STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1685 .

329

juncture, invectives against the Whigs and exhortations to ™A p -

obey the Lord’s anointed resounded at once from many thou--

sands of pulpits; and the effect was formidable indeed. Ofall the causes which, after the dissolution of the Oxford Par-liament, produced the violent reaction against the Exclu-sionists, the most potent seems to have been the oratory ofthe country clergy.

The power which the country gentlemen and the country The yeo-clergymen exercised in the rural districts was in some measure manry ‘counterbalanced by the power of the yeomanry, an eminentlymanly and truehearted race. The petty proprietors whocultivated their own fields with their own hands, and enjoyeda modest competence, without affecting to have scutcheonsand crests, or aspiring to sit on the bench of justice, thenformed a much more important part of the nation than atpresent. If we may trust the best statistical writers of thatage, not less than a hundred and sixty thousand proprietors,who with their families must have made up more than aseventh of the whole population, derived their subsistencefrom little freehold estates. The average income of thesesmall dandholders, an income made up of rent, profit, andwages, was estimated at between sixty and seventy pounds ayear. It was computed that the number of persons who tilledtheir own land was greater than the number of those whofarmed the land of others. * A large portion of the yeomanryhad, from the time of the Reformation, leaned towardsPuritanism, had, in the civil war, taken the side of the Par-liament, had, after the Restoration, persisted in hearingPresbyterian and Independent preachers, had, at elections,strenuously supported the Exclusionists, and had continued,even after the discovery of the Rye House plot and the pro-scription of the Whig leaders, to regard Popery and arbitrarypower with unmitigated hostility.

* I have taken Darenant’s estimate, which is a little lower than King's,