CHAPTER III

THE PEASANT REVOLT

1347-1381

[Sidenote: Edward the Third]

Still in the vigour of manhood, for he was but thirty-five, Edward the

Third stood at the height of his renown. He had won the greatest victory of

his age. France, till now the first of European states, was broken and

dashed from her pride of place at a single blow. The kingdom seemed to lie

at Edward's mercy, for Guienne was recovered, Flanders was wholly on his

side, and Britanny, where the capture of Charles of Blois secured the

success of his rival and the English party which supported him, opened the

road to Paris. At home his government was popular, and Scotland, the one

enemy he had to dread, was bridled by the capture of her king. How great

his renown was in Europe was seen in 1347, when on the death of Lewis of

Bavaria the electors offered him the Imperial Crown. Edward was in truth a

general of a high order, and he had shown himself as consummate a

strategist in the campaign as a tactician in the field. But to the world

about him he was even more illustrious as the foremost representative of

the showy chivalry of his day. He loved the pomp of tournaments; he revived

the Round Table of the fabled Arthur; he celebrated his victories by the

creation of a new order of knighthood. He had varied the sterner operations

of the siege of Calais by a hand-to-hand combat with one of the bravest of

the French knights. A naval picture of Froissart sketches Edward for us as

he sailed to meet a Spanish fleet which was sweeping the narrow seas. We

see the king sitting on deck in his jacket of black velvet, his head

covered by a black beaver hat "which became him well," and calling on Sir

John Chandos to troll out the songs he had brought with him from Germany,

till the Spanish ships heave in sight and a furious fight begins which ends

in a victory that leaves Edward "King of the Seas."

But beneath all this glitter of chivalry lay the subtle, busy diplomatist.

None of our kings was so restless a negotiator. From the first hour of

Edward's rule the threads of his diplomacy ran over Europe in almost

inextricable confusion. And to all who dealt with him he was equally false

and tricky. Emperor was played off against Pope and Pope against Emperor,

the friendship of the Flemish towns was adroitly used to put a pressure on

their counts, the national wrath against the exactions of the Roman See was

employed to bridle the French sympathies of the court of Avignon, and when

the statutes which it produced had served their purpose they were set aside

for a bargain in which King and Pope shared the plunder of the Church

between them. His temper was as false in his dealings with his people as in

his dealings with the European powers. Edward aired to country and

parliament his English patriotism. "Above all other lands and realms," he

made his chancellor say, "the King had most tenderly at heart his land of

England, a land more full of delight and honour and profit to him than any

other." His manners were popular; he donned on occasion the livery of a

city gild; he dined with a London merchant. His perpetual parliaments, his

appeals to them and to the country at large for counsel and aid, seemed to

promise a ruler who was absolutely one at heart with the people he ruled.

But when once Edward passed from sheer carelessness and gratification at

the new source of wealth which the Parliament opened to a sense of what its

power really was becoming, he showed himself as jealous of freedom as any

king that had gone before him. He sold his assent to its demands for heavy

subsidies, and when he had pocketed the money coolly declared the statutes

he had sanctioned null and void. The constitutional progress which was made

during his reign was due to his absorption in showy schemes of foreign

ambition, to his preference for war and diplomatic intrigue over the sober

business of civil administration. The same shallowness of temper, the same

showiness and falsehood, ran through his personal character. The king who

was a model of chivalry in his dealings with knight and noble showed

himself a brutal savage to the burgesses of Calais. Even the courtesy to

his Queen which throws its halo over the story of their deliverance went

hand in hand with a constant disloyalty to her. When once Philippa was dead

his profligacy threw all shame aside. He paraded a mistress as Queen of

Beauty through the streets of London, and set her in pomp over tournaments

as the Lady of the Sun. The nobles were quick to follow their lord's

example. "In those days," writes a chronicler of the time, "arose a rumour

and clamour among the people that wherever there was a tournament there

came a great concourse of ladies, of the most costly and beautiful but not

of the best in the kingdom, sometimes forty and fifty in number, as if they

were a part of the tournament, ladies clad in diverse and wonderful male

apparel, in parti-coloured tunics, with short caps and bands wound

cord-wise round their heads, and girdles bound with gold and silver, and

daggers in pouches across their body. And thus they rode on choice coursers

to the place of tourney; and so spent and wasted their goods and vexed

their bodies with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of the people

sounded everywhere. But they neither feared God nor blushed at the chaste

voice of the people."

[Sidenote: The Black Death]

The "chaste voice of the people" was soon to grow into the stern moral

protest of the Lollards, but for the moment all murmurs were hushed by the

king's success. The truce which followed the capture of Calais seemed a

mere rest in the career of victories which opened before Edward. England

was drunk with her glory and with the hope of plunder. The cloths of Caen

had been brought after the sack of that town to London. "There was no

woman," says Walsingham, "who had not got garments, furs, feather-beds, and

utensils from the spoils of Calais and other foreign cities." The court

revelled in gorgeous tournaments and luxury of dress; and the establishment

in 1346 of the Order of the Garter which found its home in the new castle

that Edward was raising at Windsor marked the highest reach of the spurious

"Chivalry" of the day. But it was at this moment of triumph that the whole

colour of Edward's reign suddenly changed. The most terrible plague the

world has ever witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating

Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic swooped at the

close of 1348 upon Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness and the

panic-struck words of the statutes passed after its visitation have been

amply justified by modern research. Of the three or four millions who then

formed the population of England more than one-half were swept away in its

repeated visitations. Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns where

filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and

fever. In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay purchased

for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the

Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been

interred. Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the

living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black Death fell on the

villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More than one-half of the

priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the diocese of Norwich

two-thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents. The whole organization

of labour was thrown out of gear. The scarcity of hands produced by the

terrible mortality made it difficult for villeins to perform the services

due for their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent by

the landowners induced the farmers of their demesnes to refrain from the

abandonment of their farms. For a time cultivation became impossible. "The

sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary,

"and there were none left who could drive them." Even when the first burst

of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on the enormous

diminution in the supply of labour, though accompanied by a corresponding

rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the course of industrial

employments. Harvests rotted on the ground and fields were left untilled

not merely from scarcity of hands but from the strife which now for the

first time revealed itself between capital and labour.

[Sidenote: Its Social Results]

Nowhere was the effect of the Black Death so keenly felt as in its bearing

on the social revolution which had been steadily going on for a century

past throughout the country. At the moment we have reached the lord of a

manor had been reduced over a large part of England to the position of a

modern landlord, receiving a rental in money from his tenants and supplying

their place in the cultivation of his demesne lands by paid labourers. He

was driven by the progress of enfranchisement to rely for the purposes of

cultivation on the supply of hired labour, and hitherto this supply had

been abundant and cheap. But with the ravages of the Black Death and the

decrease of population labour at once became scarce and dear. There was a

general rise of wages, and the farmers of the country as well as the

wealthier craftsmen of the town saw themselves threatened with ruin by what

seemed to their age the extravagant demands of the labour class. Meanwhile

the country was torn with riot and disorder. An outbreak of lawless

self-indulgence which followed everywhere in the wake of the plague told

especially upon the "landless men," workers wandering in search of work who

found themselves for the first time masters of the labour market; and the

wandering labourer or artizan turned easily into the "sturdy beggar," or

the bandit of the woods. A summary redress for these evils was at once

provided by the Crown in a royal proclamation. "Because a great part of the

people," runs this ordinance, "and principally of labourers and servants,

is dead of the plague, some, seeing the need of their lords and the

scarcity of servants, are unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive

wages, and others are rather begging in idleness than supporting themselves

by labour, we have ordained that any able-bodied man or woman, of

whatsoever condition, free or serf, under sixty years of age, not living of

merchandise nor following a trade nor having of his own wherewithal to

live, either his own land with the culture of which he could occupy

himself, and not serving another, shall if so required serve another for

such wages as was the custom in the twentieth year of our reign or five or

six years before."

[Sidenote: Statute of Labourers]

It was the failure of this ordinance to effect its ends which brought about

at the close of 1349 the passing of the Statute of Labourers. "Every man or

woman," runs this famous provision, "of whatsoever condition, free or bond,

able in body, and within the age of threescore years, ... and not having of

his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which

he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve

the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages

which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood where he is bound to

serve" two years before the plague began. A refusal to obey was punished by

imprisonment. But sterner measures were soon found to be necessary. Not

only was the price of labour fixed by the Parliament of 1351 but the labour

class was once more tied to the soil. The labourer was forbidden to quit

the parish where he lived in search of better paid employment; if he

disobeyed he became a "fugitive," and subject to imprisonment at the hands

of justices of the peace. To enforce such a law literally must have been

impossible, for corn rose to so high a price that a day's labour at the old

wages would not have purchased wheat enough for a man's support. But the

landowners did not flinch from the attempt. The repeated re-enactment of

the law shows the difficulty of applying it and the stubbornness of the

struggle which it brought about. The fines and forfeitures which were

levied for infractions of its provisions formed a large source of royal

revenue, but so ineffectual were the original penalties that the runaway

labourer was at last ordered to be branded with a hot iron on the forehead,

while the harbouring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down. Nor was it

merely the existing class of free labourers which was attacked by this

reactionary movement. The increase of their numbers by a commutation of

labour services for money payments was suddenly checked, and the ingenuity

of the lawyers who were employed as stewards of each manor was exercised in

striving to restore to the landowners that customary labour whose loss was

now severely felt. Manumissions and exemptions which had passed without

question were cancelled on grounds of informality, and labour services from

which they held themselves freed by redemption were again demanded from the

villeins. The attempt was the more galling that the cause had to be pleaded

in the manor-court itself, and to be decided by the very officer whose

interest it was to give judgement in favour of his lord. We can see the

growth of a fierce spirit of resistance through the statutes which strove

in vain to repress it. In the towns, where the system of forced labour was

applied with even more rigour than in the country, strikes and combinations

became frequent among the lower craftsmen. In the country the free

labourers found allies in the villeins whose freedom from manorial service

was questioned. These were often men of position and substance, and

throughout the eastern counties the gatherings of "fugitive serfs" were

supported by an organized resistance and by large contributions of money on

the part of the wealthier tenantry.

[Sidenote: Renewal of the War]

With plague, famine, and social strife in the land, it was no time for

reaping the fruits even of such a victory as Crécy. Luckily for England the

pestilence had fallen as heavily on her foe as on herself. A common

suffering and exhaustion forced both countries to a truce, and though

desultory fighting went on along the Breton and Aquitanian borders, the

peace which was thus secured lasted with brief intervals of fighting for

seven years. It was not till 1355 that the failure of a last effort to turn

the truce into a final peace again drove Edward into war. The campaign

opened with a brilliant prospect of success. Charles the Bad, King of

Navarre, held as a prince of descent from the house of Valois large fiefs

in Normandy; and a quarrel springing suddenly up between him and John, who

had now succeeded his father Philip on the throne of France, Charles

offered to put his fortresses into Edward's hands. Master of Cherbourg,

Avranches, Pontaudemer, Evreux and Meulan, Mantes, Mortain, Pontoise,

Charles held in his hands the keys of France; and Edward grasped at the

opportunity of delivering a crushing blow. Three armies were prepared to

act in Normandy, Britanny, and Guienne. But the first two, with Edward and

Henry of Derby, who had been raised to the dukedom of Lancaster, at their

head, were detained by contrary winds, and Charles, despairing of their

arrival, made peace with John. Edward made his way to Calais to meet the

tidings of this desertion and to be called back to England by news of a

recapture of Berwick by the Scots. But his hopes of Norman co-operation

were revived in 1356. The treachery of John, his seizure of the King of

Navarre, and his execution of the Count of Harcourt who was looked upon as

the adviser of Charles in his policy of intrigue, stirred a general rising

throughout Normandy. Edward at once despatched troops under the Duke of

Lancaster to its support. But the insurgents were soon forced to fall back.

