The craft gilds existed usually under the authority of the town

government, though frequently they obtained authorization or even a

charter from the crown. They were formed primarily to regulate and

preserve the monopoly of their own occupations in their own town, just

as the gild merchant existed to regulate the trade of the town in

general. No one could carry on any trade without being subject to the

organization which controlled that trade. Membership, however, was not

intentionally restricted. Any man who was a capable workman and

conformed to the rules of the craft was practically a member of the

organization of that industry. It is a common requirement in the

earliest gild statutes that every man who wishes to carry on that

particular industry should have his ability testified to by some known

members of the craft. But usually full membership and influence in the

gild was reached as a matter of course by the artisans passing through

the successive grades of apprentice, journeyman, and master. As an

apprentice he was bound to a master for a number of years, living in

his house and learning the trade in his shop. There was usually a

signed contract entered into between the master and the parents of

the apprentice, by which the former agreed to provide all necessary

clothing, food, and lodging, and teach to the apprentice all he

himself knew about his craft. The latter, on the other hand, was bound

to keep secret his master's affairs, to obey all his commandments, and

to behave himself properly in all things. After the expiration of the

time agreed upon for his apprenticeship, which varied much in

individual cases, but was apt to be about seven years, he became free

of the trade as a journeyman, a full workman. The word "journeyman"

may refer to the engagement being by the day, from the French word

_journée_, or to the habit of making journeys from town to town in

search of work, or it may be derived from some other origin. As a

journeyman he served for wages in the employ of a master. In many

cases he saved enough money for the small requirements of setting up

an independent shop. Then as full master artisan or tradesman he might

take part in all the meetings and general administration of the

organized body of his craft, might hold office, and would himself

probably have one or more journeymen in his employ and apprentices

under his guardianship. As almost all industries were carried on in

the dwelling-houses of the craftsmen, no establishments could be of

very considerable size, and the difference of position between master,

journeyman, and apprentice could not have been great. The craft gild

was organized with its regular rules, its officers, and its meetings.

The rules or ordinances of the fraternity were drawn up at some one

time and added to or altered from time to time afterward. The approval

of the city authorities was frequently sought for such new statutes as

well as for the original ordinances, and in many towns appears to have

been necessary. The rules provided for officers and their powers, the

time and character of meetings, and for a considerable variety of

functions. These varied of course in different trades and in different

towns, but some characteristics were almost universal. Provisions were

always either tacitly or formally included for the preservation of the

monopoly of the crafts in the town. The hours of labor were regulated.

Night work was very generally prohibited, apparently because of the

difficulty of oversight at that time, as was work on Saturday

afternoons, Sundays, and other holy days. Provisions were made for the

inspection of goods by the officers of the gild, all workshops and

goods for sale being constantly subject to their examination, if they

should wish it. In those occupations that involved buying and selling

the necessities of life, such as those of the fishmongers and the

bakers, the officers of the fraternity, like the town authorities,

were engaged in a continual struggle with "regrators," "forestallers,"

and "engrossers," which were appellations as odious as they were

common in the mediæval town. Regrating meant buying to sell again at a

higher price without having made any addition to the value of the

goods; forestalling was going to the place of production to buy, or in

any other way trying to outwit fellow-dealers by purchasing things

before they came into the open market where all had the same

opportunity; engrossing was buying up the whole supply, or so much of

it as not to allow other dealers to get what they needed, the modern

"cornering of the market." These practices, which were regarded as so

objectionable in the eyes of mediæval traders, were frequently nothing

more than what would be considered commendable enterprise in a more

competitive age. Another class of rules was for mutual assistance, for

kindliness among members, and for the obedience and faithfulness of

journeymen and apprentices. There were provisions for assistance to

members of the craft when in need, or to their widows and orphans, for

the visitation of those sick or in prison, for common attendance at

the burial services of deceased members, and for other charitable and

philanthropic objects. Thus the craft gild, like the gild merchant,

combined close social relationship with a distinctly recognized and

enforced regulation of the trade. This regulation provided for the

protection of members of the organization from outside competition,

and it also prevented any considerable amount of competition among

members; it supported the interests of the full master members of the

craft as against those in the journeyman stage, and enforced the

custom of the trade in hours, materials, methods of manufacture, and

often in prices.

[Illustration: Table of Assize of Bread in Record Book of City of

Hull. (Lambert: _Two Thousand Years of Gild Life_. Published by A.

Brown & Sons, Hull.)]

The officers were usually known as masters, wardens, or stewards.

Their powers extended to the preservation of order among the master

members of the craft at the meetings, and among the journeymen and

apprentices of the craft at all times; to the supervision, either

directly or through deputies, of the work of the members, seeing that

it conformed to the rules and was not false in any way; to the

settlement, if possible, of disputes among members of the craft; to

the administration of its charitable work; and to the representation

of the organized body of the craft before town or other authorities.

Common religious observances were held by the craftsmen not only at

the funerals of members, but on the day of the saint to which the gild

was especially dedicated. Most fraternities kept up a shrine or chapel

in some parish church. Fines for the breach of gild rules were often

ordered to be paid in wax that the candles about the body of dead

brethren and in the gild chapel should never be wanting. All the

brethren of the gild, dressed in common suits of livery, walked in

procession from their hall or meeting room to the church, performed

their devotions and joined in the services in commemoration of the

dead. Members of the craft frequently bequeathed property for the

partial support of a chaplain and payment of other expenses connected

with their "obits," or masses for the repose of their souls and those

of their relatives.

