[262] _Repton School Register_, 1564-?1910. One of the husbandmen kept his boy at school for ten years. The average school life of the sons of seven yeomen was between six and seven years; one stays for twelve years, going to school at five and staying till seventeen. If one may judge by the attitude of most modern parents ("I went to the mill when I was ten, and why shouldn't Tommie?"), these men must have been pretty comfortably off.
But by that time much had changed, and for seventy years before these documents begin the peasantry in many parts of England had had sterner things to think of than the schooling of their children.
So far attention has been concentrated upon those phenomena which suggest that, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth century begin, there has been a period--one may date it roughly from 1381 to 1489--of increasing prosperity for the small cultivator. We have emphasised the evidence of this upward movement which is given by the growth among the peasantry of a freer and more elastic economy. We have watched them shake off many of the restrictions imposed by villeinage and build up considerable properties. We have seen how the custom of the manor still acts as a dyke to defend them against encroachments, and to concentrate in their hands a large part of the fruits of economic progress. In the century from the Peasants' Revolt to the first Statute against Depopulation, in spite of the political anarchy which disfigures it, there is, as it seems to us an interval between one oppressive régime and another, between the leaden weight of villeinage and the stress and strain of the gathering power of competition. In that happy balance between the forces of custom and the forces of economic enterprise, custom is powerful, yet not so powerful that men cannot evade it when evasion is desired; enterprise is growing, yet it has not grown to such lengths as to undermine the security which the small man finds in the established relationships and immemorial routine of communal agriculture.