Macaulay has remarked as singular the fact that two great relics of
barbarism in England were never abolished by law: disappeared, melted
away before the advance of civilization. These were feudalism and human
slavery.
It is also a remarkable fact that there never was in England an
insurrection of the laboring classes, save one, that in the reign of
Richard II., of sad fortune. The same can not be said of any other
nation. This favorable contrast for England is due to several causes
which we need not recount. But England’s one servile rising came very
near putting an abrupt end to serfdom by violence; emancipation was
sanctioned and pardoned by royal writs, and would have been confirmed
by act of Parliament had that body contained fewer slaveholders at the
time; _i. e._, had it been more truly a representative body of the
English people.
Wat Tyler was the John Brown of that movement, and Richard of Bordeaux
came near being its Abraham Lincoln. Death in the guise of the Black
Plague had struck a fierce blow at English slavery about the middle
of the fourteenth century. [See last CHAUTAUQUAN.] It made labor so
scarce that the old laws binding the laborer to the soil and compelling
him to work without hire, proved abortive; insomuch that we find
Parliament soon at work passing the new “Statute of Laborers.” It
was made to reach as well freedmen as serfs, for it said any man who
was out of work “must serve the first employer who shall require him
to do so,” and must not accept higher wages than obtained before the
plague; and it forbade him going beyond his parish to hire out, under
pain of arrest as a vagabond, branding on the forehead with a hot iron
being one of the penalties. But this statute did not work, either; for
succeeding Parliaments adopted it over and over again. That was the
way they made laws more binding. King Edward I. reaffirmed to respect
the Great Charter some thirty times. And yet, farmers and lords whose
lands were lying waste, or whose herds were running wild for want of
help, would offer large pay to get it and men were reckless enough to
hire out to those who would pay the most, the much-enacted Statute of
Laborers to the contrary, notwithstanding.
Then a crazy step was taken. An effort was made to supply landlords
with unrequited help by remanding freed serfs to slavery on frivolous
pretexts and legal technicalities, the ex-master usually controlling
the decision of the manorial court before which these questions were
tried. Of course the accused freedman had there little chance for
right. The consequence was that the woods and wastes Boon became
filled with bands of men who had been slaves, had tasted the sweets of
freedom, and had turned outlaws and chronic vagabonds sooner than come
within the reach of such “justice.”
While this was going on, during twenty years, other things helped to
create the spirit of insubordination. John Wickliffe had begun to
thunder against the tyranny of Rome and the corruptions of the clergy,
and to preach individual liberty of conscience. The sect of Lollards,
of which he was the head, had offshoots of ruder tenets and practices.
A preacher named John Ball had for many years itinerated, with all
England for his circuit and the fields, market-places and church-yards
for his chapels. He “preached politics” with an unction and genuine
eloquence, as this condensed report of one of his sermons will show:
“Good people, things will never go well in England so
long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right
are they whom we call lords greater than we? Why do
they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the same
father and mother, of Adam and Eve, [see the danger of
putting the Bible into common people’s hands!] 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 ermine, while we are
covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair
bread, we oat-cake and straw and water to drink. They
have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labor,
the rain and wind in the fields. And yet it is of us
and of our toil that these men hold their state.”
And John Ball, like all men who move the masses, boiled his whole
political and religious platform down into a motto with a rhyme to it,
so that the most stolid ignorance could learn and remember it—for,
mark you, poetry is the aspiration of the ignorant as well as the
inspiration of the gifted:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
Immortal old epigrammatist and poet of democracy! His lines are heard
to-day wherever manhood rebels against the pride and tyranny of
property. It was in every poor man’s mouth in England for a quarter of
a century, and it did a wonderful work, that little couplet. Such is
the power of a thought!
There were other street orators and other poets. An Oxford student
wrote “The Plaints of Piers, the Ploughman,” the saddest, fiercest
protest against caste that England ever heard.
While all this work was going on in the huts and fields of England, her
proud nobles were squabbling over the dotage and around the dying bed
of Edward III., and for the control of his grandson, Richard II.; and
while they were thus dissipating government, her enemies were assailing
her on all sides. Armies and fleets were raised, and campaigns and
expeditions fooled away, while the treasure was squandered in both
military failures and court prodigality and corruption. Taxes were
laid, on the heels of defeats which made the old archers of Cressy,
Nevill’s Cross, and Poictiers mad with shame and rage.
The crowning act of folly and injustice came when Parliament laid a
poll-tax on every person in the kingdom over fifteen years of age. This
made the poor man pay as much as the rich; and more, if the poorer the
man the larger his family, which was probably the case then as now.