Conscious of the danger to which an English occupation of Normandy would

expose him, John hastened with a large army to the west, drove Lancaster to

Cherbourg, took Evreux, and besieged Breteuil.

[Sidenote: The Black Prince]

Here however his progress was suddenly checked by news from the south. The

Black Prince, as the hero of Crécy was called, had landed in Guienne during

the preceding year and won a disgraceful success. Unable to pay his troops,

he staved off their demands by a campaign of sheer pillage. While plague

and war and the anarchy which sprang up under the weak government of John

were bringing ruin on the northern and central provinces of France, the

south remained prosperous and at peace. The young prince led his army of

freebooters up the Garonne into "what was before one of the fat countries

of the world, the people good and simple, who did not know what war was;

indeed no war had been waged against them till the Prince came. The English

and Gascons found the country full and gay, the rooms adorned with carpets

and draperies, the caskets and chests full of fair jewels. But nothing was

safe from these robbers. They, and especially the Gascons, who are very

greedy, carried off everything." Glutted by the sack of Carcassonne and

Narbonne the plunderers fell back to Bordeaux, "their horses so laden with

spoil that they could hardly move." Worthier work awaited the Black Prince

in the following year. In the plan of campaign for 1356 it had been

arranged that he should march upon the Loire, and there unite with a force

under the Duke of Lancaster which was to land in Britanny and push rapidly

into the heart of France. Delays however hindered the Prince from starting

from Bordeaux till July, and when his march brought him to the Loire the

plan of campaign had already broken down. The outbreak in Normandy had

tempted the English Council to divert the force under Lancaster from

Britanny to that province; and the Duke was now at Cherbourg, hard pressed

by the French army under John. But if its original purpose was foiled, the

march of the Black Prince on the Loire served still more effectively the

English cause. His advance pointed straight upon Paris, and again as in the

Crécy campaign John was forced to leave all for the protection of the

capital. Hasty marches brought the king to the Loire while Prince Edward

still lay at Vierzon on the Cher. Unconscious of John's designs, he wasted

some days in the capture of Romorantin while the French troops were

crossing the Loire along its course from Orleans to Tours and John with the

advance was hurrying through Loches upon Poitiers in pursuit, as he

supposed, of the retreating Englishmen. But the movement of the French

army, near as it was, was unknown in the English camp; and when the news of

it forced the Black Prince to order a retreat the enemy was already far

ahead of him. Edward reached the fields north of Poitiers to find his line

of retreat cut off and a French army of sixty thousand men interposed

between his forces and Bordeaux.

If the Prince had shown little ability in his management of the campaign,

he showed tactical skill in the fight which was now forced on him. On the

nineteenth of September he took a strong position in the fields of

Maupertuis, where his front was covered by thick hedges and approachable

only by a deep and narrow lane which ran between vineyards. The vineyards

and hedges he lined with bowmen, and drew up his small body of men-at-arms

at the point where the lane opened upon the higher plain on which he was

himself encamped. Edward's force numbered only eight thousand men, and the

danger was great enough to force him to offer in exchange for a free

retreat the surrender of his prisoners and of the places he had taken, with

an oath not to fight against France for seven years to come. His offers

however were rejected, and the battle opened with a charge of three hundred

French knights up the narrow lane. But the lane was soon choked with men

and horses, while the front ranks of the advancing army fell back before a

galling fire of arrows from the hedgerows. In this moment of confusion a

body of English horsemen, posted unseen by their opponents on a hill to the

right, charged suddenly on the French flank, and the Prince watching the

disorder which was caused by the repulse and surprise fell boldly on their

front. The steady shot of the English archers completed the panic produced

by this sudden attack. The first French line was driven in, and on its rout

the second, a force of sixteen thousand men, at once broke in wild terror

and fled from the field. John still held his ground with the knights of the

reserve, whom he had unwisely ordered to dismount from their horses, till a

charge of the Black Prince with two thousand lances threw this last body

into confusion. The French king was taken, desperately fighting; and when

his army poured back at noon in utter rout to the gates of Poitiers eight

thousand of their number had fallen on the field, three thousand in the

flight, and two thousand men-at-arms, with a crowd of nobles, were taken

prisoners. The royal captive entered London in triumph, mounted on a big

white charger, while the Prince rode by his side on a little black hackney

to the palace of the Savoy, which was chosen as John's dwelling, and a

truce for two years seemed to give healing-time to France.

[Sidenote: Edward and the Scots]

With the Scots Edward the Third had less good fortune. Recalled from Calais

by their seizure of Berwick, the king induced Balliol to resign into his

hands his shadowy sovereignty, and in the spring of 1356 marched upon

Edinburgh with an overpowering army, harrying and burning as he marched.

But the Scots refused an engagement, a fleet sent with provisions was

beaten off by a storm, and the famine-stricken army was forced to fall

rapidly back on the border in a disastrous retreat. The trial convinced

Edward that the conquest of Scotland was impossible, and by a rapid change

of policy which marks the man he resolved to seek the friendship of the

country he had wasted so long. David Bruce was released on promise of

ransom, a truce concluded for ten years, and the prohibition of trade

between the two kingdoms put an end to. But the fulness of this

reconciliation screened a dexterous intrigue. David was childless, and

Edward availed himself of the difficulty which the young king experienced

in finding means of providing the sum demanded for his ransom to bring him

over to a proposal which would have united the two countries for ever. The

scheme however was carefully concealed; and it was not till 1363 that David

proposed to his Parliament to set aside on his death the claims of the

Steward of Scotland to his crown, and to choose Edward's third son, Lionel,

Duke of Clarence, as his successor. Though the proposal was scornfully

rejected, negotiations were still carried on between the two kings for the

realization of this project, and were probably only put an end to by the

calamities of Edward's later years.

[Illustration: France at the Treaty of Bretigny (v2-map-2t.jpg)]

[Sidenote: Peace of Brétigny]

In France misery and misgovernment seemed to be doing Edward's work more

effectively than arms. The miserable country found no rest in itself. Its

routed soldiery turned into free companies of bandits, while the lords

captured at Crécy or Poitiers procured the sums needed for their ransom by

extortion from the peasantry. The reforms demanded by the States-General

which met in this agony of France were frustrated by the treachery of the

Regent, John's eldest son Charles, Duke of Normandy, till Paris, impatient

of his weakness and misrule, rose in arms against the Crown. The peasants

too, driven mad by oppression and famine, rose in wild insurrection,

butchering their lords and firing their castles over the whole face of

France. Paris and the Jacquerie, as this peasant rising was called, were at

last crushed by treachery and the sword: and, exhausted as it was, France

still backed the Regent in rejecting a treaty of peace by which John in

1359 proposed to buy his release. By this treaty Maine, Touraine, and

Poitou in the south, Normandy, Guisnes, Ponthieu, and Calais in the west

were ceded to the English king. On its rejection Edward in 1360 poured

ravaging over the wasted land. Famine however proved its best defence. "I

could not believe," said Petrarch of this time, "that this was the same

France which I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented itself

to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated,

houses in ruins. Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed everywhere marks of

desolation and conflagration. The streets are deserted, the roads overgrown

with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude." The utter desolation forced

Edward to carry with him an immense train of provisions, and thousands of

baggage waggons with mills, ovens, forges, and fishing-boats, formed a long

train which streamed for six miles behind his army. After a fruitless

attempt upon Reims he forced the Duke of Burgundy to conclude a treaty with

him by pushing forward to Tonnerre, and then descending the Seine appeared

with his army before Paris. But the wasted country forbade a siege, and

Edward after summoning the town in vain was forced to fall back for

subsistence on the Loire. It was during this march that the Duke of

Normandy's envoys overtook him with proposals of peace. The misery of the

land had at last bent Charles to submission, and in May a treaty was

concluded at Brétigny, a small place to the eastward of Chartres. By this

treaty the English king waived his claims on the crown of France and on the

Duchy of Normandy. On the other hand, his Duchy of Aquitaine, which

included Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, and Saintonge, the Limousin and the

Angoumois, Périgord and the counties of Bigorre and Rouergue, was not only

restored but freed from its obligations as a French fief and granted in

full sovereignty with Ponthieu, Edward's heritage from the second wife of

Edward the First, as well as with Guisnes and his new conquest of Calais.

[Sidenote: Misery of England]

The Peace of Brétigny set its seal upon Edward's glory. But within England

itself the misery of the people was deepening every hour. Men believed the

world to be ending, and the judgement day to be near. A few months after

the Peace came a fresh swoop of the Black Death, carrying off the Duke of

Lancaster. The repressive measures of Parliament and the landowners only

widened the social chasm which parted employer from employed. We can see

the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance both to the reactionary efforts

which were being made to bring back labour services and to the enactments

which again bound labour to the soil in statutes which strove in vain to

repress the strikes and combinations which became frequent in the towns and

the more formidable gatherings of villeins and "fugitive serfs" in the

country at large. A statute of later date throws light on the nature of the

resistance of the last. It tells us that "villeins and holders of land in

villeinage withdrew their customs and services from their lords, having

attached themselves to other persons who maintained and abetted them, and

who under colour of exemplifications from Domesday of the manors and

villages where they dwelt claimed to be quit of all manner of services

either of their body or of their lands, and would suffer no distress or

other course of justice to be taken against them; the villeins aiding their

maintainers by threatening the officers of their lords with peril to life

and limb as well by open assemblies as by confederacies to support each

other." It would seem not only as if the villein was striving to resist the

reactionary tendency of the lords of manors to regain his labour service

but that in the general overturning of social institutions the copyholder

was struggling to make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to be

recognized as proprietor of the demesne he held on lease.

[Sidenote: John Ball]

A more terrible outcome of the general suffering was seen in a new revolt

against the whole system of social inequality which had till then passed

unquestioned as the divine order of the world. The Peace was hardly signed

when the cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the words of "a mad

priest of Kent" as the courtly Froissart calls him, who for twenty years to

come found audience for his sermons in spite of interdict and imprisonment

in the stout yeomen who gathered round him in the churchyards of Kent.

"Mad" as the landowners held him to be, it was in the preaching of John

Ball that England first listened to a declaration of the natural equality

and rights of man. "Good people," cried the preacher, "things will never be

well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be

villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater

folk than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in

serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how

can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they

make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are

clothed in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are

covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we

oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses;

we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is

of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." It was the tyranny

of property that then as ever roused the defiance of socialism. A spirit

fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rime

which condensed the levelling doctrine of John Ball:

"When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?"

[Sidenote: William Langland]

More impressive, because of the very restraint and moderation of its tone,

is the poem in which William Langland began at the same moment to embody

with a terrible fidelity all the darker and sterner aspects of the time,

its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the misery of the

poor, the selfishness and corruption of the rich. Nothing brings more

vividly home to us the social chasm which in the fourteenth century severed

the rich from the poor than the contrast between his "Complaint of Piers

the Ploughman" and the "Canterbury Tales." The world of wealth and ease and

laughter through which the courtly Chaucer moves with, eyes downcast as in

a pleasant dream is a far-off world of wrong and of ungodliness to the

gaunt poet of the poor. Born probably in Shropshire, where he had been put

to school and received minor orders as a clerk, "Long Will," as Langland

was nicknamed from his tall stature, found his way at an early age to

London, and earned a miserable livelihood there by singing "placebos" and

"diriges" in the stately funerals of his day. Men took the moody clerk for

a madman; his bitter poverty quickened the defiant pride that made him

loth, as he tells us, to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode decked in

silver and minivere along the Cheap or to exchange a "God save you" with

the law sergeants as he passed their new house in the Temple. His world is

the world of the poor; he dwells on the poor man's life, on his hunger and

toil, his rough revelry and his despair, with the narrow intensity of a man

who has no outlook beyond it. The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of

the life he paints reflect themselves in his verse. It is only here and

there that a love of nature or a grim earnestness of wrath quickens his

rime into poetry; there is not a gleam of the bright human sympathy of

Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the gaiety, the tenderness, the daring of

the world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest

contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous

allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed texts from Scripture which form

the staple of Langland's work, are only broken here and there by phrases of

a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad

Hogarthian humour. What chains one to the poem is its deep undertone of

sadness: the world is out of joint, and the gaunt rimer who stalks silently

along the Strand has no faith in his power to put it right.

