream, and the notes of the bell that sounded its summons to the crowded assembly of the town-mote, in merchant gild and craft gild, was growing up that sturdy, industrial life, unheeded and unnoticed by knight or baron, that silently and surely was building up the slow structure of England’s wealth and freedom.”15

15 V. Industry in England, p. 96; and Green, History, I. 212.