... the curse of the farmer, and their cotes were called dens of thieves. By the end of the sixteenth century, certainly by the first quarter of the seventeenth, the villein, who in the Middle Ages ... formed the bulk of the population, had disappeared.[239] It is probable that even at the beginning of the Tudor period the great majority of the bondmen had become free, and that the serf then ... passed, in June 1564, the Rutland magistrates met under the Act, and stated that the prices of linen, woollen, leather, corn, and other victuals were great, so they drew up the following list...