[Sidenote: Piers Ploughman]

Londoner as he is, Will's fancy flies far from the sin and suffering of the

great city to a May-morning in the Malvern Hills. "I was weary forwandered

and went me to rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I lay and

leaned and looked in the water I slumbered in a sleeping, it sweyved

(sounded) so merry." Just as Chaucer gathers the typical figures of the

world he saw into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers into a wide

field his army of traders and chafferers, of hermits and solitaries, of

minstrels, "japers and jinglers," bidders and beggars, ploughmen that "in

setting and in sowing swonken (toil) full hard," pilgrims "with their

wenches after," weavers and labourers, burgess and bondman, lawyer and

scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, and pardoners "parting the

silver" with the parish priest. Their pilgrimage is not to Canterbury but

to Truth; their guide to Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the

Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in his field. He it is who bids the

knight no more wrest gifts from his tenant nor misdo with the poor. "Though

he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven that he be worthier set

and with more bliss than thou.... For in charnel at church churles be evil

to know, or a knight from a knave there." The gospel of equality is backed

by the gospel of labour. The aim of the Ploughman is to work, and to make

the world work with him. He warns the labourer as he warns the knight.

Hunger is God's instrument in bringing the idlest to toil, and Hunger waits

to work her will on the idler and the waster. On the eve of the great

struggle between wealth and labour, Langland stands alone in his fairness

to both, in his shrewd political and religious common sense. In the face of

the popular hatred which was to gather round John of Gaunt, he paints the

Duke in a famous apologue as the cat who, greedy as she might be, at any

rate keeps the noble rats from utterly devouring the mice of the people.

Though the poet is loyal to the Church, he proclaims a righteous life to be

better than a host of indulgences, and God sends His pardon to Piers when

priests dispute it. But he sings as a man conscious of his loneliness and

without hope. It is only in a dream that he sees Corruption, "Lady Mede,"

brought to trial, and the world repenting at the preaching of Reason. In

the waking life reason finds no listeners. The poet himself is looked

upon--he tells us bitterly--as a madman. There is a terrible despair in the

close of his later poem, where the triumph of Christ is only followed by

the reign of Antichrist; where Contrition slumbers amidst the revel of

Death and Sin; and Conscience, hard beset by Pride and Sloth, rouses

himself with a last effort, and seizing his pilgrim staff, wanders over the

world to find Piers Ploughman.

[Sidenote: Præmunire]

The strife indeed which Langland would have averted raged only the fiercer

as the dark years went by. If the Statutes of Labourers were powerless for

their immediate ends, either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in

restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas of employment,

they proved effective in sowing hatred between employer and employed,

between rich and poor. But this social rift was not the only rift which was

opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The close of William

Langland's poem is the prophecy of a religious revolution; and the way for

such a revolution was being paved by the growing bitterness of strife

between England and the Papacy. In spite of the sharp protests from king

and parliament the need for money at Avignon was too great to allow any

relaxation in the Papal claims. Almost on the eve of Crécy Edward took the

decisive step of forbidding the entry into England of any Papal bulls or

documents interfering with the rights of presentation belonging to private

patrons. But the tenacity of Rome was far from loosening its grasp on this

source of revenue for all Edward's protests. Crécy however gave a new

boldness to the action of the State, and a Statute of Provisors was passed

by the Parliament in 1351 which again asserted the rights of the English

Church and enacted that all who infringed them by the introduction of Papal

"provisors" should suffer imprisonment. But resistance to provisors only

brought fresh vexations. The patrons who withstood a Papal nominee in the

name of the law were summoned to defend themselves in the Papal Court. From

that moment the supremacy of the Papal law over the law of the land became

a great question in which the lesser question of provisors merged. The

pretension of the Court of Avignon was met in 1353 by a statute which

forbade any questioning of judgements rendered in the King's Courts or any

prosecution of a suit in foreign courts under pain of outlawry, perpetual

imprisonment, or banishment from the land. It was this act of Præmunire--as

it came in after renewals to be called--which furnished so terrible a

weapon to the Tudors in their later strife with Rome. But the Papacy paid

little heed to these warnings, and its obstinacy in still receiving suits

and appeals in defiance of this statute roused the pride of a conquering

people. England was still fresh from her glory at Brétigny when Edward

appealed to the Parliament of 1365. Complaints, he said, were constantly

being made by his subjects to the Pope as to matters which were cognizable

in the King's Courts. The practice of provisors was thus maintained in the

teeth of the laws, and "the laws, usages, ancient customs, and franchises

of his kingdom were thereby much hindered, the King's crown degraded, and

his person defamed." The king's appeal was hotly met. "Biting words," which

it was thought wise to suppress, were used in the debate which followed,

and the statutes against provisors and appeals were solemnly confirmed.

[Sidenote: Wyclif]

What gave point to this challenge was the assent of the prelates to the

proceedings of the Parliament; and the pride of Urban V. at once met it by

a counter-defiance. He demanded with threats the payment of the annual sum

of a thousand marks promised by King John in acknowledgement of the

suzerainty of the See of Rome. The insult roused the temper of the realm.

The king laid the demand before Parliament, and both houses replied that

"neither King John nor any king could put himself, his kingdom, nor his

people under subjection save with their accord or assent." John's

submission had been made "without their assent and against his coronation

oath" and they pledged themselves, should the Pope attempt to enforce his

claim, to resist him with all their power. Even Urban shrank from

imperilling the Papacy by any further demands, and the claim to a Papal

lordship over England was never again heard of. But the struggle had

brought to the front a man who was destined to give a far wider scope and

significance to this resistance to Rome than any as yet dreamed of. Nothing

is more remarkable than the contrast between the obscurity of John Wyclif's

earlier life and the fulness and vividness of our knowledge of him during

the twenty years which preceded its close. Born in the earlier part of the

fourteenth century, he had already passed middle age when he was appointed

to the mastership of Balliol College in the University of Oxford and

recognized as first among the schoolmen of his day. Of all the scholastic

doctors those of England had been throughout the keenest and most daring in

philosophical speculation. A reckless audacity and love of novelty was the

common note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as against the sober and

more disciplined learning of the Parisian schoolmen, Albert and Thomas

Aquinas. The decay of the University of Paris during the English wars was

transferring her intellectual supremacy to Oxford, and in Oxford Wyclif

stood without a rival. From his predecessor, Bradwardine, whose work as a

scholastic teacher he carried on in the speculative treatises he published

during this period, he inherited the tendency to a predestinarian

Augustinianism which formed the groundwork of his later theological revolt.

His debt to Ockham revealed itself in his earliest efforts at Church

reform. Undismayed by the thunder and excommunications of the Church,

Ockham had supported the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria in his recent struggle,

and he had not shrunk in his enthusiasm for the Empire from attacking the

foundations of the Papal supremacy or from asserting the rights of the

civil power. The spare, emaciated frame of Wyclif, weakened by study and

asceticism, hardly promised a reformer who would carry on the stormy work

of Ockham; but within this frail form lay a temper quick and restless, an

immense energy, an immovable conviction, an unconquerable pride. The

personal charm which ever accompanies real greatness only deepened the

influence he derived from the spotless purity of his life. As yet indeed

even Wyclif himself can hardly have suspected the immense range of his

intellectual power. It was only the struggle that lay before him which

revealed in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later English

prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous

politician, an audacious partizan, the organizer of a religious order, the

unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of

controversialists, the first Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone,

to question and deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break

through the tradition of the past, and with his last breath to assert the

freedom of religious thought against the dogmas of the Papacy.

[Sidenote: "De Dominio Divino."]

At the moment of the quarrel with Pope Urban however Wyclif was far from

having advanced to such a position as this. As the most prominent of

English scholars it was natural that he should come forward in defence of

the independence and freedom of the English Church; and he published a

formal refutation of the claims advanced by the Papacy to deal at its will

with church property in the form of a report of the Parliamentary debates

which we have described. As yet his quarrel was not with the doctrines of

Rome but with its practices; and it was on the principles of Ockham that he

defended the Parliament's refusal of the "tribute" which was claimed by

Urban. But his treatise on "The Kingdom of God," "De Dominio Divino," which

can hardly have been written later than 1368, shows the breadth of the

ground he was even now prepared to take up. In this, the most famous of his

works, Wyclif bases his argument on a distinct ideal of society. All

authority, to use his own expression, is "founded in grace." Dominion in

the highest sense is in God alone; it is God who as the suzerain of the

universe deals out His rule in fief to rulers in their various stations on

tenure of their obedience to Himself. It was easy to object that in such a

case "dominion" could never exist, since mortal sin is a breach of such a

tenure and all men sin. But, as Wyclif urged it, the theory is a purely

ideal one. In actual practice he distinguishes between dominion and power,

power which the wicked may have by God's permission, and to which the

Christian must submit from motives of obedience to God. In his own

scholastic phrase, so strangely perverted afterwards, here on earth "God

must obey the devil." But whether in the ideal or practical view of the

matter all power and dominion was of God. It was granted by Him not to one

person, His Vicar on earth, as the Papacy alleged, but to all. The king was

as truly God's Vicar as the Pope. The royal power was as sacred as the

ecclesiastical, and as complete over temporal things, even over the

temporalities of the Church, as that of the Church over spiritual things.

So far as the question of Church and State therefore was concerned the

distinction between the ideal and practical view of "dominion" was of

little account. Wyclif's application of the theory to the individual

conscience was of far higher and wider importance. Obedient as each

Christian might be to king or priest, he himself as a possessor of

"dominion" held immediately of God. The throne of God Himself was the

tribunal of personal appeal. What the Reformers of the sixteenth century

attempted to do by their theory of Justification by Faith Wyclif attempted

to do by his theory of Dominion, a theory which in establishing a direct

relation between man and God swept away the whole basis of a mediating

priesthood, the very foundation on which the mediaeval church was built.

[Sidenote: England and Aquitaine]

As yet the full bearing of these doctrines was little seen. But the social

and religious excitement which we have described was quickened by the

renewal of the war, and the general suffering and discontent gathered

bitterness when the success which had flushed England with a new and

warlike pride passed into a long series of disasters in which men forgot

the glories of Crécy and Poitiers. Triumph as it seemed, the treaty of

Brétigny was really fatal to Edward's cause in the south of France. By the

cession of Aquitaine to him in full sovereignty the traditional claim on

which his strength rested lost its force. The people of the south had clung

to their Duke, even though their Duke was a foreign ruler. They had

stubbornly resisted incorporation with Northern France. While preserving

however their traditional fealty to the descendants of Eleanor they still

clung to the equally traditional suzerainty of the kings of France. But the

treaty of Brétigny not only severed them from the realm of France, it

subjected them to the realm of England. Edward ceased to be their

hereditary Duke, he became simply an English king ruling Aquitaine as an

English dominion. If the Southerners loved the North-French little, they

loved the English less, and the treaty which thus changed their whole

position was followed by a quick revulsion of feeling from the Garonne to

the Pyrenees. The Gascon nobles declared that John had no right to transfer

their fealty to another and to sever them from the realm of France. The

city of Rochelle prayed the French king not to release it from its fealty

to him. "We will obey the English with our lips," said its citizens, "but

our hearts shall never be moved towards them." Edward strove to meet this

passion for local independence, this hatred of being ruled from London, by

sending the Black Prince to Bordeaux and investing him in 1362 with the

Duchy of Aquitaine. But the new Duke held his Duchy as a fief from the

English king, and the grievance of the Southerners was left untouched.

