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In Lark Rise especially, we receive an unforgettable impression of the transitional state between the old stable, work-pleasure England and the modern world. World because non-differentiation is the mark of it, and [Pg xii] all modern industrial States have a common likeness such as that of Manchester to Stalingrad, Paris to Buenos Aires. The society of Lark Rise is one of landlabourers' families—only they are now all landless. They have lost that which made them what they are in Part I of the trilogy; and the whole point of it is that the reader is given a picture of a peasant class which is still a peasantry in everything but the one thing that makes it so—the holding of land and stock. Here, the labourers are dispropertied, though they still have gardens; here, they are wage-earners only, keeping their families on ten shillings a week, though in 1540 their forefathers in another village not a score of miles from Lark Rise, and exactly the same class as that from which they were descended, paid the lord of the manor £46,000 as copyholders to be free of all dues and services to him. Lark Rise in the 'eighties of last century, admittedly but a hamlet, could certainly not have collected 46,000 farthings.