There were, of course, many things besides the statute, tending to keep the majority of peasants on the manors where they had been born; so that the formal abolition of villenage remained to be carried by rebellion in 1381, while many traces of it in practice remained for long after. Those who stayed on their old manors, or removed to another county or hundred to become tenants under new lords, were able to get permanently better wages; the price of labour remained about forty per cent. higher than it had been before the mortality; so that the statute was on the whole ineffective. But another large proportion of the labouring class appears to have been driven to a wandering life. It is not easy to explain on economical principles why the class of “wasters,” of whom we hear so much, should have been called into existence. Hands were scarce, and wages were high; the conditions look on the surface to be entirely adverse to the creation of a class of sturdy beggars and idle tramps. But the economic conditions were really complex; and when all has been said on the head of economics, there will remain something to be explained on the side of ethics. Not only the labourers but also the employers of labour were cut off in the mortality. A great part of the capital of the country passed suddenly into new hands. Before the Parliament of 1351 legislated upon wages, it was occupied with a number of technical difficulties about wills. Of the proving of wills and the granting of letters of administration on a great scale we have had an instance from an archdeaconry in Lancashire. In Colchester, a town with some four hundred burgesses, one hundred and eleven wills were proved[354]. In the Husting Court of London, three hundred and sixty wills were enrolled and proved from 13th January, 1349, to 13th January, 1350. An immense number of persons came into money who could not all have had the inclination, even if they had the skill and aptitude, for employing it as capital. If there were wasters among the labourers, there were wasters also among the moneyed class. The mortality produced, indeed, that demoralisation of the whole national life which has been usually observed to follow in the like circumstances. “Almost all great epochs of moral degradation are connected with great epidemics,” says Niebuhr, generalizing the evidence which Thucydides gives specially for the plague of Athens[355]. The fourteenth century was by no means a period of high morality before the Black Death; but it was undoubtedly worse after it. Langland’s poem of the vision of Piers the Ploughman is one long diatribe against the vices of the age, and some of the worst of them he expressly dates “sith the pestilence time.” It will be convenient to take these ethical illustrations, before we proceed with the effects of the mortality upon material prosperity and population, and with the domestication of plague on the soil.