Closely connected with the religious observances was the convivial

side of the gild's life. On the annual gild day, or more frequently,

the members all gathered at their hall or some inn to a feast, which

varied in luxuriousness according to the wealth of the fraternity,

from bread, cheese, and ale to all the exuberance of which the Middle

Ages were capable.

Somewhat later, we find the craft gilds taking entire charge of the

series or cycles of "mystery plays," which were given in various

towns. The words of the plays produced at York, Coventry, Chester, and

Woodkirk have come down to us and are of extreme interest as embryonic

forms of the drama and examples of purely vernacular language. It is

quite certain that such groups of plays were given by the crafts in a

number of other towns. They were generally given on Corpus Christi

day, a feast which fell in the early summer time, when out-door

pleasures were again enjoyable after the winter's confinement. A cycle

consisted of a series of dialogues or short plays, each based upon

some scene of biblical story, so arranged that the whole Bible

narrative should be given consecutively from the Creation to the

Second Advent. One of the crafts, starting early in the morning, would

draw a pageant consisting of a platform on wheels, to a regularly

appointed spot in a conspicuous part of the town, and on this

platform, with some rude scenery, certain members of the gild or men

employed by them would proceed to recite a dialogue in verse

representative of some early part of the Bible story. After they had

finished, their pageant would be dragged to another station, where

they repeated their performance. In the meantime a second company had

taken their former place, and recited a dialogue representative of a

second scene. So the whole day would be occupied by the series of

performances. The town and the craftsmen valued the celebration

because it was an occasion for strangers visiting their city and thus

increasing the volume of trade, as well as because it furnished an

opportunity for the gratification of their social and dramatic

instincts.

It was not only at the periodical business meetings, or on the feast

days, or in the preparation for the dramatic shows, that the gildsmen

were thrown together. Usually all the members of one craft lived on

the same street or in the same part of the town, and were therefore

members of the same parish church and constantly brought under one

another's observation in all the daily concerns of life. All things

combined to make the craft a natural and necessary centre for the

interest of each of its members.

*17. Non-industrial Gilds.*--Besides the gilds merchant, which included

persons of all industrial occupations, and the craft gilds, which were

based upon separate organizations of each industry, there were gilds

or fraternities in existence which had no industrial functions

whatever. These are usually spoken of as "religious" or "social"

gilds. It would perhaps be better to describe them simply as

non-industrial gilds; for their religious and social functions they

had in common, as has been seen, both with the gild merchant and the

craft organizations. They only differed from these in not being based

upon or interested in the monopoly or oversight of any kind of trade

or handicraft. They differed also from the craft gilds in that all

their members were on an equal basis, there being no such industrial

grades as apprentice, journeyman, and master; and from both of the

organizations already discussed in the fact that they existed in small

towns and even in mere villages, as well as in industrial centres.

In these associations the religious, social, and charitable elements

were naturally more prominent than in those fraternities which were

organized primarily for some kind of economic regulation. They were

generally named after some saint. The ordinances usually provided for

one or more solemn services in the year, frequently with a procession

in livery, and sometimes with a considerable amount of pantomime or

symbolic show. For instance, the gild of St. Helen at Beverly, in

their procession to the church of the Friars Minors on the day of

their patron saint, were preceded by an old man carrying a cross;

after him a fair young man dressed as St. Helen; then another old man

carrying a shovel, these being intended to typify the finding of the

cross. Next came the sisters two and two, after them the brethren of

the gild, and finally the officers. There were always provisions for

solemnities at the funerals of members, for burial at the expense of

the gild if the member who had died left no means for a suitable

ceremony, and for prayers for deceased members. What might be called

the insurance feature was also much more nearly universal than in the

case of the industrial fraternities. Help was given in case of theft,

fire, sickness, or almost any kind of loss which was not chargeable to

the member's own misdoing. Finally it was very customary for such

gilds to provide for the support of a certain number of dependents,

aged men or women, cripples, or lepers, for charity's sake; and

occasionally educational facilities were also provided by them from

their regular income or from bequests made for the purpose. The

social-religious gilds were extremely numerous, and seem frequently to

have existed within the limits of a craft, including some of its

members and not others, or within a certain parish, including some of

the parishioners, but not all.

Thus if there were men in the mediæval town who were not members of

some trading or craft body, they would in all probability be members

of some society based merely on religious or social feeling. The whole

tendency of mediæval society was toward organization, combination,

close union with one's fellows. It might be said that all town life

involved membership in some organization, and usually in that one into

which a man was drawn by the occupation in which he made his living.

These gilds or the town government itself controlled even the affairs

of private economic life in the city, just as the customary

agriculture of the country prevented much freedom of action there.

Methods of trading, or manufacture, the kind and amount of material to

be used, hours of labor, conditions of employment, even prices of

work, were regulated by the gild ordinances. The individual gildsman

had as little opportunity to emancipate himself from the controlling

force of the association as the individual tenant on the rural manor

had to free himself from the customary agriculture and the customary

services. Whether we study rural or urban society, whether we look at

the purely economic or at the broader social side of existence, life

in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was corporate rather than

individual.

*18. BIBLIOGRAPHY*

Gross, Charles: _The Gild Merchant_, two volumes. The first volume

consists of a full account and discussion of the character and

functions of the gild merchant, with a number of appendices on cognate

subjects. The second volume contains the documents on which the first

is based.

Seligman, E. R. A.: _Two Chapters on Mediæval Gilds_.

Brentano, L.: _The History and Development of English Gilds_. An essay

prefixed to a volume of ordinances of English Gilds, edited by T.

