They enjoy indeed a greater or a smaller immunity from pressing miseries.

They are innocent or criminal in different degrees.

But the ground-work of humanity in them remains comparatively unaltered; and their moral qualities, so far as these may be exceptional, reflect the influences of an upper social stratum.

It is clear from the histories related in this chapter that members of the lowest classes were continually mixing with the nobles and the gentry in the wild adventures of that troubled century.

They, like their betters, were undergoing a tardy metamorphosis from mediaeval to modern conditions, retaining vices of ferocity and grossness, virtues of loyalty and self-reliance, which belonged to earlier periods.