THE POOR
"Misuse not thy bondman, the better mayst thou speed;
Though he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven
That he win a worthier seat, and with more bliss;
For in charnel at the church churls be evil to know,
Or a knight from a knave there; know this in thine heart."
"Piers Plowman," B., vi., 46
It has sometimes been contended in recent years that the Middle Ages
lacked only our smug middle-class comfort; and that, as the upper classes
were nobler, so the poor were healthier and happier then. It is probable
that the latter part of this theory is at least as mistaken as the first:
but the question is in itself more complicated, and we have naturally less
detailed evidence in the poor man's case than in the rich man's. Among the
great, we find many virtues and many vices common to both ages; but a
careful comparison reveals certain grave faults which put the earlier
state of society, as we might expect, at a definite and serious
disadvantage. No gentleman of the present day would dream of striking his
wife and daughters, of talking to them like the Knight of La Tour Landry,
or like the Merchant in the presence of the Nuns, or of selling marriages
and wardships in the open market. All the redeeming virtues in the world,
we should feel, could not put the man who saw no harm in these things in
the front rank of real gentility. Such plain and decisive methods of
differentiation, however, begin to disappear as we descend the social
scale; until, at the very bottom, we find little or no difference in
coarseness of moral fibre between our own contemporaries and Chaucer's.
For it stands to reason that the development of the poor cannot be so
rapid as that of the upper classes. In all human affairs, to him that hath
shall be given; the superior energy and abilities of one family will
differentiate it more and more, as life becomes more complicated, from
other families which still vegetate among the mass; and in proportion as
the wealth of the world increases, the gap must necessarily widen between
the man who has most and the man who has least; since there have always
been a certain number who possess, and are capable of possessing or
keeping, virtually nothing. In that sense, the terrible contrast between
wealth and poverty is undoubtedly worse in our days; but this fact in
itself is as insignificant as it is unavoidable. The tramp on the highroad
is not appreciably unhappier for knowing that his nothingness is
contrasted nowadays with Mr. Carnegie's millions instead of de la Pole's
thousands; and again, until we can find some means of distributing the
accumulations of the rich among the poor without doing far more harm than
good, the community loses no more by allowing a selfish man to lock up his
millions, than formerly when they were only hundreds or thousands. The
securities afforded by modern society for possession and accumulation of
wealth do indeed often permit the capitalist to sweat his workmen
deplorably; but these are the same securities which allow the workman to
sleep in certain possession of his own little savings. While the
capitalist is accumulating money, the foresight and self-restraint of the
workmen enables them to accumulate votes, which in the long run are worth
even more. Much may no doubt be done in detail by keeping in eye the
simpler methods of our ancestors; but no sound principle can be modelled
on an age when nothing prevented capitalists from hoarding but lack of
decent security, when strikes were rare only because of penal laws against
all combinations of workmen, and when the peasant was partly kept from
starving by his recognized market value as the domestic animal of his
master. We could easily remedy many desperate social difficulties--for the
moment at least--if we might reduce half the population of England again
to the status of serfs.
"The social questions of the period cannot be understood, unless we
remember that in 1381 more than half the people of England did not possess
the privileges which Magna Charta secured to every 'freeman.'"[240] The
English serf was indeed some degrees better off than his French brother,
to whose lord the legist Pierre de Fontaines could write in the 13th
century "by our custom there is between thee and thy villein no judge but
only God."[241] The English serf could not be evicted, but neither could
he leave his holding; he was transferred with the estate from master to
master as a portion of the live stock. By custom, as the master had rights
to definite services or money dues from him, so he had definite rights as
against his master; but though in cases of manslaughter or maiming the
serf could appeal to the king's courts, all other cases must be heard in
the manor court, where the lord was judge in his own cause. Let us hear
Chaucer himself on this subject, in his Parson's Tale: "Through this
cursed sin of avarice and covetise come these hard lordships, through
which men be distrained by tallages, customs, and carriages more than
their duty or reason is: and eke take they of their bondmen amercements
which might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements. Of
which amercements, or ransoming of bondmen, some lords' stewards say that
it is rightful, forasmuch as a churl hath no temporal thing that is not
his lord's, as they say. But certes these lordships do wrong that bereave
their bondmen [of] things that they never gave them." In theory, the
Reeve was indeed a sort of foreman, elected by the workers to represent
their interests before their master; but it will be noticed how Chaucer
looks upon him as the lord's servant; and in "Piers Plowman" he is even
more definitely put among the enemies of the people, with beadles,
sheriffs, and "sisours," or jurors.[242] It must be remembered, too, that
the general reliance everywhere on custom rather than on written law, the
difference of customs on various manors, and the petty vexations
constantly entailed even by those which were most certainly recognized,
bred constant discontent and disputes. The heavy fine which the serf owed
for sending his son to school fell, of course, only in very exceptional
cases, and may be set off against the few who were enfranchized in order
to enable them to take holy orders. But the _merchet_, or fine paid for
marriage, must have been a bitter burden, while the _heriot_, or
_mortuary_, is to modern ideas an exaction of unredeemed iniquity. In most
manors, though apparently not in all, the lord claimed by this custom the
best possession left by his dead tenant; and (so long as he had left not
less than three head of live stock) the parish clergyman claimed the
second best. The case of a widow and orphans in a struggling household is
one in which no charity can ever be misplaced; yet here their natural
protectors were precisely those who joined hands to plunder them; and
every parish had its two licensed wreckers, who picked their perquisites
from the deathbeds of the poor.[243] No doubt here, as elsewhere, the
strict law was not always enforced, even though its enforcement was so
definitely to the interest of the stronger party; self-interest, apart
from a fellow-feeling which seldom dies out altogether, prevents a man
from taxing even his horse beyond its powers; but there is definite
evidence that merchets and heriots were no mere theoretical grievance.