Charles V. who succeeded his father John in 1364 silently prepared to reap

this harvest of discontent. Patient, wary, unscrupulous, he was hardly

crowned before he put an end to the war which had gone on without a pause

in Britanny by accepting homage from the claimant whom France had hitherto

opposed. Through Bertrand du Guesclin, a fine soldier whom his sagacity had

discovered, he forced the king of Navarre to a peace which closed the

fighting in Normandy. A more formidable difficulty in the way of

pacification and order lay in the Free Companies, a union of marauders whom

the disbanding of both armies after the peace had set free to harry the

wasted land and whom the king's military resources were insufficient to

cope with. It was the stroke by which Charles cleared his realm of these

scourges which forced on a new struggle with the English in the south.

[Sidenote: Pedro the Cruel]

In the judgement of the English court the friendship of Castille was of the

first importance for the security of Aquitaine. Spain was the strongest

naval power of the western world, and not only would the ports of Guienne

be closed but its communication with England would be at once cut off by

the appearance of a joint French and Spanish fleet in the Channel. It was

with satisfaction therefore that Edward saw the growth of a bitter

hostility between Charles and the Castilian king, Pedro the Cruel, through

the murder of his wife, Blanche of Bourbon, the French king's

sister-in-law. Henry of Trastamara, a bastard son of Pedro's father Alfonso

the Eleventh, had long been a refugee at the French court, and soon after

the treaty of Brétigny Charles in his desire to revenge this murder on

Pedro gave Henry aid in an attempt on the Castilian throne. It was

impossible for England to look on with indifference while a dependant of

the French king became master of Castille; and in 1362 a treaty offensive

and defensive was concluded between Pedro and Edward the Third. The time

was not come for open war; but the subtle policy of Charles saw in this

strife across the Pyrenees an opportunity both of detaching Castille from

the English cause and of ridding himself of the Free Companies. With

characteristic caution he dexterously held himself in the background while

he made use of the Pope, who had been threatened by the Free Companies in

his palace at Avignon and was as anxious to get rid of them as himself.

Pedro's cruelty, misgovernment, and alliance with the Moslem of Cordova

served as grounds for a crusade which was proclaimed by Pope Urban; and Du

Guesclin, who was placed at the head of the expedition, found in the Papal

treasury and in the hope of booty from an unravaged land means of gathering

the marauders round his standard. As soon as these Crusaders crossed the

Ebro Pedro was deserted by his subjects, and in 1366 Henry of Trastamara

saw himself crowned without a struggle at Burgos as king of Castille. Pedro

with his two daughters fled for shelter to Bordeaux and claimed the aid

promised in the treaty. The lords of Aquitaine shrank from fighting for

such a cause, but in spite of their protests and the reluctance of the

English council to embark in so distant a struggle Edward held that he had

no choice save to replace his ally, for to leave Henry seated on the throne

was to leave Aquitaine to be crushed between France and Castille.

[Sidenote: Charles the Fifth]

The after course of the war proved that in his anticipations of the fatal

result of a combination of the two powers Edward was right, but his policy

jarred not only against the universal craving for rest, but against the

moral sense of the world. The Black Prince however proceeded to carry out

his father's design in the teeth of the general opposition. His call to

arms robbed Henry of the aid of those English Companies who had marched

till now with the rest of the crusaders, but who returned at once to the

standard of the Prince; the passes of Navarre were opened with gold, and in

the beginning of 1367 the English army crossed the Pyrenees. Advancing to

the Ebro the Prince offered battle at Navarete with an army already reduced

by famine and disease in its terrible winter march, and Henry with double

his numbers at once attacked him. But in spite of the obstinate courage of

the Castilian troops the discipline and skill of the English soldiers once

more turned the wavering day into a victory. Du Guesclin was taken, Henry

fled across the Pyrenees, and Pedro was again seated on his throne. The pay

however which he had promised was delayed; and the Prince, whose army had

been thinned by disease to a fifth of its numbers and whose strength never

recovered from the hardships of this campaign, fell back sick and beggared

to Aquitaine. He had hardly returned when his work was undone. In 1368

Henry reentered Castille; its towns threw open their gates; a general

rising chased Pedro from the throne, and a final battle in the spring of

1369 saw his utter overthrow. His murder by Henry's hand left the bastard

undisputed master of Castille. Meanwhile the Black Prince, sick and

disheartened, was hampered at Bordeaux by the expenses of the campaign

which Pedro had left unpaid. To defray his debt he was driven in 1368 to

lay a hearth-tax on Aquitaine, and the tax served as a pretext for an

outbreak of the long-hoarded discontent. Charles was now ready for open

action. He had won over the most powerful among the Gascon nobles, and

their influence secured the rejection of the tax in a Parliament of the

province which met at Bordeaux. The Prince, pressed by debt, persisted

against the counsel of his wisest advisers in exacting it; and the lords of

Aquitaine at once appealed to the king of France. Such an appeal was a

breach of the treaty of Brétigny in which the French king had renounced his

sovereignty over the south; but Charles had craftily delayed year after

year the formal execution of the renunciations stipulated in the treaty,

and he was still able to treat it as not binding on him. The success of

Henry of Trastamara decided him to take immediate action, and in 1369 he

summoned the Black Prince as Duke of Aquitaine to meet the appeal of the

Gascon lords in his court.

[Sidenote: Renewal of the War]

The Prince was maddened by the summons. "I will come," he replied, "but

with helmet on head, and with sixty thousand men at my back." War however

had hardly been declared when the ability with which Charles had laid his

plans was seen in his seizure of Ponthieu and in a rising of the whole

country south of the Garonne. Du Gueselin returned in 1370 from Spain to

throw life into the French attack. Two armies entered Guienne from the

east; and a hundred castles with La Réole and Limoges threw open their

gates to Du Guesclin. But the march of an English army from Calais upon

Paris recalled him from the south to guard the capital at a moment when the

English leader advanced to recover Limoges, and the Black Prince borne in a

litter to its walls stormed the town and sullied by a merciless massacre of

its inhabitants the fame of his earlier exploits. Sickness however recalled

him home in the spring of 1371; and the war, protracted by the caution of

Charles who forbade his armies to engage, did little but exhaust the energy

and treasure of England. As yet indeed the French attack had made small

impression on the south, where the English troops stoutly held their ground

against Du Guesclin's inroads. But the protracted war drained Edward's

resources, while the diplomacy of Charles was busy in rousing fresh dangers

from Scotland and Castille. It was in vain that Edward looked for allies to

the Flemish towns. The male line of the Counts of Flanders ended in Count

Louis le Mâle; and the marriage of his daughter Margaret with Philip, Duke

of Burgundy, a younger brother of the French king, secured Charles from

attack along his northern border. In Scotland the death of David Bruce put

an end to Edward's schemes for a reunion of the two kingdoms; and his

successor, Robert the Steward, renewed in 1371 the alliance with France.

[Sidenote: Loss of Aquitaine]

Castille was a yet more serious danger; and an effort which Edward made to

neutralize its attack only forced Henry of Trastamara to fling his whole

weight into the struggle. The two daughters of Pedro had remained since

their father's flight at Bordeaux. The elder of these was now wedded to

John of Gaunt, Edward's fourth son, whom he had created Duke of Lancaster

on his previous marriage with Blanche, a daughter of Henry of Lancaster and

the heiress of that house, while the younger was wedded to Edward's fifth

son, the Earl of Cambridge. Edward's aim was that of raising again the

party of King Pedro and giving Henry of Trastamara work to do at home which

would hinder his interposition in the war of Guienne. It was with this view

that John of Gaunt on his marriage took the title of king of Castille. But

no adherent of Pedro's cause stirred in Spain, and Henry replied to the

challenge by sending a Spanish fleet to the Channel. A decisive victory

which this fleet won over an English convoy off Rochelle proved a fatal

blow to the English cause. It wrested from Edward the mastery of the seas,

and cut off all communication between England and Guienne. Charles was at

once roused to new exertions. Poitou, Saintonge, and the Angoumois yielded

to his general Du Guesclin; and Rochelle was surrendered by its citizens in

1372. The next year saw a desperate attempt to restore the fortune of the

English arms. A great army under John of Gaunt penetrated into the heart of

France. But it found no foe to engage. Charles had forbidden any fighting.

"If a storm rages over the land," said the king coolly, "it disperses of

itself; and so will it be with the English." Winter in fact overtook the

Duke of Lancaster in the mountains of Auvergne, and a mere fragment of his

host reached Bordeaux. The failure of this attack was the signal for a

general defection, and ere the summer of 1374 had closed the two towns of

Bordeaux and Bayonne were all that remained of the English possessions in

Southern France. Even these were only saved by the exhaustion of the

conquerors. The treasury of Charles was as utterly drained as the treasury

of Edward; and the kings were forced to a truce.

[Sidenote: The Social Strife]

Only fourteen years had gone by since the Treaty of Brétigny raised England

to a height of glory such as it had never known before. But the years had

been years of a shame and suffering which stung the people to madness.

Never had England fallen so low. Her conquests were lost, her shores

insulted, her commerce swept from the seas. Within she was drained by the

taxation and bloodshed of the war. Its popularity had wholly died away.

When the Commons were asked in 1354 whether they would assent to a treaty

of perpetual peace if they might have it, "the said Commons responded all,

and all together, 'Yes, yes!'" The population was thinned by the ravages of

pestilence, for till 1369, which saw its last visitation, the Black Death

returned again and again. The social strife too gathered bitterness with

every effort at repression. It was in vain that Parliament after Parliament

increased the severity of its laws. The demands of the Parliament of 1376

show how inoperative the previous Statutes of Labourers had proved. They

prayed that constables be directed to arrest all who infringed the Statute,

that no labourer should be allowed to take refuge in a town and become an

artizan if there were need of his service in the county from which he came,

and that the king would protect lords and employers against the threats of

death uttered by serfs who refused to serve. The reply of the Royal Council

shows that statesmen at any rate were beginning to feel that repression

might be pushed too far. The king refused to interfere by any further and

harsher provisions between employers and employed, and left cases of breach

of law to be dealt with in his ordinary courts of justice. On the one side

he forbade the threatening gatherings which were already common in the

country, but on the other he forbade the illegal exactions of the

employers. With such a reply however the proprietary class were hardly

likely to be content. Two years later the Parliament of Gloucester called

for a Fugitive-slave Law, which would have enabled lords to seize their

serfs in whatever county or town they found refuge, and in 1379 they prayed

that judges might be sent five times a year into every shire to enforce the

Statute of Labourers.

