The French, however, were in due time compelled to evacuate Scotland, and the danger in the north ceased to be pressing. There was, however, constant trouble in Ireland; and to provide the necessary troops to keep it in order, resort was made to an instrument of which we shall hear much in the years that follow, namely, the press-gang. None the less the revelations discovered by the war in Scotland prompted Cecil to require a report from the magistrates all over England as to the condition of the population and the working of the statutes enacted for national defence. The answer was by no means complimentary to the influence of the Reformation, nor encouraging in respect of military efficiency. The people, reported the magistrates, were no longer trained to the use of arms, because the gentlemen no longer set them the example. In plain words the old system of the fyrd, a people in arms, was obsolete. Not one but many causes had conspired to make it so. The country was passing through a social as well as a religious revolution; old landmarks were vanishing, old customs dying out; and the loss of the old faith had become to many an excuse for disburdening themselves of every irksome duty. Again, Calais was lost, and though there were still vague hopes that it might yet be regained, England was now strictly insular and France was closed as a field of national adventure. The people had awaked to the fact that their heritage was the sea; and the life of the corsair, free, stirring, lucrative, and dangerous, appealed powerfully to a race at once adventurous and grasping, energetic and casual, bold and born gamblers. Moreover, the national weapon, the long-bow, and the tactics that went with it, were things of the past, while the new arms were at once distasteful and costly, and in the unsettled state of the country not to be trusted in every man's hand. The whole business of war, too, was becoming difficult and elaborate, and was passing through transitions too rapid to permit it to be learned once for all. Military training no longer consisted in friendly matches at the archery butts, but in precise movements of drill and manœuvre, unwelcome alike because their advantages were unrecognised, and because they could no longer be learned from the old masters. The acknowledged leaders in hundred and parish and shire gave place to experts trained in foreign schools, men who swaggered about in plumed hats and velvet doublets and extravagant hose, swearing strange oaths of mingled blasphemy taught by Spanish Catholics and Lutheran landsknechts, and prating of besonios and alferez, of camp-masters and rote-masters, of furriers and huren-weibels, of false brays, mines and countermines, in one long insolent crow of military superiority. Such instructors were not likely to soften the painful lesson that war had become a profession, and could no longer be tacked on as a mere appendage to the everyday life of the citizen.