She had been accustomed to pare down her comforts on all sides, in order to squeeze out money for her charities, walking many miles in the course of the day, to save the expense of a vehicle, and often dining on a slice of bread and butter, a hard boiled egg, or a bit of cold meat, generally eaten standing.' Her brother, fearing the effect upon her health, for she had suffered once or twice from gastric fever, sent her in 1846 a sum of money to be spent in luxuries for herself, promising a subscription to her Association if she should have spent it before a certain time. She writes, Although I have used it to pay my doctor's bill, and had an egg for breakfast every day (besides riding in omnibuses), there are still, alas, about thirtytwo marks,* and how to get through it before the first of August I really cannot see.' A novel subject of lamentation!

Miss Sieveking was now so well known throughout Northern Germany as a practical and earnest philanthropist, that she received several solicitations to become the head of institutions either already existing or about to be established. Pastor Fliedner, the excellent founder of Kaisersworth, invited her to become the directress of the nursing department of his institution. Here was, in fact, a Protestant sisterhood, and she was strongly tempted to accept his offer, being restrained alone by the difficulty of finding a successor to her presidency of the Hamburg Association.

When her native city mourned under the terrible calamity of the great fire of 1842, Miss Sieveking lent her energies to relieve the distress. Fully perceiving the dangers, she also saw the way to avoid them. Many of the poorer quarters were destroyed, and the workmen, besides being burnt out, had lost their tools in the fire; so that the principal object of the Relief Association, of which Miss Sieveking was a member, was to procure tools, that there might be the least possible amount of gratuitous relief, which is so apt to demoralize the poor. Miss Sieveking's own house was not destroyed, but when at one time it was considered in danger, her goods were eagerly conveyed to a place of safety by her 'poor people.' She also received a very gratifying proof of the influence she had silently exercised over many of her German sisters:-contributions were sent to her as marks of personal affection from similar associations to her own in seventeen towns, and it was thus she first learned the existence of several of them.

Her account of the fire is contained in a letter to the late Queen of Denmark, who had entered into cordial friendship with Amelia, which remained undisturbed until the Queen's

* £1. 12s. 2d.

death.

death. A similar happy connection existed between Miss Sieveking and the Queen of Prussia, and had a like duration. The former she visited at her palace at Sorgenfrei, near Copenhagen, where she spent her time very pleasantly in conversations with Her Majesty, and in visiting the various institutions of the neighbourhood which were calculated to interest her.

In 1855 Miss Sieveking caught a severe cold while on a visit to her brother, in England, and from that time her health gradually gave way, weakened as it must have been by the fatigues she had undergone. For a time she rallied, and for a still longer time delayed giving up her usual occupations, but they told fearfully on her exhausted frame. She conscientiously followed the prescriptions of her physicians, in the attempt to restore her health, visiting, at their request, different German Spas. But it was all in vain. Her cough and weakness steadily increased throughout the winter of She occupied herself with settling her worldly affairs, leaving the management of the Association in the hands of five of her assistants, of whom one was to be chief, so that there might be a recognized head in its dealings with other bodies.

She continued her lessons almost to the last, taking leave of her children on the 5th of March, 1859. From that time till her death, on the first of the succeeding month, her sufferings were extreme. The privilege of nursing her was greatly prized by those who were permitted to do so, while many whom she had benefited vied with each other in anticipating her every want. Her funeral, by her own request, resembled strictly that of a pauper, but it was followed by a stream of mourners of all ranks and both sexes, desirous to pay a last mark of respect to one who had poured out her love upon them when living, and now that she was departed would ever dwell in their memory as a most beloved and lamented

friend.

Never have sixty-four years of life been better spent than those of Amelia Sieveking. Her standard of personal excellence was lofty, and she attained its summit by labours which exalted her spiritual being in exact proportion to their beneficent effects on her fellow-creatures. Her noble aspirations, under the guidance and control of a pure and humble spirit, accomplished great objects. Her success has, by the consent of all, enlarged the bounds of female usefulness, and her sex may well regard her as one of the foundresses of their moral and intellectual freedom.

SOCIAL SCIENCE SELECTIONS.

LIFE IN ENGLAND IN THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH

CENTURIES.

In the 'Journal of the Statistical Society,' Professor J. E. T. Rogers has a carefully written paper on a Continuous Price of Wheat for 105 years, from 1380 to 1484. At the end, he gives the following inferences from the facts under consideration.