Smith. Brentano's essay is only referred to because of the paucity of

works on the subject, as it is fanciful and unsatisfactory. No

thorough and scholarly description of the craft gilds exists. On the

other hand, a considerable body of original materials is easily

accessible in English, as in the following works:--

Riley: _Memorials of London and London Life_.

Smith, Toulmin: _English Gilds_.

Various documents illustrative of town and gild history will also be

found in Vol. II, No. 1, of the _Translations and Reprints_,

published by the Department of History of the University of

Pennsylvania.

Better descriptions exist for the position of the gilds in special

towns than for their general character, especially in London by

Herbert, in Hull by Lambert, in Shrewsbury by Hibbert, and in Coventry

by Miss Harris.

CHAPTER IV

MEDIÆVAL TRADE AND COMMERCE

*19. Markets and Fairs.*--Within the towns, in addition to the ordinary

trading described in the last chapter, much buying and selling was

done at the weekly or semi-weekly markets. The existence of a market

in a town was the result of a special grant from the king, sometimes

to the burgesses themselves, sometimes to a neighboring nobleman or

abbey. In the latter case the tolls paid by outsiders who bought or

sold cattle or victuals in the market did not go to the town or gild

authorities, but to the person who was said to "own" the market. Many

places which differed in scarcely any other way from agricultural

villages possessed markets, so that "market towns" became a

descriptive term for small towns midway in size between the larger

boroughs or cities and mere villages. The sales at markets were

usually of the products of the surrounding country, especially of

articles of food consumption, so that the fact of the existence of a

market on one or more days of the week in a large town was of

comparatively little importance from the point of view of more general

trade.

Far more important was the similar institution of periodical fairs.

Fairs, like markets, existed only by grant from the king. They

differed from markets, however, in being held only once a year or at

most semi-annually or quarterly, in being invariably in the possession

of private persons, never of town governments, and in the fact that

during their continuance as a rule all buying and selling except at

the fairs was suspended within a considerable circuit. Several hundred

grants of fairs are recorded on the rolls of royal charters, most of

them to abbeys, bishoprics, and noblemen; but comparatively few of

them were of sufficient size or importance to play any considerable

part in the trade and commerce of the country. Moreover, the

development of the towns with their continuous trade tended to draw

custom away from all the fairs except those which had obtained some

especial importance and an international reputation. Of these,

however, there was still a considerable number whose influence was

very great. The best known were those of Winchester, of Stourbridge

near Cambridge, of St. Ives belonging to the abbot of Ramsay, and of

Boston. In early times fairs were frequently held in the churchyards,

but this came to be looked upon as a scandal, and was prohibited by a

law of 1285. The fairs were in many cases held just beyond the limits

of a town in an open field or on a smooth hillside. Each year, some

time before the opening day of the fair, this ground was formally

occupied by the servants of the owner of the fair, wooden booths were

erected or ground set apart for those who should put up their own

tents or prefer to sell in the open. Then as merchants appeared from

foreign or English towns they chose or were assigned places which they

were bound to retain during the continuance of the fair. By the time

of the opening of the fair those who expected to sell were arranged in

long rows or groups, according to the places they came from, or the

kind of goods in which they dealt. After the opening had been

proclaimed no merchant of the nearby town could buy or sell, except

within the borders of the fair. The town authorities resigned their

functions into the hands of the officials whom the lord of the fair

had placed in charge of it, and for the time for which the fair was

held, usually from six to twelve days, everything within the enclosure

of the fair, within the town, and in the surrounding neighborhood was

under their control.

[Illustration: Location of Some of the Principal Fairs in the

Thirteenth Century.]

Tolls were collected for the advantage of the lord of the fair from

all goods as they were brought into or taken out from the bounds of

the fair, or at the time of their sale; stallage was paid for the rent

of booths, fees were charged for the use of space, and for using the

lord's weights and scales. Good order was preserved and fair dealing

enforced by the officials of the lord. To prevent offences and settle

disputes arising in the midst of the busy trading the officials of the

lord formed a court which sat continually and followed a summary

procedure. This was known as a court of "pie-powder," that is _pied

poudré_, or _dusty foot_, so called, no doubt, from its readiness to

hear the suits of merchants and wayfarers, as they were, without

formality or delay. At this court a great variety of cases came up,

such as disputes as to debts, failure to perform contracts of sale or

purchase, false measurements, theft, assault, defamation, and

misdemeanors of all kinds. Sometimes the court decided offhand,

sometimes compurgation was allowed immediately or on the next day,

sometimes juries were formed and gave decisions. The law which the

court of pie-powder administered was often referred to as the "law

merchant," a somewhat less rigid system than the common law, and one

whose rules were generally defined, in these courts and in the king's

courts, by juries chosen from among the merchants themselves.

At these fairs, even more than in the towns, merchants from a distance

gathered to buy the products peculiar to the part of England where the

fair was held, and to sell their own articles of importation or

production. The large fairs furnished by far the best markets of the

time. We find mention made in the records of one court of pie-powder

of men from a dozen or twenty English towns, from Bordeaux, and from

Rouen. The men who came from any one town, whether of England or the

Continent, acted and were treated as common members of the gild

merchant of that town, as forming a sort of community, and being to a

certain extent responsible for one another. They did their buying and

selling, it is true, separately, but if disputes arose, the whole

group were held responsible for each member. For example, the

following entry was made in the roll of the fair of St. Ives in the

year 1275: "William of Fleetbridge and Anne his wife complain of

Thomas Coventry of Leicester for unjustly withholding from them 55_s._

2-1/2_d._ for a sack of wool.... Elias is ordered to attach the

community of Leicester to answer ... and of the said community Allan

Parker, Adam Nose and Robert Howell are attached by three bundles of

ox-hides, three hundred bundles of sheep skins and six sacks of wool."