There were no census statistics, and the tax-gatherers had to make a
domiciliary visit in every case, an inquisition Englishmen especially
resent; for the feeling that every man’s house is his castle dates
back to the life of family segregation for which they were remarked in
old Roman times. The tax, payable in money, came hard on poor people,
who generally worked for their food and clothing, paid in kind. With
an exaggerated idea of the population of England, Parliament had not
levied a large enough unit per head. The rich, instead of helping
the poor heads of families to pay the tax, as directed in the writs,
shirked their own share. Thus the returns were insufficient to meet
government needs, and the tax-gatherers were sent out again, with
sheriffs’ posses, to glean more thoroughly.
With all these exactions when the times were ripe for an outbreak, you
may be sure England was soon in a fever of excitement. Collectors’
processes began to be resisted, and they and their posses driven away
by force. One day a rough collector went into the house of a man in
Dartford, Kent, named Walter, a tyler by trade. Demanding his tax the
collector insisted, in spite of the mother’s denial, that the eldest
daughter was over fifteen years of age, and at last, to settle the
dispute, he made an insulting proposition and laid hands on the girl.
The screams of the mother and children brought the father running from
his shop, hammer in hand, and seeing his daughter struggling in the
arms of the man, he smashed his brains out with the hammer, regardless
of the royal coat-of-arms. Walter himself had worn that uniform, for
he had been a brave campaigner in France. The deed was done, and his
life was forfeit. Instead of shrinking from the consequences, he placed
himself at the head of his neighbors, who now gathered around him. His
hammer had struck the percussion cap to the mine long prepared.
In another part of Kent there was another outbreak. A noble claimed
a runaway bondsman and shut him up in Rochester Castle. The people
stormed the castle and delivered the prisoner-slave to a double
freedom. Couriers now went through all England bearing calls to rise,
couched in rude rhymes which tell at once of the lowly state of the
masses and of the art of those who called to arms. One ran thus:
“John Ball greeteth you all,
And doth for to understand he hath rung your bell,
Now, right and might, will and skill,
God speede every dele.”
There were several other leaders, and some of the proclamations were
issued anonymously. They ran thus:
“Help truth and truth shall help you. Now reigneth
pride in place and covetise [covetousness] is counted
wise, and lechery withouten shame, and gluttony
withouten blame. Envy reigneth with treason, and sloth
is taken in great season. God do bote! for now is time.”
“Jack Carter prays you all that ye may 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.”
“Truth hath been set under a lock, and falseness and
guile reigneth in every stock. True love is away that
was so good and clerks [priests] for wealth work us
woe. God do bote for now is tyme.
[signed] “JACK TREWMAN.”
These unmistakable references to preparations already made, help us
to understand how it was that almost in a day Wat Tyler found himself
at the head of a hundred thousand men marching on London. One force
under a leader named Jack Straw, came by Canterbury, which threw open
its gates, as “the whole town was of their sort,” and they gutted
the palace of the archbishop, who had ground the face of the poor by
assuming a monopoly of all the grinding of grain in his district, on
which he had placed excessive toll.
There is something very pathetic in this movement on London. They
would appeal to the young king himself, and not to the selfish dukes,
his uncles, who guarded him and misgoverned the realm. The son of the
Black Prince, the defender of England, and, so long as he lived, the
protector of the people against the cruelty of the nobles, should
hear their appeal and do them right. It was said the boy king was no
better than a prisoner in his uncles’ hands; peradventure they might
deliver him and themselves by the same blow. All the way to London
they made everybody they took swear allegiance to Richard. But all the
lawyers they captured they hung, as the instruments of oppression, the
contrivers of technicalities by which freedmen had been re-enslaved.
And thus they settled down on Blackheath, before London, June 12,
1381. Panic had gone before them. John, the Duke of Lancaster, fled
to Scotland, deserting the young king he had overruled with no gentle
hand. All the knights and nobles about the king threw themselves into
the tower. The king’s mother, the widow of the Black Prince, hearing
of the disturbance in her country home, made brave by a mother’s fear,
hastened to London, passing through the camp of the insurgents unhurt
and with honor; she kissed Walter Tyler and Jack Straw and took their
devotion to her son.