Our forefathers were far from ignorant of the advantages of laborious adaptation, and of the value of agricultural improvements. They ploughed their land repeatedly, were alive to the profit of sheep dressing, manured the soil diligently, drained and ditched it regularly, marled it when needed, and used lime largely to destroy weeds and divide stiff clays. They spent much labour in hoeing their crops, and, as is evidenced by the wages paid to sowers, and the rate of seed per acre, had a full sense of the significance of agricultural economy. Half of their land was left, however, to unproductive fallow. Not that the arable acreage was probably much less than at present. No doubt some soil which is now under the plough was in those times poor pasture. But, on the other hand, some land which has been for time out of mind only poor upland pasture was in past days brought under cultivation. I have seen myself on some of the Hampshire and Sussex downs the evidence of ancient culture. The arts of peace leave more durable signs on the surface of the earth than those of war, and the marks of the plough may still be traced on spots which tradition only declares to have been the scene of battle and destruction.

But the produce was very scanty. The seed was invariably or almost invariably two bushels to the acre, the produce rarely exceeded twelve bushels, even in the best years, and this, it may be concluded, is nearly the limit of unscientific-to use a phrase applicable to modern improvements and uninstructed agriculture. Cicero tells us that eightfold was a good rate in Sicily, in his time the granary of Rome. A crop of thirtyfive bushels on average land under modern culture is by no means excessive. Land under tillage then, at the present time, yields 2 times more than it did in the days of our forefathers.

But though much land was tilled then, very little was productive. Half the soil was in fallow, and the fallow was ploughed over and over again that it might recover its vigour. Add to the amount under fallow that which has been rendered available for crops at the present time, the downs, for instance, at Brighton and Eastbourne, and similar places, and we shall find that there is now probably 24 times more wheat-bearing land than at that period.

But this is not all. Our forefathers had no winter roots, no artificial grasses. Turnips, carrots, parsnips, and I need not mention beet and potatoes, were things of the future. They had coarse cabbage and the unimproved kinds of onions. They flavoured their poor soups with Jack-bythe-hedge,' a weed known to most of us by its spike of white flowers, and coarse alliaceous smell. In spring they sold their nettles which grew in their gardens. It is said that nettles are wholesome and pleasant spring food; such an impression must be historical. They were, perhaps, in those days of salt meat, six months of herbless winter, and endemic scurvy. But the eagerness with which our forefathers gathered nettles and such wild herbs reminds one of the danger which the owners of those pastures run where

• Cicero in Verrem; iii., 47.

the

Early Life in England.

153

the autumn crocus grows profusely, when their cattle fed all the winter on hay are turned loose among the spring meadows. Potatoes, the great remedy for scurvy, have occurred to me as priced in 1590, when they were bought at 2s. 6d. a pound for Queen Elizabeth's table.

Clover, too, and the best of other artificial grasses were unknown. I am not botanist enough to determine what are the natural grasses of our country, but entertain a strong suspicion that they are of the least nutritive kind. It is not too much, at any rate, to think that the absence of these modern but familiar conveniences diminished the rate of production by 21 times more.

Lastly. Cattle and sheep were poor, small, and long coming to perfection. Stunted by the winter's privation, they took double time to be eatable. We have often laughed at the story of the Irishman's plan of making his bacon streaked, by alternate starvation and plenty in the diet of his pig. With our forefathers the variation was a permanent necessity. I have before me the weights of oxen purchased by the Comptroller of Edward VI., and find that the average of thirty oxen was about 4 cwts. Besides, fat was six times the price of meat. Such causes may fairly diminish the rate of production by another unit. I am disposed, therefore, to conclude that the rate of production was about one-eighth of that which is customary at present. Now the population of England and Wales is about, in round numbers, at present twenty millions, of whom about fifteen millions are maintained on the agricultural produce of this country. If to those diminishing forces in population be added the insecurity of some regions, and the relatively backward state of others, as the condition of the Welsh and Scotch marches, and that generally of the Principality, especially during the time of Owen Glendower, there is no great rashness, it may be conceded, in fixing the miximum of population in the fifteenth century, and indeed long after, at from one and a half to two millions, and in inclining to the less rather than to the greater number.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the ordinary rent of arable land was from 4d. to 6d. the acre. The rioters of Blackheath demanded, and by the charter (afterwards annulled in 1381) procured, that the rent of land should not exceed 4d. an acre. It has been stated that our forefathers, as far as manual labour went, employed most of the modern arts of agriculture; that is, they developed the artificial fertilities of the soil. But the rent of the same parcels of land in purely agricultural districts, and where no virtual improvement has been induced, or what may be called the merely mechanical junctions of the earth, has risen eighty or one hundred times since the period which this paper deals with.