*20. Trade Relations between Towns.*--The fairs were only temporary

selling places. When the time for which the fair was held had expired

the booths were removed, the merchants returned to their native cities

or travelled away to some other fair, and the officials were

withdrawn. The place was deserted until the next quarter or year. But

in the towns, as has been already stated, more or less continuous

trade went on; not only petty retail trade and that of the weekly or

semi-weekly markets between townsmen or countrymen coming from the

immediate vicinity, but a wholesale trade between the merchants of

that town and those from other towns in England or on the Continent.

It was of this trade above all that the gild merchant of each town

possessed the regulation. Merchants from another town were treated

much the same, whether that town was English or foreign. In fact,

"foreigner" or "alien," as used in the town records, of Bristol, for

instance, may apply to citizens of London or Oxford just as well as to

those of Paris or Cologne. Such "foreign" merchants could deal when

they came to a town only with members of the gild, and only on the

conditions required by the gild. Usually they could buy or sell only

at wholesale, and tolls were collected from them upon their sales or

purchases. They were prohibited from dealing in some kinds of articles

altogether, and frequently the duration of their stay in the town was

limited to a prescribed period. Under such circumstances the

authorities of various towns entered into trade agreements with those

of other towns providing for mutual concessions and advantages.

Correspondence was also constantly going on between the officials of

various towns for the settlement of individual points of dispute, for

the return of fugitive apprentices, asking that justice might be done

to aggrieved citizens, and on occasion threatening reprisal.

Southampton had formal agreements with more than seventy towns or

other trading bodies. During a period of twenty years the city

authorities of London sent more than 300 letters on such matters to

the officials of some 90 other towns in England and towns on the

Continent. The merchants from any one town did not therefore trade or

act entirely as separate individuals, but depended on the prestige of

their town, or the support of the home authorities, or the privileges

already agreed upon by treaty. The non-payment of a debt by a merchant

of one town usually made any fellow-townsman liable to seizure where

the debt was owed, until the debtor could be made to pay. In 1285, by

a law of Edward I, this was prohibited as far as England was

concerned, but a merchant from a French town might still have his

person and property seized for a debt of which he may have had no

previous knowledge. External trade was thus not so much individual,

between some Englishmen and others; or international, between

Englishmen and Frenchmen, Flemings, Spaniards, or Germans, as it was

intermunicipal, as it has been well described. Citizens of various

towns, London, Bristol, Venice, Ghent, Arras, or Lubeck, for instance,

carried on their trade under the protection their city had obtained

for them.

*21. Foreign Trading Relations.*--The regulations and restrictions of

fairs and town markets and gilds merchant must have tended largely to

the discouragement of foreign trade. Indeed, the feeling of the body

of English town merchants was one of strong dislike to foreigners and

a desire to restrict their trade within the narrowest limits. In

addition to the burdens and limitations placed upon all traders not of

their own town, it was very common in the case of merchants from

abroad to require that they should only remain within the town for the

purpose of selling for forty days, and that they should board not at

an inn but in the household of some town merchant, who could thus keep

oversight of their movements, and who would be held responsible if his

guest violated the law in any way. This was called the custom of

"hostage."

The king, on the other hand, and the classes most influential in the

national government, the nobility and the churchmen, favored foreign

trade. A series of privileges, guarantees, and concessions were

consequently issued by the government to individual foreign merchants,

to foreign towns, and even to foreigners generally, the object of

which was to encourage their coming to England to trade. The most

remarkable instance of this was the so-called _Carta Mercatoria_

issued by Edward I in 1303. It was given according to its own terms,

for the peace and security of merchants coming to England from

Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Navarre, Lombardy, Tuscany,

Provence, Catalonia, Aquitaine, Toulouse, Quercy, Flanders, Brabant,

and all other foreign lands. It allowed such merchants to bring in and

sell almost all kinds of goods, and freed them from the payment of

many tolls and payments habitually exacted by the towns; it gave them

permission to sell to strangers as well as to townsmen, and to retail

as well as sell by wholesale. It freed them from the necessity of

dwelling with native merchants, and of bringing their stay to a close

within a restricted time. Town and market authorities were required by

it to give prompt justice to foreigners according to the law merchant,

and it was promised that a royal judge would be specially appointed to

listen to appeals. It is quite evident that if this charter had been

enforced some of the most familiar and valued customs of the merchants

of the various English towns would have been abrogated. In consequence

of vigorous protests and bitter resistance on the part of the townsmen

its provisions were partly withdrawn, partly ignored, and the position

of foreign merchants in England continued to depend on the tolerably

consistent support of the crown. Even this was modified by the steady

policy of hostility, limitation, and control on the part of the native

merchants.

With the exception of some intercourse between the northern towns and

the Scandinavian countries, the foreign trade of England was carried

on almost entirely by foreigners. English merchants, until after the

fourteenth century, seem to have had neither the ability, the

enterprise, nor the capital to go to continental cities in any numbers

to sell the products of their own country or to buy goods which would

be in demand when imported into England. Foreigners were more

enterprising. From Flemish, French, German, Italian, and even Spanish

cities merchants came over as traders. The product of England which

was most in demand was wool. Certain parts of England were famous

throughout all Europe for the quality and quantity of the wool raised

there. The relative good order of England and its exemption from civil

war made it possible to raise sheep more extensively than in countries

where foraging parties from rival bodies of troops passed frequently

to and fro. Many of the monasteries, especially in the north and west,

had large outlying wastes of land which were regularly used for the

raising of sheep. The product of these northern and western pastures

as well as the surplus product of the demesnes and larger holdings of

the ordinary manors was brought to the fairs and towns for sale and

bought up readily by foreign merchants. Sheepskins, hides, and tanned

leather were also exported, as were certain coarse woven fabrics. Tin

and lead were well-known products, at that time almost peculiar to

England, and in years of plentiful production, grain, salt meat, and

dairy products were exported. England was far behind most of the

Continent in industrial matters, so that there was much that could be

brought into the country that would be in demand, both of the natural

productions of foreign countries and of their manufactured articles.

