In the country at large the most striking and immediate effect of the mortality was to bring about nothing less than a complete social revolution. Everywhere, although the well-to-do people were not exempt from the contagion, it was the poor who were the chief sufferers. "It is well [p196] known," wrote the late Professor Thorold Rogers, "that the Black Death, in England at least, spared the rich and took the poor. And no wonder. Living as the peasantry did in close, unclean huts, with no rooms above ground, without windows, artificial light, soap, linen; ignorant of certain vegetables, constrained to live half the year on salt meat; scurvy, leprosy, and other diseases, which are engendered by hard living and the neglect of every sanitary precaution, were endemic among the population.[369] The obvious and undoubted effect of the great mortality among the working classes was to put a premium upon the services of those that survived. From all parts of England comes the same cry for workers to gather in the harvests, to till the ground, and to guard the cattle. For years the same demands are re-echoed until the landowners learnt from experience that the old methods of cultivation, and the old tenures of land, had been rendered impossible by the great scourge that had swept over the land. It was a hard time for the landowners, who up to this had had it, roughly speaking, all their own away. With rents falling to half their value, with thousands of acres of land lying untilled and valueless, with cottages, mills and houses without tenants, and orchards, gardens, and fields waste and desolate, there came a corresponding rise in the prices of commodities. Everything that the landowner had to buy rose at once, as Professor Thorold Rogers pointed out, "50, 100, and even 200 per cent." Iron, salt and clothing doubled in value, and fish—and in particular herrings, which formed so considerable a part of the food of that generation—became dear beyond the reach of the multitude. "At that time," writes William Dene, the [p197] contemporary monk of Rochester, "there was such a dearth and want of fish that people were obliged to eat meat on the Wednesdays, and a command was issued that four herrings should be sold for a penny. But in Lent there was still such a want of fish that many, who had been wont to live well, had to content themselves with bread and potage."[370]