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In Norfolk a Norwich artizan, called John the Litster or Dyer, took the title of King of the Commons, and marching through the country at the head of a mass of peasants compelled the nobles whom he captured to act as his meat-tasters and to serve him on their knees during his repast. The story of St. Edmundsbury shows us what was going on in Suffolk.
Twenty-five years ago, the expense of the voyage out to Quebec, and the difficulty, delay, and additional outlay of the inland journey put it completely out of the power of the needy agriculturist or artizan to emigrate; the very classes, however, who, from their having been brought up from their infancy to hard labour, and used to all sorts of privations, were the best fitted to cope with the dangers and hardships attending the settlement of a new country.
The Jew had to pay them for his heresy, the assassin for his crime, the peasant for his produce, the artizan for his right to pursue a handicraft. Now all is good feeling, peace, and prosperity in this modern town, where alike are absent signs of great wealth or great poverty. As yet I am still in a region without a beggar.
This I did, regardless of all, of every faction, whether Whig, Tory, or Burdettite; for at this period there was a considerable faction, composed principally of petty shop-keepers, and little tradesmen, who, under the denomination of tax-paying housekeepers, enlisted themselves under the banners of Sir Francis Burdett, in order to set themselves up as a sort of privileged class, above the operative manufacturer, the artizan, the mechanic, and the labourer.
The town régime was not so conducive to lifelong adjustments of masters and slaves except as regards domestic service; for whereas a planter could always expand his operations in response to an increase of his field hands and could usually provide employment at home for any artizan he might produce, a lawyer, a banker or a merchant had little choice but to hire out or sell any slave who proved a superfluity or a misfit in his domestic establishment.
"That might be very well," replied the minister, totally unmoved by her insolence, "if the King could pay these sums out of his own privy purse; but that they should be levied upon the merchant, the artizan, and the labourer, is entirely out of the question.
The man was a grizzled artizan looking fellow well over fifty; extraordinarily like the old Thatcher, though darker of skin yellow as a guinea, said Gantick; in fact and beyond doubt, the old man's son. He made no friends, no acquaintances ever, but confined himself to nursing the Thatcher, now tied to his chair by rheumatism.
Those rights, however, were eminently exclusive and selfish in their character. Outside the well-guarded defences which these trades-unions constructed, there were the masses hewers of wood and drawers of water standing to the skilled artizan of the thirteenth century almost precisely in the same relation as the bricklayer's labourer does to the mason in our own time.
While the husbandman furrows his land, and prepares for every one his daily bread, the town artizan, far away, weaves the stuff in which he is to be clothed; the miner seeks underground the iron for his plow; the soldier defends him against the invader; the judge takes care that the law protects his fields; the tax-comptroller adjusts his private interests with those of the public; the merchant occupies himself in exchanging his products with those of distant countries; the men of science and of art add every day a few horses to this ideal team, which draws along the material world, as steam impels the gigantic trains of our iron roads!
In truth, the texture of that salmon-coloured skin could be seen to be aristocratic without a microscope, and the exceptious artizan has an offhand way when contrasts are made painfully strong by an idler of this kind coming, gloved and brushed, into the very den where he is sweating and muddling in his shirt-sleeves.
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