We become aware, however, from the time of the Great Charter, and during the steady growth of the country’s prosperity, of a widening chasm between the rich and the poor within the ranks of the commons themselves, and that too, not only in the centres of trade (as we shall see), but also in country districts. The claims of feudal service did not prevent some among the villagers from adding house to house, and field to field, thereby marking in every parish the interval between the thriving and comfortable and a residuum of _pauperes_ composed of the less capable or the less fortunate. A curious story, told by Roger of Wendover of the village of Abbotsley near St Neots, will serve as an illustration of a fact which we might be otherwise well assured of from first principles[82]. The year 1234 was the third of a succession of lean years. So sharp was the famine before the harvest of that year, that crowds of the poor went to the fields in the month of July, and plucked the unripe ears of corn, rubbing them in their hands and eating the raw grain. The St Albans monk is full of indignation against the prevailing spirit of avarice which reduced some of the people to that sad necessity: Alms had everywhere gone out of fashion; the rich, abounding in all manner of temporal goods, were so smitten with blind greed that they suffered Christian men, made in the image of God, to die for want of food. Some, indeed, were so impious as to say that their wealth was due to their own industry, and not to the gift of God. Of that mind seem to have been the more prosperous cultivators of the village of Abbotsley “who looked on the needy with an eye of suspicion[83].” The following story is told of them. Seeing the poor making free with their corn in the ear, they assembled in the parish church on a Sunday in August, and assailed the parson with their clamours, demanding that he would forthwith pronounce the ban of the Church upon those who helped themselves to the ears of corn. The parson, notwithstanding a well-known precedent in the Gospels, was about to yield to their insistence, when a man of religion and piety rose in the congregation and adjured the priest, in the name of God and all His saints, to refrain from the sentence, adding that those who were in need were welcome to help themselves to his own corn. The others, however, insisted, and the parson was just beginning to ban the pilferers, when a thunderstorm suddenly burst, with hail and torrents of rain. When the storm had passed, the peasants went out to find their crops destroyed,--all but that one simple and just man who found his corn untouched. We have only to recall the minute subdivisions of the common field, or fields, of the parish into half-acre strips separated by balks of turf, and the fact that no two half-acres of the same cultivator lay together, to realize how nice must have been the discrimination[84].