Trade relations existed between England and the Scandinavian

countries, northern Germany, southern Germany, the Netherlands,

northeastern, northwestern, and southern France, Spain and Portugal,

and various parts of Italy. Of these lines of trade the most important

were the trade with the Hanse cities of northern Germany, with the

Flemish cities, and with those in Italy, especially Venice.

*22. The Italian and Eastern Trade.*--The merchandise which Venice had

to offer was of an especially varied nature. Her prosperity had begun

with a coastwise trade along the shores of the Adriatic. Later,

especially during the period of the Crusades, her training had been

extended to the eastern Mediterranean, where she obtained trading

concessions from the Greek Emperor and formed a half commercial, half

political empire of her own among the island cities and coast

districts of the Ionian Sea, along the Dardanelles and the Sea of

Marmora, and finally in the Black Sea. From these regions she brought

the productions peculiar to the eastern Mediterranean: wines, sugar,

dried fruits and nuts, cotton, drugs, dyestuffs, and certain kinds of

leather and other manufactured articles.

[Illustration: Trade Routes between England and the Continent in the

Fourteenth Century. Engraved by Bormay and Co., N.Y.]

Eventually Venice became the special possessor of a still more distant

trade, that of the far East. The products of Arabia and Persia, India

and the East Indian Islands, and even of China, all through the Middle

Ages, as in antiquity, made their way by long and difficult routes to

the western countries of Europe. Silk and cotton, both raw and

manufactured into fine goods, indigo and other dyestuffs, aromatic

woods and gums, narcotics and other drugs, pearls, rubies, diamonds,

sapphires, turquoises, and other precious stones, gold and silver, and

above all the edible spices, pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and

allspice, could be obtained only in Asia. There were three principal

routes by which these goods were brought into Europe: first, along the

Red Sea and overland across Egypt; second, up the Persian Gulf to its

head, and then either along the Euphrates to a certain point whence

the caravan route turned westward to the Syrian coast, or along the

Tigris to its upper waters, and then across to the Black Sea at

Trebizond; third, by caravan routes across Asia, then across the

Caspian Sea, and overland again, either to the Black Sea or through

Russia to the Baltic. A large part of this trade was gathered up by

the Italian cities, especially Venice, at its various outlets upon the

Mediterranean or adjacent waters. She had for exportation therefore,

in addition to her own manufactures, merchandise which had been

gathered from all parts of the then known world. The Venetian laws

regulated commerce with the greatest minuteness. All goods purchased

by Venetian traders must as a rule be brought first to the city and

unloaded and stored in the city warehouses. A certain amount of

freedom of export by land or water was then allowed, but by far the

greater proportion of the goods remained under the partial control of

the government. When conditions were considered favorable, the Senate

voted a certain number of government galleys for a given voyage. There

were several objective points for these voyages, but one was regularly

England and Flanders, and the group of vessels sent to those countries

was known as the "Flanders Fleet." Such an expedition was usually

ordered about once a year, and consisted of two to five galleys. These

were put under the charge of an admiral and provided with sailing

masters, crews of rowers, and armed men to protect them, all at the

expense of the merchants who should send goods in the vessels.

Stringent regulations were also imposed upon them by the government,

defining the length of their stay and appointing a series of stopping

places, usually as follows: Capo d'Istria, Corfu, Otranto, Syracuse,

Messina, Naples, Majorca, certain Spanish ports, Lisbon; then across

the Bay of Biscay to the south coast of England, where usually the

fleet divided, part going to Sluys, Middleburg, or Antwerp, in the

Netherlands; the remainder going to Southampton, Sandwich, London, or

elsewhere in England. At one or other of the southern ports of

England the fleet would reassemble on its return, the whole outward

and return voyage usually taking about a year.

The merchants who had come with the fleet thereupon proceeded to

dispose of their goods in the southern towns and fairs of England and

to buy wool or other goods which might be taken back to Venice or

disposed of on the way. A somewhat similar trade was kept up with

other Italian cities, especially with Genoa and Florence, though these

lines of trade were more extensive in the fifteenth century than in

the fourteenth.

*23. The Flanders Trade and the Staple.*--A trade of greater bulk and

greater importance, though it did not include articles from such a

distance as that of Italy, was the trade with the Flemish cities. This

was more closely connected with English wool production than was that

with any other country. Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Courtrai, Arras, and a

number of other cities in Flanders and the adjacent provinces of the

Netherlands and France had become populous and rich, principally from

their weaving industry. For their manufacture of fine fabrics they

needed the English wool, and in turn their fine woven goods were in

constant demand for the use of the wealthier classes in England.

English skill was not yet sufficient to produce anything more than the

crudest and roughest of textile fabrics. The fine cloths, linens,

cambrics, cloth of gold and silver, tapestries and hangings, were the

product of the looms of the Flemish cities. Other fine manufactured

goods, such as armor and weapons, glass and furniture, and articles

which had been brought in the way of trade to the Netherlands, were

all exported thence and sold in England.