Moreover, these were only the worst of a hundred ways in which law and
custom gave the lord a galling, and apparently unreasonable, hold upon the
peasants; and they must needs have chafed against such a yoke as this even
if their position as domestic animals had been more comfortable than it
was. Let us suppose--though this needs better proof than has yet been
advanced--that the serf was as well fed and housed as the modern English
labourer;[244] suppose that he was far more of a real man than his legal
status gave him a right to be; then he must only have smarted all the
more, we may safely say, under his beastlike disabilities. "We are men
formed in Christ's likeness, and we are kept like beasts"; such are the
words which Froissart puts into the serfs' mouths. "To the sentiment"
(comments a modern writer) "there is all the difference between economic
compulsion, apparently the outcome of inevitable conditions, and a legal
dependence upon personal caprice. Even comfortable circumstances, which he
apparently enjoyed, created in the Malmesbury bondman no satisfaction with
his lot. There is a pathetic ring in the words which, in his old age, he
is recorded to have used, that 'if he might bring that [his freedom]
aboute, it wold be more joifull to him than any worlie goode.'" Nor was
this the cry of a single voice only, but also of the whole peasantry of
England at that moment of the Middle Ages when they most definitely
formulated their aims. "The rising of 1381 sets it beyond doubt that the
peasant had grasped the conception of complete personal liberty, that he
held it degrading to perform forced labour, and that he considered freedom
to be his right."[245]
Moreover, the general voice of medieval moralists is here on the peasants'
side. It is true that (in spite of the frequent reminders of our common
parentage in Adam and Eve) few men of Chaucer's day would have agreed with
Wycliffe in objecting on principle to hereditary bondage; but still fewer
doubted that the landlords, as a class, did in fact use their power
unmercifully. "How mad" (writes Cardinal Jacques de Vitry), "how mad are
those men who rejoice when sons are born to their lords!" Many knights (he
says) force their serfs to labour, and give them not even bread to eat.
When the knight does call his men together, as if for war, it is too often
only to prey on the peasant. "Many say nowadays, when they are rebuked for
having taken a cow from a poor peasant: 'Let it suffice the boor that I
have left him the calf and his own life. I might do him far more harm if I
would; I have taken his goose, but left him the feathers.'"
Here, again, is a still more living picture from "Piers Plowman"--
"Then Peace came to Parliament and put up a bill,
How that Wrong against his will his wife had y-taken
And how he ravished Rose, Reginald's leman,
And Margaret of her maidenhood, maugre her cheeks.
'Both my geese and my griskins his gadlings fetchen,
I dare not for dread of him fight nor chide.
He borrowed my bay steed, and brought him never again,
Nor no farthing him-for, for nought I can plead.
He maintaineth his men to murder mine own,
Forestalleth my fair, fighteth in my cheapings, [markets
Breaketh up my barn-door and beareth away my wheat;
And taketh me but a tally for ten quarter oaten;
And yet he beat me thereto, and lieth by my maiden,
I am not so hardy for him up for to look.'
The King knew he said sooth, for Conscience him told."
