There was a steady and unbroken line of paupers in Great Castleborough, as the parish books testify. No families had a more unquestionable pedigree. There was no flaw, no dubious spot in it. The parish books were the red-books of this race. No genealogy could bear a more rigid scrutiny than theirs. From generation to generation their demands on the parish funds stand recorded. There were no _lacunæ_ in their career; there was no occasion for the herald to skip skilfully from cousin to doubtful cousin, nor great lawyers to cast a costly glamour over some delicate question of legitimacy. There never failed a rightful heir to their families. Fed on the bread of idleness and legal provision, these people flourished, increased, and multiplied. Sometimes required to work for the weekly stipend which they received, they never acquired a taste for labour, or lost the taste for the bread for which they did not labour. These paupers regarded their maintenance by no means as a disgrace. They claimed it as a right—as their patrimony. They contended that one-third of the property of the Church had been given by benevolent individuals for the support of the poor, and that what the Reformation wrongfully deprived them of, the great enactment of Elizabeth rightfully—and only rightfully—restored. Those who imagine that all paupers merely claim parish relief because the law has ordained it, commit a great error. There were numbers then who were hereditary paupers, on a higher principle even than hereditary peers, and that on a tradition carefully handed down, that they were only manfully claiming their own. They traced their claims from the most ancient feudal times. They were none of your modern manufactures, the offspring of wretched political necessities. They came down from times when the lord was as much bound to maintain his villein in gross, as the villein was to work for the lord. These paupers were in fact, or claimed to be, the original _adscripti glebæ_, and to have as sound a claim to parish support as the landed proprietor had to his land. For this reason, in the old Catholic times, after they had escaped from villenage by running away from their hundred, and remaining absent for a year and a day, dwelling for that period in a walled town, these people were amongst the most diligent attendants at the abbey doors, and, when the abbeys were dissolved, were, no doubt, amongst the most daring of those thieves, vagabonds, and sturdy rogues who, after the Robin Hood fashion, beset the highways and solitary farms of England, and claimed their black-mail in a very unceremonious style. It was out of this class that Henry VIII. hanged his seventy-two thousand during his reign, and, as it is said, without appearing materially to diminish their number.