, composed more than four centuries before, when he observed of the poor that `it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour', and that the `wisest legislator will never be able to devise a more equitable, a more effectual, or in any respect a more suitable punishment, than hunger is for a disobedient servant'.(35) But Townsend's language as well as his sentiments bear an uncanny resemblance to Langland's lengthy discourses on the unique ability of hunger to transform idlers and beggars into willing workmen. Langland admonished the labourers of his own day, when Hunger was sleeping,(36) for their greed and indolence and their defiance of the king's statutes: `Ac whiles hunger was her maister. there wolde none of hem chyde / Ne stryve ageines his statut, so sternliche he loked'.(37) The fact that both Langland and Townsend dwelt upon the salutary effects of a scarcity of food upon the poor of their times is no random coincidence, for the relationship between hunger and industry, and plenty and idleness, was an integral part of the writings of both periods.(38) Thomas Mun (1664), perhaps mindful of the famine of 1661, reflected that `penury and want do make a people wise and industrious'. Similarly, when real wages plunged downwards in the harvest failures of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, observers such as William Temple (1770) and Thomas Pennant (1772) were swift to remark that `idling the whole day together ... never happen[s] when wheat and other necessaries are dear' and that until `famine pinches they will not bestir themselves'.(39)The tenor of contemporary reflections on the well-rewarded labouring classes of later fourteenth-century England is that they pursued `their own ease and greed' and `served their masters worse from day to day'; thus, these reflections have much in common with the general opinion of the behaviour of their successors three centuries later. And if the diagnoses of the ills besett...
