The once lusty young woman who had formerly done a hard day’s work with the men at harvesting was broken by this life. It is said of an army that it fights upon its stomach. These women faced the grim battle of life, laden with the heavy burden of child-bearing, seldom knowing what it meant to have enough to eat. Is it surprising that courage often failed and they sank into the spiritless, dismal ranks of miserable beings met in the pages of Quarter Sessions Records, who are constantly being forwarded from one parish to another. Such women, enfeebled in mind and body, could not hope to earn more than the twopence a day and their food which is assessed as the maximum rate for women workers in the hay harvest. On the contrary, judging from the account books of the period, they often received only one penny a day for their labour. Significant of their feebleness is the Norfolk assessment which reads, “Women and such impotent persons that weed corne, or other such like Labourers 2d with meate and drinke, 6d without.”[171] Such wages may have sufficed for the infirm and old, but they meant starvation for the woman with a young family depending on her for food. And what chance of health and virtue existed for the children of these enfeebled starving women? Footnote 171: _Eng. Hist. Rev._, Vol. xiii., p. 522. On the death or desertion of her husband the labouring woman became wholly dependent on the Parish for support. The conduct of the magistrates in fixing maximum wages at a rate which they knew to be below subsistence level seems inexplicable; is in fact inexplicable until it is understood that these wages were never intended to be sufficient for the support of a family. Statute 31 Eliz. and others, show that the whole influence of the Government and administration was directed to prevent the creation of a class of wage-earners. It was an essential feature of Tudor policy to foster the Yeomanry, from whose ranks were recruited the defenders of the realm. Husbandmen were recognised as “the body and stay” of the kingdom.[172] They made the best infantry when bred “not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner.”[173] If the depopulation of the country-side went on unchecked, there would come to pass “a mere sollitude and vtter desolation to the whole Realme, furnished only with shepe and shepherdes instead of good men; wheareby it might be a prey to oure enymies that first would sett vppon it.”[174] Footnote 172: Lipson, _Economic Hist. of England_, p. 153. Footnote 173: Bacon, _Works_, Vol. VI., p. 95. Footnote 174: Lamond (Eliz.) _Discourse of the Common weal_, 1581.