By the end of the fifteenth century the lot of this class of England's population became almost unendurable. The women, who bore more than their share of the burden of work in an attempt to provide the bare necessities of existence, were bowed under a weight of misery which made that existence endurable only because they knew of none better, or none which could possibly come within the range of their narrow hopes. The wretched condition of life among those whose possessions were so limited is well summed up in the following quotation from an article by Dr. Augustus Jessup in the _Nineteenth Century_, February, 1884; he says: such people "were more wretched in their poverty, incomparably less prosperous in their prosperity, worse clad, worse fed, worse housed, worse taught, worse tended, worse governed," than the peasants of the present day; "they were sufferers from loathsome diseases their descendants know nothing of; the very beasts of the field were dwarfed and stunted in their growth; the death rate among children was tremendous; the disregard of human life was so callous that we can hardly conceive it; there was everything to harden, nothing to soften; everywhere oppression, greed, and fierceness." Although wages were higher by the end of the century, reaching fourpence a day, meat, cheese, and butter were much dearer than at its beginning, so that it is doubtful if the last of the century found the condition of the laborer at all improved in this respect. As labor was suspended on the holidays of the Church and for a half-day on the eves of those holidays, and as the laborer was forbidden to receive more than a half-day's wage every Saturday, the men and women most anxious to work, even if they could obtain constant employment, could not average more than four and one-half profitable days per week. It is not surprising that, for want of nutrition, there was throughout the Middle Ages a wide prevalence of fever, the large death rate of women and children from this cause affording evidence of their physical weakness.