After the pestilence had subsided, it was impossible to find laborers
enough to till the soil and shear the sheep. Those who were free now
demanded higher wages, while the villeins, or serfs (S113), and slaves
left their masters and roamed about the country asking for pay for
their work, like freemen.
It was a general agricultural strike, which lasted over thirty years.
It marks the beginning of that contest between capital and labor which
had such an important influence on the next reign, and which, after a
lapse of more than five hundred years, is not yet satisfactorily
adjusted.
Parliament endeavored to restore order. It passed laws forbidding any
freeman to ask more for a day's work than before the plague. It gave
the master the right to punish a serf who persisted in running away,
by branding him on the forehead with the letter F, for "fugitive."
But legislation was in vain; the movement had begun, and statutes of
Parliament could no more stop it than they could stop the rolling of
the ocean tide. It continued to go on until it reached its climax in
the peasant insurrection led by Wat Tyler, under Edward's successor,
Richard II (S251).