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The number of those who had, like himself, been taught by the monk of St. Alwyth had increased somewhat, and there were, when he left, six other lads there. Three of these were intended for the Church. All were sons of neighbouring landowners, and it was to visit Albert de Courcy, the son of Sir Ralph de Courcy, that Edgar was now riding. Albert and he had been special friends.
At night we asked permission to sleep at an estancia at which we happened to arrive. It was a very large estate, being ten leagues square, and the owner is one of the greatest landowners in the country. His nephew had charge of it, and with him there was a captain in the army, who the other day ran away from Buenos Ayres. Considering their station, their conversation was rather amusing.
Among some large landowners we find tolerably conservative notions even in France. Over-education, they say, is unfitting the people for manual labour, putting them out of their place, and so forth. Moles are not exterminated. "They do more good than harm," said my host, "and I like them." I had heard the same thing at Caumont, where were many mole-hills.
The whole thing, they thought, must be voluntary, and they did not see any reason why, if it were left to the kindness and good intentions of the landowner, there should be any land question at all. Boards would be formed in every county on which such model landowners as Sir Gerald Malloring, or Lord Settleham himself, would sit, to apply the principles of goodwill.
In the same division of the hall were found the bulk and true popular part of the meeting popular indeed as representing not the people, but the things the people most prized-valour and wealth; the thegn landowners, called in the old deeds the "Ministers:" they sate with swords by their side, all of varying birth, fortune, and connection, whether with king, earl, or ceorl.
The principal landowners were impoverished by the war or despoiled by the Puritans, and could not build; the charity of the latter was devoted to other purposes. With the Restoration of the Church and the Monarchy another era of the building of almshouses set in, and to this period very many of our existing institutions belong. Of the earliest group we have several examples left.
A family of rich landowners lived in this manor-house, and all went well with them, till suddenly one morning all this prosperity was burnt to ashes. The owners removed to another home; the place was deserted. The blackened site of the immense house was transformed into a kitchen-garden, cumbered up in parts by piles of bricks, the remains of the old foundations.
The Assembly had long had much trouble with the "proprietary," or great hereditary landowners.
It was sad to see how the people kept together; the city was scattered to the winds in summer, but now it grew compacter; the homeless came in from the Common, and the great landowners returned to inhabit their winter palaces. Madam Rasmussen, in her attic, suddenly appeared with a husband; drunken Valde had returned the cold, so to speak, had driven him into her arms!
He had also incurred the dislike of influential caciques by defending the occupants of small holdings on friar estates from the rapacity of their rich neighbours, and by protecting free-patent applicants and homesteaders when large landowners opposed their applications in order to prevent their securing land, so that they might the more easily be held as peon labourers.
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