That this kind of thing was far less common in England than elsewhere, we
have Froissart's and other evidence; but that it was far too common even
in Chaucer's England there is no room whatever to doubt. As M. Jusserand
has truly said, a dozen Parliamentary documents justify the poet's
complaints; and he quotes an extraordinarily interesting case from the
actual petition of the victims.[246]
The time, however, was yet unripe for such far-reaching changes as the
peasants demanded. The circumstances and incidents of their revolt have
been admirably described by Mr. Trevelyan, and lately in more detail by
Prof. Oman; and its main events are prominent in all our histories;
probably no rebellion of such magnitude was ever so sudden in its origin
or its end; all was practically over in a single month. Discontent had, of
course, been seething for years; yet even so definite a grievance as the
Poll Tax of 1381 could not have raised half England in revolt within a few
days, but for a sense of power and a rough discipline among the
working-classes. For more than a century the men who were now so wronged
had been compelled to keep arms, to learn their use, and to muster
periodically under captains of twenties and captains of hundreds. For a
whole generation Edward III. had proclaimed, at frequent intervals, that
he could not meet his enemies without a fresh levy from town and country;
and, under a system which allowed the purchase of substitutes, such levies
fell heaviest on the lower classes. What was more natural than that these
same lower classes should muster now to free the King from his other
enemies--and theirs too, as they thought--incapable, bloodsucking
ministers and unjust landlords? They had only to turn out as on a muster
and march straight upon London, each village contingent picking up others
on the way; and this is exactly what they did.[247] The chroniclers
definitely record their order even in disorder; it was removed by a whole
horizon from the contemporary Jacquerie in France, in which the peasants
rose like wild beasts, with no ideas but plunder, lust, and revenge. These
English rebels resisted manfully at first all temptation to plunder among
the rich houses of London. "If they caught any man thieving, they cut off
his head, as men who hated thieves above all things"--such is the
testimony of their bitter enemy Walsingham. When they gutted John of
Gaunt's palace, nothing was kept of the vast wealth which it contained;
all things were treated as accursed, like the spoils of Jericho. The
rioters were loyal to the King, had a definite policy, and aimed at making
treaties in due form with their enemies. They "had among themselves a
watchword in English, 'With whome haldes you?' and the answer was, 'With
Kinge Richarde and the true comons.'" "They took [Chief Justice Belknap]
and made him swear on the Bible." At Canterbury "they summoned the Mayor,
the bailiffs and the commons of the said town, and examined them whether
they would with good will swear to be faithful and loyal to King Richard
and to the true commons of England or no." "The commons, out of good
feeling to [the King], sent back word by his messengers that they wished
to see him and speak with him at Blackheath." At Mile End they were
arrayed under "two banners, and many pennons," drew out willingly into two
lines at Richard's bidding, and made an orderly bargain with him. In the
final meeting at Smithfield, "the king and his train ... turned into the
eastern meadow in front of St. Bartholomew's ... and the commons arrayed
themselves on the west side in great battles." After Tyler's death, again,
they followed at Richard's command into Clerkenwell fields, where they
were presently surrounded partly by the mercenary troopers of Sir Robert
Knolles, but mainly by the citizen levies, "the wards arrayed in bands, a
fine company of well-armed folks in great strength." The very suddenness
of their collapse is not only perfectly explicable under these
circumstances, but it is just what we might expect in a case where the
conflicting parties have learnt, under some sort of common discipline, the
priceless lesson of give and take, and can see some reason in each other's
claims; the Cronstadt Mutiny is the latest example of this, and perhaps
not the least instructive.[248] Their main claims had been granted by the
King, and, in proportion as the rioters were loyal and orderly at heart,
in the same proportion they must have seen clearly that Wat Tyler's fate
had been thoroughly deserved. No wonder that they cowered now before the
King and his troops, and dispersed peaceably to their homes. Even
Walsingham's satirical account of their arms, with due allowance for
literary exaggeration, is exactly what the most formal documents would
lead us to expect. "The vilest of commons and peasants," he says; "some of
whom had only cudgels, some rusty swords, some only axes, some bows that
had hung so long in the smoke as to be browner than ancient ivory, with
one arrow apiece, many whereof had but one wing.... Among a thousand such,
you would scarce have found one man that wore armour."[249] Compare this
with the actual muster-roll of a Norwich leet, a far richer community than
these villages from which most of the rebels came (Conesford, A.D. 1355).
Out of the 192 mustered, 33 wear defensive armour; 7 only are archers (an
unusually small proportion, of course); 44 turn out with knife, sword,
and bill or hatchet; 108 have only two weapons, which in nine out of ten
cases consist of knife and cudgel. The rioters, of course, would in most
cases have come from this lowest class; and in reading through the Norwich
lists one seems to see the very men who followed after John Ball. "Thomas
Pottage, with knife and cudgel"; "William Mouse, with knife and cudgel";
"Long John, with knife and cudgel"; "Adam Piper and Robert Skut, with
knife and bill"; "John Cosy, Hamo Garlicman, Robert Rubbleyard, John
Stutter, Roger Dauber, William Boardcleaver, William Merrygo, Nicholas
Skip, Alice Brokedish's Servant,"--all with knife and cudgel again.
