THE GLORIOUS MIDDLE AGES
THE GLORIOUS MIDDLE AGES
With the banishment of the moneylenders and the abolition of usury, there were hardly any taxes to pay and no state debt, as the interest-free tally stick was used for government expenditures. England now enjoyed a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity.
The average laborer worked only 14 weeks a year and enjoyed 160 to 180 holidays. According to Lord Leverhulme, a writer of that time: “The men of the 15th century
were very well paid,” in fact so well paid that the purchasing power of their wages and their standard of living would only be exceeded in the late 19th century.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Anglo-German philosopher, confirms these living conditions in The Foundations of the XIXth Century:
In the 13th century, when the Teutonic races began to build their new world, the agriculturist over nearly the whole of Europe was a freer man, with a more assured existence, than he is today; copyholdwas the rule, so that England, for example—today a seat of landlordism—was even in the 15th century almost entirely in the hands of thousands of farmers, who were not only legal owners of their land, but possessed in addition far-reaching free rights to common pastures and woodlands.
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