One source of later misery was indeed unknown. The war of classes had not yet begun. The lawyers had not been at work hardening and defining vague traditions, and legally the position of the serf was far better than it was a hundred years later. The feudal system still preserved relations between the lord and his dependents, which were more easy and familiar than anything we know. The lord of the manor had not begun to encroach on the privileges or the "common" rights of the tenant, nor had the merchant guilds of the towns attacked the liberties of the craftsmen and lesser folk. For a century to come the battle for lands or rights was mainly waged between the lord or the men of one township or manor with the men of a neighbouring township or manor; and it was not till these had fairly ended their quarrel that lords and burghers turned to fight against the liberties and privileges of serfs and craftsmen. There are indications, on the other hand, that one effect of the new administration of justice, as it told on the poor, began early to show itself in the growth of an "outlaw" class. Crimes of violence were surprisingly common. Dead bodies were found in the wood, in the field, in the fold, in the barn. In an extraordinary number of cases the judges' records of a little later time tell of houses broken into by night and robbed, and every living thing within them slain, and no clue was ever found to the plunderers. There were stories in Henry's days of a new crime-of men wearing religious dress who joined themselves to wayfarers, and in such a case the traveller was never seen again alive. Tales of Robin Hood began to take shape. The by-ways and thickets were peopled with men, innocent or guilty, but all alike desperate. One Richard, we read, whose fellow at the plough fell dead in an epileptic fit, fled in terror of the judges to the woods, and so did many a worse man than Richard. We find constantly the same tale of the sudden quarrel, the blow with a stick or a stone, the thrust with the knife which every man carried, the stroke with a hatchet. Then the slayer in his panic flies to a nun's garden, to a monastery, or to the shelter of a church, where the men of the village keep guard over him till knights of the shire are sent from the Court, to whom he confesses his crime, and who allow him so many days to fly to the nearest port and forsake the kingdom. Perhaps he never reaches the coast, but takes to the woods, already haunted by "abjurors" like himself, or by outlaws flying from justice. In the social conditions of the England of that day the administration of justice was, in more ways than one, a very critical matter, and the efforts of over-zealous judges and sheriffs might easily end in driving the people to desperation before the severity of the law, or in crushing out under a heedless taxation a prosperity which was still new and still rare.