Gower's mock-heroic catalogue of the rioters' names in the first book of
his "Vox Clamantis" is not so picturesque as these actual muster-rolls.
These, then, were the men before whose face Gower describes his
fellow-landlords as lurking like wild beasts in the woods, feeding on
grass and acorns, and wishing that they could shrink within the very rind
of the trees; the men who a day or two later surged like a sea round
Chaucer's tower of Aldgate, until some accomplice unbarred the gate.
Chroniclers note with astonishment the paralysis of the upper classes all
through this revolt, or at least until Wat Tyler's death; and though
Richard revoked his Royal promise of freedom, and bloody assizes were held
from county to county until the country was sick of slaughter, and
Parliament re-enacted all the old oppressive statutes, yet the landlords
can never entirely have forgotten this lesson. Professor Oman, in his
anxiety to kill the already slain theory that the Revolt virtually put an
end to serfdom, seems hardly to allow enough for human nature; but Mr.
Trevelyan sums the matter up in words as just as they are eloquent: "[The
Revolt] was a sign of national energy, it was a sign of independence and
self-respect in the medieval peasants, from whom three-quarters of our
race, of all classes and in every continent, are descended. This
independent spirit was not lacking in France in the 14th century, but it
died out by the end of the Hundred Years' War; stupid resignation then
took hold of burghers and peasantry alike, from the days when Machiavelli
observed their torpor, down to the eve of the Revolution. The _ancien
regime_ was permitted to grow up. But in England there has been a
continuous spirit of resistance and independence, so that wherever our
countrymen or our kinsmen have gone, they have taken with them the undying
tradition of the best and surest freedom, which 'slowly broadens down from
precedent to precedent.'"[250]
This chapter could not be complete without at least a passing allusion to
the general uncleanliness of medieval life, even in a city like London,
where there was some real attempt at organized scavenging of the streets,
and where the laws commanded strictly "he that will keep a pig, let him
keep it in his own house."[251] Four great visitations of the bubonic
plague occurred in Chaucer's lifetime; the least of them would have been
enough to mark an epoch in modern England. The sixty years of his life are
exceptional, on the other hand, in their comparative freedom from severe
famine; but there hung always over men's lives the shadow of God's
hand--or rather, as they too often felt, of Satan's. During the great
storm of 1362 "beasts, trees and housen were all to-smit with violent
lightning, and suddenly perished; and the Devil in man's likeness spake to
men going by the way"; and a good herald who watched the march past of the
rioters in 1381 "saw several Devils among them; he fell sick and died
within a brief while afterwards."[252]
It has often been noted how little Chaucer refers either to this Revolt
or the Great Pestilence; but the multitude interested him comparatively
little. He felt with the pleasures and pains of the individual poor man;
but with regard to the poor in bulk, he would only have shrugged his
shoulders and said "they are always with us." His Griselda is own sister
to King Cophetua's beggar-maid in the Burne-Jones picture. For all the
real pathos of the story, her rags are draped with every refinement of
consummate art. We believe in them conventionally, but know on reflection
that they are there only to point an artistic contrast. Again, in the
"Nuns' Priest's Tale" the "poure wydwe, somdel stope in age," with her
smoky cottage and the humble stock of her yard, are just the subdued and
tender background which the poet needs for the mock-chivalric glories of
his Chanticleer and Partlet. For glimpses of the real poor, the poor poor,
we must go to "Piers Plowman." Here we find them of all sorts, and at the
top of the scale the Plowman, the skilled agricultural labourer or almost
peasant-farmer--
"I have no penny, quoth Piers, pullets for to buy,
Neither goose nor griskin; but two green cheeses [new
A few curds and cream, and a cake of oats,
And bread for my bairns of beans and of peases.
And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon;
Not a cockney, by Christ, collops to make, [egg: eggs and bacon
But I have leek-plants, parsley and shallots,
Chiboles and chervils and cherries, half-red ... [onions
By this livelihood we must live till Lammas-time,
And by that I hope to have harvest in my croft,
Then may I dight my dinner as me dearly liketh."
Piers speaks here of a bad year; but even his modest comfort required hard
work of all kinds and in all weathers. As the Ploughman says in another
place--
"I have been Truth's servant all this fifty winter,
Both y-sowen his seed and sued his beasts,
Within and withouten waited his profits.