The Flemish dealers who habitually engaged in the English trade were

organized among themselves in a company or league known as the

"Flemish Hanse of London." A considerable number of towns held such

membership in the organization that their citizens could take part in

the trade and share in the benefits and privileges of the society, and

no citizen of these towns could trade in England without paying the

dues and submitting himself to the rules of the Hanse. The export

trade from England to the Netherlands was controlled from the English

side by the system known as the "Staple." From early times it had been

customary to gather English standard products in certain towns in

England or abroad for sale. These towns were known as "staples" or

"staple towns," and wool, woolfells, leather, tin, and lead, the goods

most extensively exported, were known as "staple goods." Subsequently

the government took control of the matter, and appointed a certain

town in the Netherlands to which staple goods must be sent in the

first place when they were exported from England. Later certain towns

in England were appointed as staple towns, where all goods of the

kinds mentioned above should be taken to be registered, weighed, and

taxed before exportation. Just at the close of the period under

discussion, in 1354, a careful organization was given to the system of

staple towns in England, by which in each of the ten or twelve towns

to which staple goods must be brought for exportation, a Mayor of the

Staple and two Constables were elected by the "merchants of the

staple," native and foreign. These officials had a number of duties,

some of them more particularly in the interest of the king and

treasury, others in the interest of the foreign merchants, still

others merely for the preservation of good order and the enforcement

of justice. The law merchant was made the basis of judgment, and every

effort made to grant protection to foreigners and at the same time

secure the financial interests of the government. But the policy of

the government was by no means consistent. Both before and after this

date, the whole system of staples was repeatedly abolished for a time

and the whole trade in these articles thrown open. Again, the location

of the staple towns was shifted from England to the continent and

again back to England. Eventually, in 1363, the staple came to be

established at Calais, and all "staplers," or exporters of staple

goods from England, were forced to give bonds that their cargoes would

be taken direct to Calais to be sold.

*24. The Hanse Trade.*--The trade with Germany was at this time almost

all with the group of citizens which made up the German Hanse or

League. This was a union of a large number of towns of northern

Germany, such as Lubeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Dantzig, Brunswick, and

perhaps sixty or eighty others. By a series of treaties and agreements

among themselves, these towns had formed a close confederation which

acted as a single whole in obtaining favorable trading concessions and

privileges in various countries. There had been a considerable trade

between the merchants of these towns and England from an early time.

They brought the products of the Baltic lands, such as lumber, tar,

salt, iron, silver, salted and smoked fish, furs, amber, certain

coarse manufactures, and goods obtained by Hanseatic merchants through

their more distant trade connections, such as fine woven goods, armor

and other metal goods, and even spices and other Eastern goods,

obtained from the great Russian fairs. The Hanse cities had entered

into treaties with the English government, and possessed valuable

concessions and privileges, and imported and exported quite

extensively. The term "sterling," as applied to standard English

money, is derived from the word "Easterling," which was used as

synonymous with "German," "Hansard," "Dutch," and several other names

descriptive of these traders.

The trade with the cities of northwestern France was similar to that

with the neighboring towns of Flanders. That with northwestern France

consisted especially of salt, sail-cloth, and wine. The trade with

Poitou, Gascony, and Guienne was more extensive, as was natural from

their long political connection with England. The chief part of the

export from southern France was wine, though a variety of other

articles, including fruits and some manufactured articles, were sent

to England. A trade of quite a varied character also existed between

England and the various countries of the Spanish Peninsula, including

Portugal. Foreign trade with all of these countries was destined to

increase largely during the later fourteenth and the fifteenth

century, but its foundations were well laid within the first half of

the fourteenth. Vessels from all these countries appeared from time to

time in the harbors of England, and their merchants traded under

government patronage and support in many English towns and fairs.

*25. Foreigners settled in England.*--The fact that almost all of the

foreign trade of England was in the hands of aliens necessarily

involved their presence in the country temporarily or permanently in

considerable numbers. The closely related fact that the English were

distinctly behind the people of the Continent in economic knowledge,

skill, and wealth also led foreigners to seek England as a field for

profitable exercise of their abilities in finance, in trade, and

manufactures. The most conspicuous of these foreigners at the close of

the thirteenth century and during the early part of the fourteenth

were the Italian bankers. Florence was not only a great trading and

manufacturing city, but a money centre, a capitalist city. The Bardi,

Peruzzi, Alberti, Frescobaldi, and other banking companies received

deposits from citizens of Florence and other Italian cities, and

loaned the money, as well as their own capital, to governments, great

nobles, and ecclesiastical corporations in other countries. When the

Jews were expelled from England in 1290, there being no considerable

amount of money among native Englishmen, the Italian bankers were the

only source from which the government could secure ready money. When a

tax had been authorized by Parliament, but the product of it could be

obtained only after a year or more spent in its collection, the

Florentines were at hand to offer the money at once, receiving

security for repayment when the receipts from the tax should come in.

Government monopolies like the Cornwall tin mines were leased to them

for a lump sum; arrangements were made by which the bankers furnished

a certain amount of money each day during a campaign or a royal

progress. The immediate needs of an impecunious king were regularly

satisfied with money borrowed to be repaid some months afterward. The

equipment for all of the early expeditions of the Hundred Years' War

was obtained with money borrowed from the Florentines. Payments abroad

were also made by means of bills of exchange negotiated by the same

money-lenders. Direct payment of interest was forbidden by law, but

they seem to have been rewarded by valuable government concessions, by

the profits on exchange, and no doubt by the indirect payment of

interest, notwithstanding its illegality.