In the general panic Richard was the only man in England equal to the
emergency. Man! He was only sixteen, but at about that age his father
had won his spurs at Cressy. He took boat on the Thames and rowed
down to the insurgents’ camp. The Archbishop of Canterbury and some
ministers were with him, and when Tyler asked the king to land and talk
with them, promising respect and loyalty, this prelate prevented him,
thus confirming the stories of the king’s duress. The rescue of their
sovereign became their first object. They marched on the city, and the
sympathizing citizens threw open the gates.
Lancaster’s stately Savoy Palace was soon in flames; also the
Marshalsea and the King’s Bench Temple, the dwellings and offices of
the hated lawyers. But one of their number who undertook to carry off
a silver tankard from the destruction was immediately drowned in the
Thames. “We are no thieves and robbers; we are not nobles and bishops;
we are honest workingmen, come to deliver the king and ourselves,”
said Tyler. The next day they captured the tower, took the archbishop,
the royal treasurer, and the commissioner of the poll-tax, and cut off
their heads as traitors on Tower Hill.
The king, now delivered from his court, sent word to Tyler that
he would meet them at Mile-End, just out of London, to hear their
grievances. The knights of the Tower and the guards wanted to gather
a force and attack the mob, but the king rode out unarmed, with a few
companions, to this historic appointment.
It was a memorable scene, and a poetic coincidence. The day was the
anniversary of that other demand for rights from King John. Just one
hundred and sixty-six years before Magna Charta has been wrung from
a king at Runnymede. Now the boy king and the peasant leader meet to
treat on equal terms. Justice levels all distinctions. The graceful,
delicate and beautiful descendant of the Plantagenets and the rough,
unkempt, Celto-Saxon artisan—the personification of the two armies at
Hastings—the types of the extremes of English civilization; extremes
destined to draw nearer together through centuries of civil war, of
martyrdoms for free thought and speech, of sufferings and defeats, ever
bravely and persistently renewed by generation after generation of
laborers on the one side: through discrownings, beheadings and gradual
curtailment of royal power on the other. Two chief agencies were to
draw these extremes together—gunpowder and printer’s ink. The one to
blow feudalism off the earth and put an end to baronial domination—the
other to unlock the storehouses of thought and introduce the rule
of mind, to the permanent limitation of those other two classes of
tyrants: priests and kings. The despised class, represented by the
ruder of these two “high contracting parties,” is to rise by slow and
stormful evolution: the slave to become freeman—the freeman, yeoman—the
yeoman, citizen—the citizen, an elector of rulers; out of all to be
evolved that splendid, conservative, expansive power of England, the
Middle Class. Happy England! that the two extremes stood that day and
thereafter not as antagonists but as treaty-makers.
Richard found the Toussaint l’Overteur of that day prepared with
very distinct and well-grounded grievances, though not numerous or
unreasonable. He asked—
First—The abolition of slavery.
Second—Limitation of rent of land to fourpence an acre.
Third—Liberty to buy and sell in all markets and fairs, without
favoritism or toll.
Fourth—Pardon for what they had done in order to obtain this interview.
The young king, more just than well-informed, more generous than
politic, promised it all, and said he would immediately cause
franchises and letters of pardon and emancipation to be drawn up under
the royal seal. Great shouts of joy went up—premature shouts indeed!
During all that day and succeeding night thirty clerks were busy
drawing up the charter of freedom and amnesty for every parish and
township; and the next day the great body of the insurgents marched
home, the king’s proclamation in their hands, the king’s banners over
their heads, and in their hearts such joy as the children of Israel
felt when Miriam’s timbrel rang out its triumph over the Red Sea.
Well if this had been the end of it; but there was to be a dark and
bloody finale for Richard and Walter. Walter Tyler and many of the
Kentish men remained behind, dissatisfied with the terms of the writs.
We do not know the causes of Tyler’s refusal to accept the charters.
Perhaps he foresaw what must and did come: that as soon as this
pressure was removed from the young king, and his evil counselors
again got control, all that had been given to the people would be
withdrawn, and he wanted guaranties of fulfillment, just as the barons
had done with John. However it was, we only know that the King and his
attendants riding through Smith Fields the next day, chanced upon Tyler
and his followers. Tyler rode out alone to speak with the king, and the
mayor of London reproached him for approaching the king uninvited. Hot
words followed, and the mayor stabbed Tyler dead, in sight of all his
men.