[Sidenote: Edward and the Parliament]

But the strife between employers and employed was not the only rift which

was opening in the social structure. Suffering and defeat had stripped off

the veil which hid from the nation the shallow and selfish temper of Edward

the Third. His profligacy was now bringing him to a premature old age. He

was sinking into the tool of his ministers and his mistresses. The glitter

and profusion of his court, his splendid tournaments, his feasts, his Table

Round, his new order of chivalry, the exquisite chapel of St. Stephen whose

frescoed walls were the glory of his palace at Westminster, the vast keep

which crowned the hill of Windsor, had ceased to throw their glamour round

a king who tricked his Parliament and swindled his creditors. Edward paid

no debts. He had ruined the wealthiest bankers of Florence by a cool act of

bankruptcy. The sturdier Flemish burghers only wrested payment from him by

holding his royal person as their security. His own subjects fared no

better than foreigners. The prerogative of "purveyance" by which the king

in his progresses through the country had the right of first purchase of

all that he needed at fair market price became a galling oppression in the

hands of a bankrupt king who was always moving from place to place. "When

men hear of your coming," Archbishop Islip wrote to Edward, "everybody at

once for sheer fear sets about hiding or eating or getting rid of their

geese and chickens or other possessions that they may not utterly lose them

through your arrival. The purveyors and servants of your court seize on men

and horses in the midst of their field work. They seize on the very

bullocks that are at plough or at sowing, and force them to work for two or

three days at a time without a penny of payment. It is no wonder that men

make dole and murmur at your approach, for, as the truth is in God, I

myself, whenever I hear a rumour of it, be I at home or in chapter or in

church or at study, nay if I am saying mass, even I in my own person

tremble in every limb." But these irregular exactions were little beside

the steady pressure of taxation. Even in the years of peace fifteenths and

tenths, subsidies on wool and subsidies on leather, were demanded and

obtained from Parliament; and with the outbreak of war the royal demands

became heavier and more frequent. As failure followed failure the expenses

of each campaign increased an ineffectual attempt to relieve Rochelle cost

nearly a million; the march of John of Gaunt through France utterly drained

the royal treasury. Nor were these legal supplies all that the king drew

from the nation. He had repudiated his pledge to abstain from arbitrary

taxation of imports and exports. He sold monopolies to the merchants in

exchange for increased customs. He wrested supplies from the clergy by

arrangements with the bishops or the Pope. There were signs that Edward was

longing to rid himself of the control of Parliament altogether. The power

of the Houses seemed indeed as high as ever; great statutes were passed.

Those of Provisors and Præmunire settled the relations of England to the

Roman Court. That of Treason in 1352 defined that crime and its penalties.

That of the Staples in 1353 regulated the conditions of foreign trade and

the privileges of the merchant gilds which conducted it. But side by side

with these exertions of influence we note a series of steady encroachments

by the Crown on the power of the Houses. If their petitions were granted,

they were often altered in the royal ordinance which professed to embody

them. A plan of demanding supplies for three years at once rendered the

annual assembly of Parliament less necessary. Its very existence was

threatened by the convocation in 1352 and 1353 of occasional councils with

but a single knight from every shire and a single burgess from a small

number of the greater towns, which acted as Parliament and granted

subsidies.

[Sidenote: The Baronage and the Church]

What aided Edward above all in eluding or defying the constitutional

restrictions on arbitrary taxation, as well as in these more insidious

attempts to displace the Parliament, was the lessening of the check which

the Baronage and the Church had till now supplied. The same causes which

had long been reducing the number of the greater lords who formed the upper

house went steadily on. Under Edward the Second little more than seventy

were commonly summoned to Parliament; little more than forty were summoned

under Edward the Third, and of these the bulk were now bound to the Crown,

partly by their employment on its service, partly by their interest in the

continuance of the war. The heads of the Baronage too were members of the

royal family. Edward had carried out on a far wider scale than before the

policy which had been more or less adhered to from the days of Henry the

Third, that of gathering up in the hands of the royal house all the greater

heritages of the land. The Black Prince was married to Joan of Kent, the

heiress of Edward the First's younger son, Earl Edmund of Woodstock. His

marriage with the heiress of the Earl of Ulster brought to the king's

second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a great part of the possessions of

the de Burghs. Later on the possessions of the house of Bohun passed by

like matches to his youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, and to his grandson,

Henry of Lancaster. But the greatest English heritage fell to Edward's

third living son, John of Gaunt as he was called from his birth at Ghent

during his father's Flemish campaign. Originally created Earl of Richmond,

the death of his father-in-law, Henry of Lancaster, and of Henry's eldest

daughter, raised John in his wife's right to the Dukedom of Lancaster and

the Earldoms of Derby, Leicester, and Lincoln. But while the baronage were

thus bound to the Crown, they drifted more and more into an hostility with

the Church which in time disabled the clergy from acting as a check on it.

What rent the ruling classes in twain was the growing pressure of the war.

The nobles and knighthood of the country, already half ruined by the rise

in the labour market and the attitude of the peasantry, were pressed harder

than ever by the repeated subsidies which were called for by the

continuance of the struggle. In the hour of their distress they cast their

eyes greedily--as in the Norman and Angevin days--on the riches of the

Church. Never had her wealth been greater. Out of a population of some

three millions the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty

thousand. Wild tales of their riches floated about the country. They were

said to own in landed property alone more than a third of the soil, while

their "spiritualities" in dues and offerings amounted to twice the king's

revenue. Exaggerated as such statements were, the wealth of the Church was

really great; but even more galling to the nobles was its influence in the

royal councils. The feudal baronage, flushed with a new pride by its

victories at Crécy and Poitiers, looked with envy and wrath at the throng

of bishops around the council-board, and attributed to their love of peace

the errors and sluggishness which had caused, as they held, the disasters

of the war. To rob the Church of wealth and of power became the aim of a

great baronial party.

[Sidenote: Weakness of the Church]

The efforts of the baronage indeed would have been fruitless had the

spiritual power of the Church remained as of old. But the clergy were rent

by their own dissensions. The higher prelates were busy with the cares of

political office, and severed from the lower priesthood by the scandalous

inequality between the revenues of the wealthier ecclesiastics and the

"poor parson" of the country. A bitter hatred divided the secular clergy

from the regular; and this strife went fiercely on in the Universities.

Fitz-Ralf, the Chancellor of Oxford, attributed to the friars the decline

which was already being felt in the number of academical students, and the

University checked by statute their practice of admitting mere children

into their order. The clergy too at large shared in the discredit and

unpopularity of the Papacy. Though they suffered more than any other class

from the exactions of Avignon, they were bound more and more to the Papal

cause. The very statutes which would have protected them were practically

set aside by the treacherous diplomacy of the Crown. At home and abroad the

Roman See was too useful for the king to come to any actual breach with it.

However much Edward might echo the bold words of his Parliament, he shrank

from an open contest which would have added the Papacy to his many foes,

and which would at the same time have robbed him of his most effective

means of wresting aids from the English clergy by private arrangement with

the Roman court. Rome indeed was brought to waive its alleged right of

appointing foreigners to English livings. But a compromise was arranged

between the Pope and the Crown in which both united in the spoliation and

enslavement of the Church. The voice of chapters, of monks, of

ecclesiastical patrons, went henceforth for nothing in the election of

bishops or abbots or the nomination to livings in the gift of churchmen.

The Crown recommended those whom it chose to the Pope, and the Pope

nominated them to see or cure of souls. The treasuries of both King and

Pope profited by the arrangement; but we can hardly wonder that after a

betrayal such as this the clergy placed little trust in statutes or royal

protection, and bowed humbly before the claims of Rome.

[Sidenote: Its Worldliness]

But what weakened the clergy most was their severance from the general

sympathies of the nation, their selfishness, and the worldliness of their

temper. Immense as their wealth was, they bore as little as they could of

the common burthens of the realm. They were still resolute to assert their

exemption from the common justice of the land, though the mild punishments

of the bishops' courts carried as little dismay as ever into the mass of

disorderly clerks. But privileged as they thus held themselves against all

interference from the lay world without them, they carried on a ceaseless

interference with the affairs of this lay world through their control over

wills, contracts and divorces. No figure was better known or more hated

than the summoner who enforced the jurisdiction and levied the dues of

their courts. By their directly religious offices they penetrated into the

very heart of the social life about them. But powerful as they were, their

moral authority was fast passing away. The wealthier churchmen with their

curled hair and hanging sleeves aped the costume of the knightly society

from which they were drawn and to which they still really belonged. We see

the general impression of their worldliness in Chaucer's pictures of the

hunting monk and the courtly prioress with her love-motto on her brooch.

The older religious orders in fact had sunk into mere landowners, while the

enthusiasm of the friars had in great part died away and left a crowd of

impudent mendicants behind it. Wyclif could soon with general applause

denounce them as sturdy beggars, and declare that "the man who gives alms

to a begging friar is _ipso facto_ excommunicate."

[Sidenote: Advance of the Commons]

It was this weakness of the Baronage and the Church, and the consequent

withdrawal of both as represented in the temporal and spiritual Estates of

the Upper House from the active part which they had taken till now in

checking the Crown that brought the Lower House to the front. The Knight of

the Shire was now finally joined with the Burgess of the Town to form the

Third Estate of the realm: and this union of the trader and the country

gentleman gave a vigour and weight to the action of the Commons which their

House could never have acquired had it remained as elsewhere a mere

gathering of burgesses. But it was only slowly and under the pressure of

one necessity after another that the Commons took a growing part in public

affairs. Their primary business was with taxation, and here they stood firm

against the evasions by which the king still managed to baffle their

exclusive right of granting supplies by voluntary agreements with the

merchants of the Staple. Their steady pressure at last obtained in 1362 an

enactment that no subsidy should henceforth be set upon wool without assent

of Parliament, while Purveyance was restricted by a provision that payments

should be made for all things taken for the king's use in ready money. A

hardly less important advance was made by the change of Ordinances into

Statutes. Till this time, even when a petition of the Houses was granted,

the royal Council had reserved to itself the right of modifying its form in

the Ordinance which professed to embody it. It was under colour of this

right that so many of the provisions made in Parliament had hitherto been

evaded or set aside. But the Commons now met this abuse by a demand that on

the royal assent being given their petitions should be turned without

change into Statutes of the Realm and derive force of law from their entry

on the Rolls of Parliament. The same practical sense was seen in their

dealings with Edward's attempt to introduce occasional smaller councils

with parliamentary powers. Such an assembly in 1353 granted a subsidy on

wool. The Parliament which met in the following year might have challenged

its proceedings as null and void, but the Commons more wisely contented

themselves with a demand that the ordinances passed in the preceding

assembly should receive the sanction of the Three Estates. A precedent for

evil was thus turned into a precedent for good, and though irregular

gatherings of a like sort were for a while occasionally held they were soon

seen to be fruitless and discontinued. But the Commons long shrank from

meddling with purely administrative matters. When Edward in his anxiety to

shift from himself the responsibility of the war referred to them in 1354

for advice on one of the numerous propositions of peace, they referred him

to the lords of his Council. "Most dreaded lord," they replied, "as to this

war and the equipment needful for it we are so ignorant and simple that we

know not how nor have the power to devise. Wherefore we pray your Grace to

excuse us in this matter, and that it please you with the advice of the

great and wise persons of your Council to ordain what seems best for you

for the honour and profit of yourself and of your kingdom. And whatsoever

shall be thus ordained by assent and agreement on the part of you and your

Lords we readily assent to and will hold it firmly established."

[Sidenote: Baronage attacks the Church]

But humble as was their tone the growing power of the Commons showed itself

in significant changes. In 1363 the Chancellor opened Parliament with a

speech in English, no doubt as a tongue intelligible to the members of the

Lower House. From a petition in 1376 that knights of the shire may be

chosen by common election of the better folk of the shire and not merely

nominated by the sheriff without due election, as well as from an earlier

demand that the sheriffs themselves should be disqualified from serving in

Parliament during their term of office, we see that the Crown had already

begun not only to feel the pressure of the Commons but to meet it by

foisting royal nominees on the constituencies. Such an attempt at packing

the House would hardly have been resorted to had it not already proved too

strong for direct control. A further proof of its influence was seen in a

prayer of the Parliament that lawyers practising in the King's Courts might

no longer be eligible as knights of the shire. The petition marks the rise

of a consciousness that the House was now no mere gathering of local

representatives, but a national assembly, and that a seat in it could no

longer be confined to dwellers within the bounds of this county or that.