The Italian bankers evidently loaned to others besides the king, for

in 1327 the Knights Hospitallers in England repaid to the Society of

the Bardi £848 5_d._, and to the Peruzzi £551 12_s._ 11_d._ They

continued to loan freely to the king, till in 1348 he was indebted to

one company alone to the extent of more than £50,000, a sum equal in

modern value to about $3,000,000. The king now failed to repay what he

had promised, and the banking companies fell into great straits.

Defalcations having occurred in other countries also, some of them

failed, and after the middle of the century they never held so

conspicuous a place, though some Italians continued to act as bankers

and financiers through the remainder of the fourteenth and fifteenth

century. Many Italian merchants who were not bankers, especially

Venetians and Genoese, were settled in England, but their occupation

did not make them so conspicuous as the financiers of the same nation.

[Illustration: The Steelyard in the Seventeenth Century. (Herbert:

_History of London Livery Companies_.)]

The German or Hanse merchants had a settlement of their own in London,

known as the "Steelyard," "Gildhall of the Dutch," or the

"Easterling's House." They had similar establishments on a smaller

scale in Boston and Lynn, and perhaps in other towns. Their

permission to own property and to live in their own house instead of

in the houses of native merchants, as was the usual custom, was

derived, like most privileges of foreigners, from the gift of the

king. Little by little they had purchased property surrounding their

original grants until they had a great group of buildings, including a

meeting and dining hall, tower, kitchen, storage house, offices and

other warehouses, and a considerable number of dwelling-houses, all

enclosed by a wall and fences. It was located immediately on the

Thames just above London Bridge so that their vessels unloaded at

their own wharf. The merchants or their agents lived under strict

rules, the gates being invariably closed at nine o'clock, and all

discords among their own nation were punished by their own officers.

Their trade was profitable to the king through payment of customs, and

after the failure of the Italian bankers the merchants of the

Steelyard made considerable loans to the English government either

directly or acting for citizens at home. In 1343, when the king had

been granted a tax of 40_s._ a sack on all wool exported, he

immediately borrowed the value of it from Tiedemann van Limberg and

Johann van Wolde, Easterlings. Similarly in 1346 the Easterlings

loaned the king money for three years, holding his second crown as

security. Like the Florentines, at one time they took the Cornwall tin

mines at farm. They had many privileges not accorded generally to

foreigners, but were exceedingly unpopular alike with the population

and the authorities of the city of London. There were some other

Germans domiciled in England, but nowhere else were they so

conspicuous or influential as at the Steelyard.

[Illustration: Ground Plan of the Steelyard in the Seventeenth

Century. (Lappenberg. _Geschichte des Hansischen Stahlhofes_.)]

The trade with Flanders brought Flemish merchants into England

temporarily, but they do not seem to have formed any settlement or

located permanently in any one place. Flemish artisans, on the other

hand, had migrated to England from early times and were scattered here

and there in several towns and villages. In the early part of the

fourteenth century Edward III made it a matter of deliberate policy to

encourage the immigration of Flemish weavers and other handicraftsmen,

with the expectation that they would teach their art to the more

backward native English. In 1332 he issued a charter of protection and

privilege to a Fleming named John Kempe, a weaver of woollen cloth,

offering the same privilege and protection to all other weavers,

dyers, and fullers who should care to come to England to live. In 1337

a similar charter was given to a body of weavers coming from Zealand

to England. It is believed that a considerable number of immigrants

from the Netherlands came in at this period, settled largely in the

smaller towns and rural villages, and taking English apprentices

brought about a great improvement in the character of English

manufactures. Flemings are also met with in local records in various

occupations, even in agriculture.

There were other foreigners resident in England, especially Gascons

from the south of France, and Spaniards; but the main elements of

alien population in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were those

which have just been described, Italians, Germans from the Hanse

towns, and Flemings. These were mainly occupied as bankers, merchants,

and handicraftsmen.

*26. BIBLIOGRAPHY*

Dr. Cunningham's _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_ is

particularly full and valuable on this subject. He has given further

details on one branch of it in his _Alien Immigrants in England_.

Schanz, Georg: _Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende des Mittelalters_.

This work refers to a later period than that included in this chapter,

but the summaries which the author gives of earlier conditions are in

many cases the best accounts that we have.

Ashley, W. J.: _Early History of the Woolen Industry in England_.

Pauli, R.: _Pictures from Old England_. Contains an interesting

account of the Steelyard.

Pirenne, Henri: _La Hanse flamande de Londres_.

Von Ochenkowski, W.: _England's Wirthsschaftliche Entwickelung im

Ausgange des Mittelalters_.

CHAPTER V

THE BLACK DEATH AND THE PEASANTS' REBELLION

Economic Changes Of The Later Fourteenth And Early Fifteenth Centuries

*27. National Affairs from 1338 to 1461.*--For the last century or more

England had been standing with her back to the Continent. Deprived of

most of their French possessions, engaged in the struggle to bring

Wales, Scotland, and Ireland under the English crown, occupied with

repeated conflicts with their barons or with the development of the

internal organization of the country, John, Henry III, and the two

Edwards had had less time and inclination to interest themselves in

continental affairs than had Henry II and Richard. But after 1337 a

new influence brought England for the next century into close

connection with the rest of Europe. This was the "Hundred Years' War"

between England and France. Several causes had for years combined to

make this war unavoidable: the interference of France in the dispute

with Scotland, the conflicts between the rising fishing and trading

towns on the English and the French side of the Channel, the desire of

the French king to drive the English kings from their remaining

provinces in the south of France, and the reluctance of the English

kings to accept their dependent position in France. Edward III

commenced the war in 1338 with the invasion of France, and it was

continued with comparatively short intervals of peace until 1452.

