so proud and idle that the master cannot be known from the servant, except it be because the servant wears better clothes than his master', they were echoing, almost to the word, the sentiments voiced by the Leicester monk, Henry Knighton, who observed of the years after the Black Death, `the lesser people were so puffed up in those days ... that one might scarcely distinguish one from another for the splendour of their dress and adornments: not a humble man from a great man, nor a needy from a rich, nor a servant from his master'.(44) Many commentators in the later period favoured regulating dress by law and voiced the same concerns as the architects of the sumptuary statute of 1363 about `the outrageous and excessive apparel of divers people against their estate and degree'.(45) Nor was disquiet over the ways in which the poorer sort spent their enhanced incomes restricted to better food and clothing. According to John Gower, writing in the late 1370s, `the peasant pretends to imitate the ways of the freeman', and had developed an appetite for `luxuries', including beds and pillows, while for Thomas Alcock, writing in 1752, the `unnecessary expence of the poor' included smoking and chewing tobacco, taking snuff, tea-drinking, the wearing of `ribbons, ruffles, silks and other slight foreign things', and `dram-drinking'.(46)High real wages also enhanced the ability of the lower orders to participate in unsuitable leisure pursuits, which duly made their regulation a priority in both periods. The revival of interest in the Reformation of Manners in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may well have sprung as much from a desire to increase industriousness as from the puritanical predilection to stamp out drunkenness and other `ungodly' pursuits, which had been the guiding motive behind its former incarnation in Elizabethan and early Stuart times. When Henry Fielding denounced the `too frequent and expensive diversions among the lo...
