Lincoln Cathedral

“WITH tolerable taxes, no state debt and no interest to pay, England enjoyed a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity [in the Middle Ages]. The average laborer worked only 14 weeks and enjoyed 160 to 180 holidays. According to Lord Leverhulme, a writer of that time, “The men of the 15th century were very well paid,” in fact so well paid that the purchasing power of their wages and their standard of living would only be exceeded in the late 19th century. A labourer could provide for all the necessities his family required. They were well clothed in good woolen cloth and had plenty of meat and bread.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Anglo-German philosopher, confirms these living conditions in his The Foundations of the XIX Century:

In the thirteenth century. when the Teutonic races began to build their new world, the agriculturalist over nearly the whole of Europe was a freer man, with a more assured existence, than he is today; copyhold was the rule, so that England, for example — today a seat of landlordism — was even in the fifteenth century almost entirely in the hands of thousands of farmers, who were not only legal owners of their land, but possessed in addition far-reaching free rights to common pastures and woodlands.

During their spare hours many craftsmen volunteered their skills in building some of England’s magnificent cathedrals, which reinforces one of the basic tenets of Western civilization that without leisure time, the fostering of culture is not possible.”

— A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind, Stephen Mitford Goodson; Black House Publishing Ltd., 2014, pp. 26-27

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