But it showed also a pressure for seats, a passing away of the old dread of

being returned as a representative and a new ambition to gain a place among

the members of the Commons. Whether they would or no indeed the Commons

were driven forward to a more direct interference with public affairs. From

the memorable statute of 1322 their right to take equal part in all matters

brought before Parliament had been incontestable, and their waiver of much

of this right faded away before the stress of time. Their assent was needed

to the great ecclesiastical statutes which regulated the relation of the

See of Rome to the realm. They naturally took a chief part in the enactment

and re-enactment of the Statute of Labourers. The Statute of the Staple,

with a host of smaller commercial and economical measures, was of their

origination. But it was not till an open breach took place between the

baronage and the prelates that their full weight was felt. In the

Parliament of 1371, on the resumption of the war, a noble taunted the

Church as an owl protected by the feathers which other birds had

contributed, and which they had a right to resume when a hawk's approach

threatened them. The worldly goods of the Church, the metaphor hinted, had

been bestowed on it for the common weal, and could be taken from it on the

coming of a common danger. The threat was followed by a prayer that the

chief offices of state, which had till now been held by the leading

bishops, might be placed in lay hands. The prayer was at once granted:

William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, resigned the Chancellorship,

another prelate the Treasury, to lay dependants of the great nobles; and

the panic of the clergy was seen in large grants which were voted by both

Convocations.

[Sidenote: John of Gaunt]

At the moment of their triumph the assailants of the Church found a leader

in John of Gaunt. The Duke of Lancaster now wielded the actual power of the

Crown. Edward himself was sinking into dotage. Of his sons the Black

Prince, who had never rallied from the hardships of his Spanish campaign,

was fast drawing to the grave; he had lost a second son by death in

childhood; the third, Lionel of Clarence, had died in 1368. It was his

fourth son therefore, John of Gaunt, to whom the royal power mainly fell.

By his marriage with the heiress of the house of Lancaster the Duke had

acquired lands and wealth, but he had no taste for the policy of the

Lancastrian house or for acting as leader of the barons in any

constitutional resistance to the Crown. His pride, already quickened by the

second match with Constance to which he owed his shadowy kingship of

Castille, drew him to the throne; and the fortune which placed the royal

power practically in his hands bound him only the more firmly to its cause.

Men held that his ambition looked to the Crown itself, for the approaching

death of Edward and the Prince of Wales left but a boy, Richard, the son of

the Black Prince, a child of but a few years old, and a girl, the daughter

of the Duke of Clarence, between John and the throne. But the Duke's

success fell short of his pride. In the campaign of 1373 he traversed

France without finding a foe and brought back nothing save a ruined army to

English shores. The peremptory tone in which money was demanded for the

cost of this fruitless march while the petitions of the Parliament were set

aside till it was granted roused the temper of the Commons. They

requested--it is the first instance of such a practice--a conference with

the lords, and while granting fresh subsidies prayed that the grant should

be spent only on the war. The resentment of the government at this advance

towards a control over the actual management of public affairs was seen in

the calling of no Parliament through the next two years. But the years were

disastrous both at home and abroad. The war went steadily against the

English arms. The long negotiations with the Pope which went on at Bruges

through 1375, and in which Wyclif took part as one of the royal

commissioners, ended in a compromise by which Rome yielded nothing. The

strife over the Statute of Labourers grew fiercer and fiercer, and a return

of the plague heightened the public distress. Edward was now wholly swayed

by Alice Perrers, and the Duke shared his power with the royal mistress.

But if we gather its tenor from the complaints of the succeeding Parliament

his administration was as weak as it was corrupt. The new lay ministers

lent themselves to gigantic frauds. The chamberlain, Lord Latimer, bought

up the royal debts and embezzled the public revenue. With Richard Lyons, a

merchant through whom the king negotiated with the gild of the Staple, he

reaped enormous profits by raising the price of imports and by lending to

the Crown at usurious rates of interest. When the empty treasury forced

them to call a Parliament the ministers tampered with the elections through

the sheriffs.

[Sidenote: The Good Parliament]

But the temper of the Parliament which met in 1376, and which gained from

after times the name of the Good Parliament, shows that these precautions

had utterly failed. Even their promise to pillage the Church had failed to

win for the Duke and his party the good will of the lesser gentry or the

wealthier burgesses who together formed the Commons. Projects of wide

constitutional and social change, of the humiliation and impoverishment of

an estate of the realm, were profoundly distasteful to men already

struggling with a social revolution on their own estates and in their own

workshops. But it was not merely its opposition to the projects of

Lancaster and his party among the baronage which won for this assembly the

name of the Good Parliament. Its action marked a new period in our

Parliamentary history, as it marked a new stage in the character of the

national opposition to the misrule of the Crown. Hitherto the task of

resistance had devolved on the baronage, and had been carried out through

risings of its feudal tenantry. But the misgovernment was now that of the

baronage or of a main part of the baronage itself in actual conjunction

with the Crown. Only in the power of the Commons lay any adequate means of

peaceful redress. The old reluctance of the Lower House to meddle with

matters of State was roughly swept away therefore by the pressure of the

time. The Black Prince, anxious to secure his child's succession by the

removal of John of Gaunt, the prelates with William of Wykeham at their

head, resolute again to take their place in the royal councils and to check

the projects of ecclesiastical spoliation put forward by their opponents,

alike found in it a body to oppose to the Duke's administration. Backed by

powers such as these, the action of the Commons showed none of their old

timidity or self-distrust. The presentation of a hundred and forty

petitions of grievances preluded a bold attack on the royal Council.

"Trusting in God, and standing with his followers before the nobles,

whereof the chief was John Duke of Lancaster, whose doings were ever

contrary," their speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare, denounced the

mis-management of the war, the oppressive taxation, and demanded an account

of the expenditure. "What do these base and ignoble knights attempt?" cried

John of Gaunt. "Do they think they be kings or princes of the land?" But

the movement was too strong to be stayed. Even the Duke was silenced by the

charges brought against the ministers. After a strict enquiry Latimer and

Lyons were alike thrown into prison, Alice Perrers was banished, and

several of the royal servants were driven from the Court. At this moment

the death of the Black Prince shook the power of the Parliament. But it

only heightened its resolve to secure the succession. His son, Richard of

Bordeaux, as he was called from the place of his birth, was now a child of

but ten years old; and it was known that doubts were whispered on the

legitimacy of his birth and claim. An early marriage of his mother Joan of

Kent, a granddaughter of Edward the First, with the Earl of Salisbury had

been annulled; but the Lancastrian party used this first match to throw

doubts on the validity of her subsequent union with the Black Prince and on

the right of Richard to the throne. The dread of Lancaster's ambition is

the first indication of the approach of what was from this time to grow

into the great difficulty of the realm, the question of the succession to

the Crown. From the death of Edward the Third to the death of Charles the

First no English sovereign felt himself secure from rival claimants of his

throne. As yet however the dread was a baseless one; the people were

heartily with the Prince and his child. The Duke's proposal that the

succession should be settled in case of Richard's death was rejected; and

the boy himself was brought into Parliament and acknowledged as heir of the

Crown.

[Sidenote: Wyclif and John of Gaunt]

To secure their work the Commons ended by obtaining the addition of nine

lords with William of Wykeham and two other prelates among them to the

royal Council. But the Parliament was no sooner dismissed than the Duke at

once resumed his power. His anger at the blow which had been dealt at his

projects was no doubt quickened by resentment at the sudden advance of the

Lower House. From the Commons who shrank even from giving counsel on

matters of state to the Commons who dealt with such matters as their

special business, who investigated royal accounts, who impeached royal

ministers, who dictated changes in the royal advisers, was an immense step.

But it was a step which the Duke believed could be retraced. His haughty

will flung aside all restraints of law. He dismissed the new lords and

prelates from the Council. He called back Alice Perrers and the disgraced

ministers. He declared the Good Parliament no parliament, and did not

suffer its petitions to be enrolled as statutes. He imprisoned Peter de la

Mare, and confiscated the possessions of William of Wykeham. His attack on

this prelate was an attack on the clergy at large, and the attack became

significant when the Duke gave his open patronage to the denunciations of

Church property which formed the favourite theme of John Wyclif. To Wyclif

such a prelate as Wykeham symbolized the evil which held down the Church.

His administrative ability, his political energy, his wealth and the

colleges at Winchester and at Oxford which it enabled him to raise before

his death, were all equally hateful. It was this wealth, this intermeddling

with worldly business, which the ascetic reformer looked upon as the curse

that robbed prelates and churchmen of that spiritual authority which could

alone meet the vice and suffering of the time. Whatever baser motives might

spur Lancaster and his party, their projects of spoliation must have seemed

to Wyclif projects of enfranchisement for the Church. Poor and powerless in

worldly matters, he held that she would have the wealth and might of heaven

at her command. Wyclif's theory of Church and State had led him long since

to contend that the property of the clergy might be seized and employed

like other property for national purposes. Such a theory might have been

left, as other daring theories of the schoolmen had been left, to the

disputation of the schools. But the clergy were bitterly galled when the

first among English teachers threw himself hotly on the side of the party

which threatened them with spoliation, and argued in favour of their

voluntary abandonment of all Church property and of a return to their

original poverty. They were roused to action when Wyclif came forward as

the theological bulwark of the Lancastrian party at a moment when the

clergy were freshly outraged by the overthrow of the bishops and the

plunder of Wykeham. They forced the king to cancel the sentence of

banishment from the precincts of the Court which had been directed against

the Bishop of Winchester by refusing any grant of supply in Convocation

till William of Wykeham took his seat in it. But in the prosecution of

Wyclif they resolved to return blow for blow. In February 1377 he was

summoned before Bishop Courtenay of London to answer for his heretical

propositions concerning the wealth of the Church.

The Duke of Lancaster accepted the challenge as really given to himself,

and stood by Wyclif's side in the Consistory Court at St. Paul's. But no

trial took place. Fierce words passed between the nobles and the prelate:

the Duke himself was said to have threatened to drag Courtenay out of the

church by the hair of his head; at last the London populace, to whom John

of Gaunt was hateful, burst in to their Bishop's rescue, and Wyclif's life

was saved with difficulty by the aid of the soldiery. But his boldness only

grew with the danger. A Papal bull which was procured by the bishops,

directing the University to condemn and arrest him, extorted from him a

bold defiance. In a defence circulated widely through the kingdom and laid

before Parliament, Wyclif broadly asserted that no man could be

excommunicated by the Pope "unless he were first excommunicated by

himself." He denied the right of the Church to exact or defend temporal

privileges by spiritual censures, declared that a Church might justly be

deprived by the king or lay lords of its property for defect of duty, and

defended the subjection of ecclesiastics to civil tribunals. It marks the

temper of the time and the growing severance between the Church and the

nation that, bold as the defiance was, it won the support of the people as

of the Crown. When Wyclif appeared at the close of the year in Lambeth

Chapel to answer the Archbishop's summons a message from the Court forbade

the primate to proceed and the Londoners broke in and dissolved the

session.

[Sidenote: Death of Edward the Third]

Meanwhile the Duke's unscrupulous tampering with elections had packed the

Parliament of 1377 with his adherents. The work of the Good Parliament was

undone, and the Commons petitioned for the restoration of all who had been

impeached by their predecessors. The needs of the treasury were met by a

novel form of taxation. To the earlier land-tax, to the tax on personality

which dated from the Saladin Tithe, to the customs duties which had grown

into importance in the last two reigns, was now added a tax which reached

every person in the realm, a poll-tax of a groat a head. In this tax were

sown the seeds of future trouble, but when the Parliament broke up in March

the Duke's power seemed completely secured. Hardly three months later it

was wholly undone. In June Edward the Third died in a dishonoured old age,

robbed on his death-bed even of his rings by the mistress to whom he clung,

and the accession of his grandson, Richard the Second, changed the whole

face of affairs. The Duke withdrew from Court, and sought a reconciliation

with the party opposed to him. The men of the Good Parliament surrounded

the new king, and a Parliament which assembled in October took vigorously

up its work. Peter de la Mare was released from prison and replaced in the

chair of the House of Commons. The action of the Lower House indeed was as

trenchant and comprehensive as that of the Good Parliament itself. In

petition after petition the Commons demanded the confirmation of older

rights and the removal of modern abuses. They complained of administrative

wrongs such as the practice of purveyance, of abuses of justice, of the

oppressions of officers of the exchequer and of the forest, of the ill

state of prisons, of the customs of "maintenance" and "livery" by which

lords extended their protection to shoals of disorderly persons and

overawed the courts by means of them. Amid ecclesiastical abuses they noted

the state of the Church courts, and the neglect of the laws of Provisors.