Instantly thousands of arrows were drawn to let fly on the king and
his party. Well for him had they sped and ended his unhappy career
there, with the crown of emancipator upon it, instead of the failure,
disgrace, and violent death that were to terminate it. Putting spurs to
his horse he rode directly into the midst of the angry mob. “I will be
your captain! Follow me!” he cried. This seemed to their simple-minded
loyalty the obtaining of the end for which they had come out, and they
followed the boy with docility to the fields at Islington, where a
considerable force of royal troops was met. The king restrained the
courage which now returned redundantly to the nobles and forbade the
slaughter they were anxious to begin, dismissing the peasants to their
homes.
And now the nobility began their revenge everywhere, and the embers of
resistance were again blown into flames here and there. Green sketches
the stamping-out of the fire:
“The revolt, indeed, was far from being at an end. A
strong body of peasants occupied St. Albans. In the
eastern counties 50,000 men forced the gates of St.
Edmondsbury and wrested from the trembling monks a
charter of enfranchisement for the town. Sittester, a
dyer of Norwich, headed a strong mass of the peasants,
under the title of the ‘King of the Commons,’ and
compelled the nobles he had captured to act as his
meat-tasters, and to serve him during his repast. But
the warlike Bishop of Norwich fell lance in hand on
the rebel camp and scattered them at the first shock.
The villagers of Billericay demanded from the king the
same liberties as their lords, and on his refusal threw
themselves into the woods and fought two hard fights
before they were reduced to submission.”
For many years there were camps of refuge of these outlawed peasants in
forests and upon lonely islands—Englishmen exiles in their own country
for the cause of human rights.
The prelates and lawyers gathered around Richard with their sophisms
and technicalities, to show him he had done an unlawful thing with
his proclamations of emancipation and clemency; the barons backed the
constitutional arguments up with fierce threats about this “royal
usurpation,” insomuch that Richard within two weeks recalled and
canceled all his charters, and let loose the unrestrained arrogance of
the nobles on the people. So many and such unwarranted executions took
place that Parliament subsequently granted an act of indemnity to the
savage perpetrators, who, it says, “made divers punishments upon the
said villeins and other traitors without due process of law, but only
to appease and cease the apparent mischief.” All manumissions were
declared void. But Richard submitted to the Parliament the proposition
to abolish slavery if Parliament would lend its sanction. The lords
and gentlemen replied, “The serfs are our chattels, and the king can
not take our property from us without our consent. And this consent we
have never given, and never will give were we all to die in one day.”
Had Richard insisted on keeping faith with the lower classes of his
subjects, had he placed his crown and life in the scale against human
slavery, he would have gone into history as the Great Emancipator
of Englishmen, or as Freedom’s Greatest Martyr. Either destiny was
preferable to the ignominious end he did meet. He was a man for an
emergency, but not a statesman for one of the world’s great crises. But
in a boy of sixteen were not his conduct and his attempt at a great
deed wonderful?
It is a curious thing to reflect on that Abraham Lincoln, in a
government of constitutional law and in a position of very limited
powers, could with a stroke of the pen decree emancipation, while
Richard, a ruler of almost absolute powers in an age of ill-defined
authority and much lawless administration, could not take the chains
off one of his subjects.
At this distance it is difficult to determine just how much influence
the only servile uprising of England had upon the emancipation of her
serfs. It at least stamped a wholesome dread of the laboring classes
into the selfish souls of the nobles, a dread that had much influence
on the contentions of succeeding reigns, and raised the common people
in importance. Slavery did not disappear for over two centuries; “Good
Queen Bess” got her much gain by selling her subjects for slaves in
the West Indies. But if “they never die who perish in a good cause,”
the blood of Walter the Tyler aided the cause of human liberty, and he
ought to be canonized as one of her martyrs, instead of being treated
as the violent and bloody rioter that most historians make him.
[To be continued.]
ANECDOTES IN SERMONS.—The fashion which once prevailed of introducing
historical anecdotes into addresses from the pulpit, is illustrated
by the following extract from a sermon by the martyr Bishop Ridley:
“Cambyses was a great emperor, such another as our master is; he had
many lord-deputies, lord-presidents, and lieutenants under him. It is
a great while ago since I read the history. It chanced he had under
him, in one of his dominions, a briber, a gift-taker, a gratifier of
rich men; he followed gifts as fast as he that followed the pudding;
a hand-maker in his office, to make his son a great man; as the old
saying is, ‘Happy is the child whose father goeth to the devil.’ The
cry of the poor widow came to the emperor’s ear, and caused him to flay
the judge quick, and laid his skin in his chair of judgment, that all
judges that should give judgment afterward should sit in the same skin.
Surely it was a goodly sign, a goodly monument, the sign of the judge’s
skin. I pray God we may once see the sign of the skin in England.”