The short and simple annals of the poor’ were no more plentiful or easy to interpret in the Middle Ages than they were in Gray's time. Yet when we remember that it has been estimated that there were fifteen countrymen to every townsman in the fifteenth century, and that the majority of these countrymen were but poor villagers, it is obvious that difficult or easy, no picture of medieval life could be satisfactory that ignored this great body of men and women, whose lives were obscure, but whose labours were an essential element in the agricultural economy—an economy, be it remembered, that was the principal factor in providing both the money and produce on which lords and landowners of whatever degree mainly depended. On many thousands of manors up and down the country there was a great body of men and women, some well off, some miserably poor, continuously employed in winning a living for their lords and themselves from the soil. One such poor family was observed with a sympathetic eye by a contemporary, who tells us how as he went on his way he saw a poor man hanging on to his plough. His coat was of a poor stuff called ‘cary’; his hood was full of holes and his hair stuck out of it. As he trod the soil his toes stuck out of his worn and thick-soled shoes; his hose hung about his hocks and he was beslobbered with mud from following the plough. His two mittens, scantily made of rough stuff, with worn-out fingers, were stiff with muck. Bemired with mud, almost up to his ankles, he drove four heifers before him that had become so feeble that men might count every rib, so sorry looking they were.

Beside him walked his wife, carrying a long goad, her short dress tucked up high, with a winnowing-sheet round her as a protection against the cold weather. She was barefoot, so that the ice cut into her feet and made them bleed. At the end of the row was a little wooden bread-bowl which held a small child covered with rags and on one side of it stood the two-year old twins. They all sang one song that was pitiful to hear: they all cried the same cry—a note full of care.