I dike and I delve, I do what Truth biddeth;
Some time I sow and some time I thresh,
In tailor's craft and tinker's craft, what Truth can devise,
I weave and I wind, and do what Truth biddeth."[253]
[Illustration: THE PLOUGHMAN
FROM THE LOUTERELL PSALTER (EARLY 14TH CENTURY)]
In contrast with Piers stands the great crowd of beggars--soldiers
discharged from the wars, and sturdy vagrants who fear nothing but
labour--"beggars with bags, which brewhouses be their churches," as the
poet writes in the racy style affected in modern times by Mrs. Gamp. The
roads were crowded with wandering minstrels "that will neither swink nor
sweat, but swear great oaths, and find up foul fantasies, and fools them
maken; and yet have wit at will to work, if they would." Lowest of all
(except the outlaws and felons who haunt the thickets and forests) come
the professional tramps--
"For they live in no love, nor no law they holden,
They wed no woman wherewith they dealen,
Bring forth bastards, beggars of kind.
Or the back or some bone they breaken of their children,
And go feigning with their infants for evermore after.
There are more misshapen men among such beggars
Than of many other men that on this mould walken."
But the Great Pestilence had bred yet another class odious to Piers
Plowman--strikers, as they would be called in modern English--the men who
thought their labour was worth more than the miserable price at which
Parliament was constantly trying to fix it under the heaviest penalties.
These were they of whom the Commons complained in 1376 that "they contrive
by great malice prepense to evade the penalty of the aforesaid Ordinances
and Statutes; for so soon as their masters chide them for evil service, or
would fain pay them for their aforesaid service according to the form of
the said Statutes, suddenly they flee and disperse away from their service
and from their own district, from county to county, from hundred to
hundred, from town to town, into strange places unknown to their said
masters, who know not where to find them.... And the greater part of such
runaway labourers become commonly stout thieves, wherefrom robberies and
felonies increase everywhere from day to day, to the destruction of the
aforesaid realm."[254] The worst effect of a law which attempted to fix
wages everywhere and chain the labourer to one master or one parish, was
to drive into rebellion indiscriminately the honest man who wanted to sell
his work in an open market, and the idler who was glad to escape in
company with his betters. No doubt there was a half-truth in the satire on
the pretensions of these labourers for whom the old wages no longer
sufficed, and who, in spite of the law, often managed to enforce their
claim--
"Labourers that have no land to live on, but their hands,
Deigned not to dine to-day on last night's cabbage;
May no penny-ale please them, nor a piece of bacon,
But it be fresh flesh or fish, fried or y-baken,
And that _chaud_ and _plus chaud_ for the chill of their maw."[255]
But sometimes the law too had its way; and for years before the Great
Revolt the countryside swarmed with such Statute-made malefactors,
together with those other outcasts so graphically described in Jusserand's
"Vie Nomade" (Pt. II., c. 2).
Meanwhile there lived and died, in the background, the thousands who, for
all their honest toil, struggled on daily from hand to mouth, knowing no
Bible truth more true than this, that God had cursed the ground for Adam's
sake. These are the true poor--"God's minstrels," as they are called in
"Piers Plowman"; those upon whom our alms cannot possibly be ill-spent--
"The most needy are our neighbours, an we take good heed,
As prisoners in pits and poor folk in cotes
Charged with children and chief lordes rent;
That they with spinning may spare, spend they it in house-hire,
Both in milk and in meal to make therewith papelots
To glut therewith their children that cry after food.
Also themselves suffer much hunger,
And woe in wintertime, with waking a-nights
To rise to the ruel to rock the cradle ...
Both to card and to comb, to clout and to wash
To rub and to reel, and rushes to peel,
That ruth is to read, or in rime to show
The woe of these women that woneth in cotes;
And many other men that much woe suffren,
Both a-hungered and athirst, to turn the fair side outward,
And be abashed for to beg, and will not be a-known
What them needeth to their neighbours at noon and at even.
This I wot witterly, as the world teacheth,
What other men behoveth that have many children
And have no chattels but their craft to clothe them and to feed
And fele to fong thereto, and few pence taken.
There is payn and penny-ale as for a pittance y-taken,
Cold flesh and cold fish for venison y-baken;
Fridays and fasting-days, a farthing's worth of mussels
Were a feast for such folk, or so many cockles."[256]
How many such cottages did Chaucer, like ourselves, pass on his ride to
Canterbury? In all ages the sufferings of the very poor have been limited
only by the bounds of that which flesh and blood can endure.