They demanded that the annual assembly of Parliament, which had now become

customary, should be defined by law, and that bills once sanctioned by the

Crown should be forthwith turned into statutes without further amendment or

change on the part of the royal Council. With even greater boldness they

laid hands on the administration itself. They not only demanded that the

evil counsellors of the last reign should be removed, and that the

treasurer of the subsidy on wool should account for its expenditure to the

lords, but that the royal Council should be named in Parliament, and chosen

from members of either estate of the realm. Though a similar request for

the nomination of the officers of the royal household was refused, their

main demand was granted. It was agreed that the great officers of state,

the chancellor, treasurer, and barons of exchequer should be named by the

lords in Parliament, and removed from their offices during the king's

"tender years" only on the advice of the lords. The pressure of the war,

which rendered the existing taxes insufficient, gave the House a fresh hold

on the Crown. While granting a new subsidy in the form of a land and

property tax, the Commons restricted its proceeds to the war, and assigned

two of their members, William Walworth and John Philpot, as a standing

committee to regulate its expenditure. The successor of this Parliament in

the following year demanded and obtained an account of the way in which the

subsidy had been spent.

[Sidenote: Discontent of the people]

The minority of the king, who was but eleven years old at his accession,

the weakness of the royal council amidst the strife of the baronial

factions, above all the disasters of the war without and the growing

anarchy within the realm itself, alone made possible this startling

assumption of the executive power by the Houses. The shame of defeat abroad

was being added to the misery and discomfort at home. The French war ran

its disastrous course. One English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a

second sunk by a storm; and a campaign in the heart of France ended, like

its predecessors, in disappointment and ruin. Meanwhile the strife between

employers and employed was kindling into civil war. The Parliament, drawn

as it was wholly from the proprietary classes, struggled as fiercely for

the mastery of the labourers as it struggled for the mastery of the Crown.

The Good Parliament had been as strenuous in demanding the enforcement of

the Statute of Labourers as any of its predecessors. In spite of statutes,

however, the market remained in the labourers' hands. The comfort of the

worker rose with his wages. Men who had "no land to live on but their hands

disdained to live on penny ale or bacon, and called for fresh flesh or

fish, fried or bake, and that hot and hotter for chilling of their maw."

But there were dark shades in this general prosperity of the labour class.

There were seasons of the year during which employment for the floating

mass of labour was hard to find. In the long interval between harvest-tide

and harvest-tide work and food were alike scarce in every homestead of the

time. Some lines of William Langland give us the picture of a farm of the

day. "I have no penny pullets for to buy, nor neither geese nor pigs, but

two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oaten cake, and two loaves

of beans and bran baken for my children. I have no salt bacon nor no cooked

meat collops for to make, but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbage

plants, and eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare to draw afield my dung

while the drought lasteth, and by this livelihood we must all live till

Lammas-tide [August], and by that I hope to have harvest in my croft." But

it was not till Lammas-tide that high wages and the new corn bade "Hunger

go to sleep," and during the long spring and summer the free labourer and

the "waster that will not work but wander about, that will eat no bread but

the finest wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest ale," was a source

of social and political danger. "He grieveth him against God and grudgeth

against Reason, and then curseth he the King and all his council after such

law to allow labourers to grieve." Such a smouldering mass of discontent as

this needed but a spark to burst into flame; and the spark was found in the

imposition of fresh taxation.

[Sidenote: The Poll-Tax]

If John of Gaunt was fallen from his old power he was still the leading

noble in the realm, and it is possible that dread of the encroachments of

the last Parliament on the executive power drew after a time even the new

advisers of the Crown closer to him. Whatever was the cause, he again came

to the front. But the supplies voted in the past year were wasted in his

hands. A fresh expedition against France under the Duke himself ended in

failure before the walls of St. Malo, while at home his brutal household

was outraging public order by the murder of a knight who had incurred

John's anger in the precincts of Westminster. So great was the resentment

of the Londoners at this act that it became needful to summon Parliament

elsewhere than to the capital; and in 1378 the Houses met at Gloucester.

The Duke succeeded in bringing the Lords to refuse those conferences with

the Commons which had given unity to the action of the late Parliament, but

he was foiled in an attack on the clerical privilege of sanctuary and in

the threats which his party still directed against Church property, while

the Commons forced the royal Council to lay before them the accounts of the

last subsidy and to appoint a commission to examine into the revenue of the

Crown. Unhappily the financial policy of the preceding year was persisted

in. The check before St. Malo had been somewhat redeemed by treaties with

Charles of Evreux and the Duke of Britanny which secured to England the

right of holding Cherbourg and Brest; but the cost of these treaties only

swelled the expenses of the war. The fresh supplies voted at Gloucester

proved insufficient for their purpose, and a Parliament in the spring of

1379 renewed the Poll-tax in a graduated form. But the proceeds of the tax

proved miserably inadequate, and when fresh debts beset the Crown in 1380 a

return was again made to the old system of subsidies. But these failed in

their turn; and at the close of the year the Parliament again fell back on

a severer Poll-tax. One of the attractions of the new mode of taxation

seems to have been that the clergy, who adopted it for themselves, paid in

this way a larger share of the burthens of the state; but the chief ground

for its adoption lay, no doubt, in its bringing within the net of the

tax-gatherer a class which had hitherto escaped him, men such as the free

labourer, the village smith, the village tiler. But few courses could have

been more dangerous. The Poll-tax not only brought the pressure of the war

home to every household; it goaded into action precisely the class which

was already seething with discontent. The strife between labour and capital

was going on as fiercely as ever in country and in town. The landlords were

claiming new services, or forcing men who looked on themselves as free to

prove they were no villeins by law. The free labourer was struggling

against the attempt to exact work from him at low wages. The wandering

workman was being seized and branded as a vagrant. The abbey towns were

struggling for freedom against the abbeys. The craftsmen within boroughs

were carrying on the same strife against employer and craft-gild. And all

this mass of discontent was being heightened and organized by agencies with

which the Government could not cope. The poorer villeins and the free

labourers had long since banded together in secret conspiracies which the

wealthier villeins supported with money. The return of soldiers from the

war threw over the land a host of broken men, skilled in arms, and ready to

take part in any rising. The begging friars, wandering and gossiping from

village to village and street to street, shared the passions of the class

from which they sprang. Priests like Ball openly preached the doctrines of

communism. And to these had been recently added a fresh agency, which could

hardly fail to stir a new excitement. With the practical ability which

marked his character, Wyclif set on foot about this time a body of poor

preachers to supply, as he held, the place of those wealthier clergy who

had lost their hold on the land. The coarse sermons, bare feet, and russet

dress of these "Simple Priests" moved the laughter of rector and canon, but

they proved a rapid and effective means of diffusing Wyclif's protests

against the wealth and sluggishness of the clergy, and we can hardly doubt

that in the general turmoil their denunciation of ecclesiastical wealth

passed often into more general denunciations of the proprietary classes.

[Sidenote: John Ball]

As the spring went by quaint rimes passed through the country, and served

as a summons to revolt. "John Ball," ran one, "greeteth you all, and doth

for to understand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might, will and

skill, God speed every dele." "Help truth," ran another, "and truth shall

help you! Now reigneth pride in price, and covetise is counted wise, and

lechery withouten shame, and gluttony withouten blame. Envy reigneth with

treason, and sloth is take in great season. God do bote, for now is tyme!"

We recognize Ball's hand in the yet more stirring missives of "Jack the

Miller" and "Jack the Carter." "Jack Miller asketh help to turn his mill

aright. He hath grounden small, small: the King's Son of Heaven he shall

pay for all. Look thy mill go aright with the four sailes, and the post

stand with steadfastness. With right and with might, with skill and with

will; let might help right, and skill go before will, and right before

might, so goeth our mill aright." "Jack Carter," ran the companion missive,

"prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well,

and aye better and better: for at the even men heareth the day." "Falseness

and guile," sang Jack Trewman, "have reigned too long, and truth hath been

set under a lock, and falseness and guile reigneth in every stock. No man

may come truth to, but if he sing 'si dedero.' True love is away that was

so good, and clerks for wealth work them woe. God do bote, for now is

time." In the rude jingle of these lines began for England the literature

of political controversy: they are the first predecessors of the pamphlets

of Milton and of Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the

mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants: their longing for

a right rule, for plain and simple justice; their scorn of the immorality

of the nobles and the infamy of the court; their resentment at the

perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.

[Sidenote: The Peasant Rising]

From the eastern and midland counties the restlessness spread to all

England south of the Thames. But the grounds of discontent varied with

every district. The actual outbreak began on the 5th of June at Dartford,

where a tiler killed one of the collectors of the poll-tax in vengeance for

a brutal outrage on his daughter. The county at once rose in arms.

Canterbury, where "the whole town was of their mind," threw open its gates

to the insurgents who plundered the Archbishop's palace and dragged John

Ball from his prison. A hundred thousand Kentishmen gathered round Walter

Tyler of Essex and John Hales of Malling to march upon London. Their

grievance was mainly a political one. Villeinage was unknown in Kent. As

the peasants poured towards Blackheath indeed every lawyer who fell into

their hands was put to death; "not till all these were killed would the

land enjoy its old freedom again," the Kentishmen shouted as they fired the

houses of the stewards and flung the rolls of the manor-courts into the

flames. But this action can hardly have been due to anything more than

sympathy with the rest of the realm, the sympathy which induced the same

men when pilgrims from the north brought news that John of Gaunt was

setting free his bondmen to send to the Duke an offer to make him Lord and

King of England. Nor was their grievance a religious one. Lollardry can

have made little way among men whose grudge against the Archbishop of

Canterbury sprang from his discouragement of pilgrimages. Their discontent

was simply political; they demanded the suppression of the poll-tax and

better government; their aim was to slay the nobles and wealthier clergy,

to take the king into their own hands, and pass laws which should seem good

to the Commons of the realm. The whole population joined the Kentishmen as

they marched along, while the nobles were paralyzed with fear. The young

king--he was but a boy of sixteen--addressed them from a boat on the river;

but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of Archbishop Sudbury to

allow him to land kindled the peasants to fury, and with cries of "Treason"

the great mass rushed on London. On the 13th of June its gates were flung

open by the poorer artizans within the city, and the stately palace of John

of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses

of the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze. But the insurgents, as they

proudly boasted, were "seekers of truth and justice, not thieves or

robbers," and a plunderer found carrying off a silver vessel from the sack

of the Savoy was flung with his spoil into the flames. Another body of

insurgents encamped at the same time to the east of the city. In Essex and

the eastern counties the popular discontent was more social than political.

The demands of the peasants were that bondage should be abolished, that

tolls and imposts on trade should be done away with, that "no acre of land

which is held in bondage or villeinage be held at higher rate than

fourpence a year," in other words for a money commutation of all villein

services. Their rising had been even earlier than that of the Kentishmen.

Before Whitsuntide an attempt to levy the poll-tax gathered crowds of

peasants together, armed with clubs, rusty swords, and bows. The royal

commissioners who were sent to repress the tumult were driven from the

field, and the Essex men marched upon London on one side of the river as

the Kentishmen marched on the other. The evening of the thirteenth, the day

on which Tyler entered the city, saw them encamped without its walls at

Mile-end. At the same moment Highbury and the northern heights were

occupied by the men of Hertfordshire and the villeins of St. Albans, where

a strife between abbot and town had been going on since the days of Edward

the Second.