The labour of procuring the means of subsistence then, with the appliances which the agriculture of the fifteeenth century afforded, was so great that the rent of land, except under the compulsory service of villenage, absorbed but a small portion of the produce. But the continual recurrence of dearths and pestilences proves, among other evidence, that population pressed closely on the means of subsistence.

Villenage still subsisted; but the course of time, and the disposition of the law towards those persons who were held to predial servitude, but who were free to all others except their lords, had greatly mitigated the earlier theory of the bondsman's obligations and liabilities. Their tenure was secured on the terms of labour. Such labour, however, as was extorted from them was, as might be expected, unprofitable, as the labour of serfs was unprofitable in Russia. Hence it was the interest of the landlord to exempt them from personal labour on the payment of money rents, the incidents of villenage, valuable as liable to escheat, being retained. This commutation of service for payment begins very early, and, I imagine, spread very rapidly. By the middle of Henry VI.'s reign, that is about

1440, labour rents had, I am convinced, altogether ceased, and some of the claims of the rioters of Blackheath were silently accorded to the operations of economical causes. In so unnoticed a change as this, which transformed a great part of the community from serfs to occupiers of land held to low fee-farm rents, we must not, I am convinced, look for any exceptional cause. The most natural and sufficient reason for the change was the greater convenience of fixed payments compared with a service or labour rent. Of the same stock with the small landowner near them, engaged in similar occupations, and possessed, except in the single particular of personal dependence, of the same rights with freemen, there was no room for the antipathies of race, or the discredit which enforced labour brings on labour itself.

It was certainly during this time that the class of small freeholders arose. The fact is traceable, not only in the suggestions of legislation and history, but in the change made by the owners of land in the management of their estates. In the fourteenth century the landlord invariably cultivated his own estate by a bailiff. It is from the numerous records of such farming, the account being presented annually to the employer, that the greater part of the facts which I have gathered about prices in the early part of the middle ages are derived. Between the last thirty years of the fourteenth and the first forty of the fifteenth centuries this practice is almost universally abandoned. The landlord ceases to cultivate his own land, and two persons appear on his estate, one a collector of rents from the tenants, free and copyhold, the other, a farmer who cultivates the soil for his own profit, at a fixed rate, sometimes for a long term, but with his landlord's stock, which he is pledged to restore, or its equivalent in money (the amount of such liabilities being annually endorsed on the account rendered at the expiration of his tenancy). After a short time, however, this practice ceases; the tenant finds stock himself, and occupies an estate, either under a lease or very often by purchase. In the estates with which I am most familiar it was not to be expected that those who held to their successors would finally alienate their lands, but it was the case beyond doubt with those who had lay tenures.

That the tenant, at will or on lease, should become an owner in fee, could, I think, only take place under such favourable circumstances as those which affected the great mass of society at this time. Food, during the greater part of the period before me, was more abundant and cheap than it had been before, or than it was afterwards, except at the commencement of the eighteenth century, when, as is well known, there was a long succession of abundant harvests. And the exigencies of the great lords who were involved in the civil wars of the period must have disposed them to part with portions of their lands to husbandmen on advantageous terms. The Wars of the Roses almost exterminated the nobility, but hardly affected the great mass of the community. In the accounts of the fifteenth centuries, hundreds of which it has been my fortune to consult, I have never yet met with the least allusion to the strife which was raging, or with any complaint of loss from the ravages of war. The violence of the storm burst in a region far above the heads of the people, and did not generally affect them except as a means for fertilizing their labour. The barons and their retainers were worsted in the struggle, and the husbandmen reaped the profit of his exceptional position.

THE ENGLISH NON-RESTRAINT TREATMENT OF LUNATICS. A communication to the 'Journal of Mental Science,' from Baron Mundy shows that the humane English system of treating lunatics without restraint