Note 207 — Chapter IV · AGRICULTURAL TRIBES.

There was also far less need for agricultural labourers than before. “The decay of tillage and lack of rural employment, during this century,” says Professor Cunningham “rest on unimpeachable evidence”207. In the 14th century “the problem of the unemployed, as it now presents itself, had not yet arisen.” But the agrarian changes “deprived great numbers of the agricultural labouring class,—small customary tenants and cottagers,—of the means of support in their old places of abode, and sent them wandering over the country”208.