ruled in all cases by an oligarchy. [Footnote: Stubbs,
"Constitutional History," vol. i. Section 131.] The increase in the
population brought wealth to a class, the class of privileged
traders, associated into guilds, who kept their several
_mysteries_ to themselves by vigilant measures of protection.
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. The _sediment_ of the town
population in the Middle Ages was a dense slough of stagnant misery,
squalor, famine, loathsome disease, and dull despair, such as the
worst slums of London, Paris, or Liverpool know nothing of. When we
hear of the mortality among the townsmen during the periodical
outbreaks of pestilence or famine, horror suggests that we should
dismiss as incredible such stories as the imagination shrinks from
dwelling on. What greatly added to the dreary wretchedness of the
lower order in the towns was the fact that the ever-increasing
throngs of beggars, outlaws, and ruffian runaways were simply left to
shift for themselves. The civil authorities took no account of them
as long as they quietly rotted and died; and, what was still more
dreadful, the whole machinery of the Church polity had been formed
and was adapted to deal with entirely different conditions of society
from those which had now arisen.

The idea of the parish priest taking the oversight of his flock, and
ministering to each member as the shepherd of the people, is a grand
one, but it is an idea which can be realized, and then only
approximately, in the village community. In the towns of the Middle
Ages the parochial system, except as a _civil_ institution, had