Sentimental people who plaintively sigh for the good old times will do well to ponder upon these facts. Think, twelve poor creatures butchered in cold blood in a single year within a circuit of ten miles from your own door! Two of these unhappy victims were a couple of lonely women, apparently living together in their poverty, gashed and battered in the dead of the night, and left in their blood, stripped of their little all. The motive, too, for all this horrible housebreaking and bloodshed, being a lump of cheese or a side of bacon, and the shuddering creatures cowering in the corner of a hovel, being too paralyzed with terror to utter a cry, and never dreaming of making resistance to the wild-eyed assassins, who came to slay rather than to steal. Let us turn from these scenes, which are too painful to dwell on; and, before I close, let me try and point to some bright spots in the village life of six hundred years ago. If the hovels of the labourer were squalid, and dirty, and dark, yet there was not--no, there was not--as much difference between them and the dwelling of the former class, the employers of labour. Every man who had any house at all had some direct interest in the land; he always had some rood or two that he could call his own; his allotment was not large, but then there were no large farmers. I cannot make out that there was any one in Rougham who farmed as much as two hundred acres all told. What we now understand by tenant farmers were a class that had not yet come into existence. Where a landlord was non-resident he farmed his estate by a bailiff, and if any one wanted to give up an occupation for a time he let it with all that it contained. Thus, when Alice the divorced made up her mind in 1318 to go away from Rougham--perhaps on a pilgrimage--perhaps to Rome--who knows?--she let her house and land, and all that was upon it, live and dead stock, to her sister Juliana for three years. The inventory included not only the sheep and cattle, but the very hoes and pitchforks, and sacks; and everything, to the minutest particular, was to be returned without damage at the end of the term, or replaced by an equivalent. But this lady, a lady of birth and some position, certainly did not have two hundred acres under her hands, and would have been a very small personage indeed, side by side with a dozen of our West Norfolk farmers today. The difference between the labourer and the farmer was, I think, less six hundred years ago than it is now. Men climbed up the ladder by steps that were more gently graduated; there was no great gulf fixed between the employer and the employed.