[Sidenote: Richard the Second]

The royal Council with the young king had taken refuge in the Tower, and

their aim seems to have been to divide the forces of the insurgents. On the

morning of the fourteenth therefore Richard rode from the Tower to Mile-end

to meet the Essex men. "I am your King and Lord, good people," the boy

began with a fearlessness which marked his bearing throughout the crisis,

"what will you?" "We will that you free us for ever," shouted the peasants,

"us and our lands; and that we be never named nor held for serfs!" "I grant

it," replied Richard; and he bade them go home, pledging himself at once to

issue charters of freedom and amnesty. A shout of joy welcomed the promise.

Throughout the day more than thirty clerks were busied writing letters of

pardon and emancipation, and with these the mass of the Essex men and the

men of Hertfordshire withdrew quietly to their homes. But while the king

was successful at Mile-end a terrible doom had fallen on the councillors he

left behind him. Richard had hardly quitted the Tower when the Kentishmen

who had spent the night within the city appeared at its gates. The general

terror was shown ludicrously enough when they burst in and taking the

panic-stricken knights of the royal household in rough horse-play by the

beard promised to be their equals and good comrades in the days to come.

But the horse-play changed into dreadful earnest when they found that

Richard had escaped their grasp, and the discovery of Archbishop Sudbury

and other ministers in the chapel changed their fury into a cry for blood.

The Primate was dragged from his sanctuary and beheaded. The same vengeance

was wreaked on the Treasurer and the Chief Commissioner for the levy of the

hated poll-tax, the merchant Richard Lyons who had been impeached by the

Good Parliament. Richard meanwhile had ridden round the northern wall of

the city to the Wardrobe near Blackfriars, and from this new refuge he

opened his negotiations with the Kentish insurgents. Many of these

dispersed at the news of the king's pledge to the men of Essex, but a body

of thirty thousand still surrounded Wat Tyler when Richard on the morning

of the fifteenth encountered that leader by a mere chance at Smithfield.

Hot words passed between his train and the peasant chieftain who advanced

to confer with the king, and a threat from Tyler brought on a brief

struggle in which the Mayor of London, William Walworth, struck him with

his dagger to the ground. "Kill! kill!" shouted the crowd: "they have slain

our captain!" But Richard faced the Kentishmen with the same cool courage

with which he faced the men of Essex. "What need ye, my masters?" cried the

boy-king as he rode boldly up to the front of the bowmen. "I am your

Captain and your King; follow me!" The hopes of the peasants centred in the

young sovereign; one aim of their rising had been to free him from the evil

counsellors who, as they believed, abused his youth; and at his word they

followed him with a touching loyalty and trust till he entered the Tower.

His mother welcomed him within its walls with tears of joy. "Rejoice and

praise God," Richard answered, "for I have recovered to-day my heritage

which was lost and the realm of England!" But he was compelled to give the

same pledge of freedom to the Kentishmen as at Mile-end, and it was only

after receiving his letters of pardon and emancipation that the yeomen

dispersed to their homes.

[Sidenote: The general revolt]

The revolt indeed was far from being at an end. As the news of the rising

ran through the country the discontent almost everywhere broke into flame.

There were outbreaks in every shire south of the Thames as far westward as

Devonshire. In the north tumults broke out at Beverley and Scarborough, and

Yorkshire and Lancashire made ready to rise. The eastern counties were in

one wild turmoil of revolt. At Cambridge the townsmen burned the charters

of the University and attacked the colleges. A body of peasants occupied

St. Albans. In Norfolk a Norwich artizan, called John the Litster or Dyer,

took the title of King of the Commons, and marching through the country at

the head of a mass of peasants compelled the nobles whom he captured to act

as his meat-tasters and to serve him on their knees during his repast. The

story of St. Edmundsbury shows us what was going on in Suffolk. Ever since

the accession of Edward the Third the townsmen and the villeins of their

lands around had been at war with the abbot and his monks. The old and more

oppressive servitude had long passed away, but the later abbots had set

themselves against the policy of concession and conciliation which had

brought about this advance towards freedom. The gates of the town were

still in the abbot's hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the

wardship of all orphans born within his domain. From claims such as these

the town could never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from

Pope or King, interpreted cunningly by the wit of the new lawyer class, lay

stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained other and hardly

less formidable documents than these. Untroubled by the waste of war, the

religious houses profited more than any other landowners by the general

growth of wealth. They had become great proprietors, money-lenders to their

tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom they had banished from their land.

There were few townsmen of St. Edmund's who had not some bonds laid up in

the abbey registry. In 1327 one band of debtors had a covenant lying there

for the payment of five hundred marks and fifty casks of wine. Another

company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors on a bond for ten

thousand pounds. The new spirit of commercial activity joined with the

troubles of the time to throw the whole community into the abbot's hands.

[Sidenote: Saint Edmundsbury]

We can hardly wonder that riots, lawsuits, and royal commissions marked the

relation of the town and abbey under the first two Edwards. Under the third

came an open conflict. In 1327 the townsmen burst into the great house,

drove the monks into the choir, and dragged them thence to the town prison.

The abbey itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar

frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the

kitchen, all disappeared. The monks estimated their losses at ten thousand

pounds. But the townsmen aimed at higher booty than this. The monks were

brought back from prison to their own chapter-house, and the spoil of their

registry, papal bulls and royal charters, deeds and bonds and mortgages,

were laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the mob they were forced

to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of a gild to the town as well as

of free release to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the ruined

house. But all control over town or land was gone. Through spring and

summer no rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the

abbey did not dare to show their faces in the streets. News came at last

that the abbot was in London, appealing for redress to the court, and the

whole county was at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the

thought of revived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law, poured

into the streets of the town. From thirty-two of the neighbouring villages

the priests marched at the head of their flocks as on a new crusade. The

wild mass of men, women, and children, twenty thousand in all, as men

guessed, rushed again on the abbey, and for four November days the work of

destruction went on unhindered. When gate, stables, granaries, kitchen,

infirmary, hostelry had gone up in flames, the multitude swept away to the

granges and barns of the abbey farms. Their plunder shows what vast

agricultural proprietors the monks had become. A thousand horses, a hundred

and twenty plough-oxen, two hundred cows, three hundred bullocks, three

hundred hogs, ten thousand sheep were driven off, and granges and barns

burned to the ground. It was judged afterwards that sixty thousand pounds

would hardly cover the loss.

Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, the appeal of the

abbot against this outrage was promptly heeded. A royal force quelled the

riot, thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to Norwich;

twenty-four of the chief townsmen with thirty-two of the village priests

were convicted as aiders and abettors of the attack on the abbey, and

twenty were summarily hanged. Nearly two hundred persons remained under

sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged on in the

King's Courts. At last matters ended in a ludicrous outrage. Irritated by

repeated breaches of promise on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses

seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed and bound him, and

carried him off to London. There he was hurried from street to street lest

his hiding-place should be detected till opportunity offered for shipping

him off to Brabant. The Primate and the Pope levelled their

excommunications against the abbot's captors in vain, and though he was at

last discovered and brought home it was probably with some pledge of the

arrangement which followed in 1332. The enormous damages assessed by the

royal justices were remitted, the outlawry of the townsmen was reversed,

the prisoners were released. On the other hand the deeds which had been

stolen were again replaced in the archives of the abbey, and the charters

which had been extorted from the monks were formally cancelled.

[Sidenote: St. Edmundsbury in 1381]

The spirit of townsmen and villeins remained crushed by their failure, and

throughout the reign of Edward the Third the oppression against which they

had risen went on without a check. It was no longer the rough blow of sheer

force; it was the more delicate but more pitiless tyranny of the law. At

Richard's accession Prior John of Cambridge in the vacancy of the abbot was

in charge of the house. The prior was a man skilled in all the arts of his

day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists

pronounced him superior to Orpheus, to Nero, and to one yet more

illustrious in the Bury cloister though obscure to us, the Breton

Belgabred. John was "industrious and subtle," and subtlety and industry

found their scope in suit after suit with the burgesses and farmers around

him. "Faithfully he strove," says the monastic chronicler, "with the

villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he owned

specially as his "adversaries," but it was the rustics who were to show

what a hate he had won. On the fifteenth of June, the day of Wat Tyler's

fall, the howl of a great multitude round his manor-house at Mildenhall

broke roughly on the chauntings of Prior John. He strove to fly, but he was

betrayed by his own servants, judged in rude mockery of the law by villein

and bondsman, condemned and killed. The corpse lay naked in the open field

while the mob poured unresisted into Bury. Bearing the prior's head on a

lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng at last reached

the gallows where the head of one of the royal judges, Sir John Cavendish,

was already impaled; and pressing the cold lips together in mockery of

their friendship set them side by side. Another head soon joined them. The

abbey gates were burst open, and the cloister filled with a maddened crowd,

howling for a new victim, John Lackenheath, the warder of the barony. Few

knew him as he stood among the group of trembling monks, but he courted

death with a contemptuous courage. "I am the man you seek," he said,

stepping forward; and in a minute, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son!

Monk! Traitor!" he was swept to the gallows, and his head hacked from his

shoulders. Then the crowd rolled back again to the abbey gate, and summoned

the monks before them. They told them that now for a long time they had

oppressed their fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that

in the sight of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and

charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many which

were demanded they swore they could not find. A compromise was at last

patched up; and it was agreed that the charters should be surrendered till

the future abbot should confirm the liberties of the town. Then, unable to

do more, the crowd ebbed away.

[Sidenote: Close of the rising]

A scene less violent, but even more picturesque, went on the same day at

St. Albans. William Grindecobbe, the leader of its townsmen, returned with

one of the charters of emancipation which Richard had granted after his

interview at Mile-end to the men of Essex and Hertfordshire, and breaking

into the abbey precincts at the head of the burghers, forced the abbot to

deliver up the charters which bound the town in bondage to his house. But a

more striking proof of servitude than any charters could give remained in

the millstones which after a long suit at law had been adjudged to the

abbey and placed within its cloister as a triumphant witness that no

townsman might grind corn within the domain of the abbey save at the

abbot's mill. Bursting into the cloister, the burghers now tore the

mill-stones from the floor, and broke them into small pieces, "like blessed

bread in church," which each might carry off to show something of the day

when their freedom was won again. But it was hardly won when it was lost

anew. The quiet withdrawal and dispersion of the peasant armies with their

charters of emancipation gave courage to the nobles. Their panic passed

away. The warlike Bishop of Norwich fell lance in hand on Litster's camp,

and scattered the peasants of Norfolk at the first shock. Richard with an

army of forty thousand men marched in triumph through Kent and Essex, and

spread terror by the ruthlessness of his executions. At Waltham he was met

by the display of his own recent charters and a protest from the Essex men

that "they were so far as freedom went the peers of their lords." But they

were to learn the worth of a king's word. "Villeins you were," answered

Richard, "and villeins you are. In bondage you shall abide, and that not

your old bondage, but a worse!" The stubborn resistance which he met showed

that the temper of the people was not easily broken. The villagers of

Billericay threw themselves into the woods and fought two hard fights

before they were reduced to submission. It was only by threats of death

that verdicts of guilty could be wrung from Essex jurors when the leaders

of the revolt were brought before them. Grindecobbe was offered his life if

he would persuade his followers at St. Albans to restore the charters they

had wrung from the monks. He turned bravely to his fellow-townsmen and bade

them take no thought for his trouble. "If I die," he said, "I shall die for

the cause of the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to end my life

by such a martyrdom. Do then to-day as you would have done had I been

killed yesterday." But repression went pitilessly on, and through the

summer and the autumn seven thousand men are said to have perished on the

gallows or the field.