During its progress the English won three of the most brilliant

military victories in their history, at Crécy, Poitiers, and

Agincourt, in 1346, 1356, and 1415. But most of the campaigns were

characterized by brutality, destructive ravaging, and the reduction of

cities by famine. The whole contest indeed often degenerated into

desultory, objectless warfare. A permanent settlement was attempted at

Bretigny in 1360. The English required the dismemberment of France by

the surrender of almost one-third of the country and the payment by

the French of a large ransom for their king, who had been captured by

the English. In return King Edward withdrew any other claims he might

have to territory, or the French crown. These terms were, however, so

humiliating to the French that they did not adhere to them, the war

soon broke out again, and finally terminated in the driving out of the

English from all of France except the city of Calais, in the middle

years of the next century.

The many alliances, embassies, exchanges of visits, and other

international intercourse which the prosecution of the Hundred Years'

War involved brought England into a closer participation in the

general life of Europe than ever before, and caused the ebb and flow

of a tide of influences between England and the Continent which deeply

affected economic, political, and religious life on both sides of the

Channel.

The Universities continued to flourish during almost the whole of this

period. It was from Oxford as a centre, under the influence of John

Wycliffe, a lecturer there, that a great revival and reforming

movement in the church emanated. From about 1370 Wycliffe and others

began to agitate for a more earnest religious life. They translated

the Bible into English, wrote devotional and polemic tracts, preached

throughout the country, spoke and wrote against the evils in the

church at the time, then against its accepted form of organization,

and finally against its official teachings. They thus became heretics.

Thousands were influenced by their teachings, and a wave of religious

revival and ecclesiastical rebellion spread over the country. The

powers of the church and the civil government were ultimately brought

to bear to crush out the "Lollards," as those who held heretical

beliefs at that time were called. New and stringent laws were passed

in 1401 and 1415, several persons were burned at the stake, and a

large number forced to recant, or frightened into keeping their

opinions secret. This religious movement gradually died out, and by

the middle of the fifteenth century nothing more is heard of

Lollardry.

Wycliffe had been not only a religious innovator, but a writer of much

excellent English. Contemporary with him or slightly later were a

number of writers who used the native language and created permanent

works of literature. _The Vision of Piers Plowman_ is the longest and

best of a number of poems written by otherwise unknown men. Geoffrey

Chaucer, one of England's greatest poets, wrote at first in French,

then in English; his _Canterbury Tales_ showing a perfected English

form, borrowed originally, like so much of what was best in England at

the time, from Italy or France, but assimilated, improved, and

reconstructed until it seemed a purely English production. During the

reign of Edward III English became the official language of the courts

and the usual language of conversation, even among the higher classes.

Edward III lived until 1377. Through his long reign of half a century,

during which he was entirely dependent on the grants of Parliament for

the funds needed to carry on the war against France, this body

obtained the powers, privileges, and organization which made it

thereafter such an influential part of the government. His successor,

Richard II, after a period of moderate government tried to rule with a

high hand, but in 1399 was deposed through the influence of his

cousin, Henry of Lancaster, who was crowned as Henry IV. Henry's title

to the throne, according to hereditary principles, was defective, for

the son of an older brother was living. He was, however, a mere child,

and there was no considerable opposition to Henry's accession. Under

the Lancastrian line, as Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI, who now

reigned successively, are called, Parliament reached the highest

position which it had yet attained, a position higher in fact than it

held for several centuries afterward. Henry VI was a child at the

death of his father in 1422. On coming to be a man he proved too mild

in temper to control the great nobles who, by the chances of

inheritance, had become almost as powerful as the great feudal barons

of early Norman times. The descendants of the older branch of the

royal family were now represented by a vigorous and capable man, the

duke of York. An effort was therefore made about 1450 by one party of

the nobles to depose Henry VI in favor of the duke of York. A number

of other nobles took the side of the king, and civil war broke out.

After a series of miserable contests known as the "Wars of the Roses"

the former party was successful, at least temporarily, and the duke of

York became king in 1461 as Edward IV.

*28. The Black Death and its Effects.*--During the earlier mediæval

centuries the most marked characteristic of society was its stability.

Institutions continued with but slight changes during a long period.

With the middle of the fourteenth century changes become more

prominent. Some of the most conspicuous of these gather around a

series of attacks of epidemic disease during the latter half of the

century.

[Illustration: Distribution of Population According to the Poll-tax of

1377. Engraved by Bormay & Co., N.Y.]

From the autumn of 1348 to the spring of 1350 a wave of pestilence

was spreading over England from the southwest northward and eastward,

progressively attacking every part of the country. The disease was new

to Europe. Its course in the individual case, like its progress

through the community, was very rapid. The person attacked either died

within two or three days or even less, or showed signs of recovery

within the same period. The proportion of cases which resulted fatally

was extremely large; the infectious character of the disease quite

remarkable. It was, in fact, an extremely violent epidemic attack, the

most violent in history, of the bubonic plague, with which we have

unfortunately become again familiar within recent years.

From much careful examination of several kinds of contemporary

evidence it seems almost certain that as each locality was

successively attacked in 1348 and 1349 something like a half of the

population died. In other words, whereas in an ordinary year at that

time perhaps one-twentieth of the people died, in the plague year

one-half died. Such entries as the following are frequent in the

contemporary records. At the abbey of Newenham, "in the time of this

mortality or pestilence there died in this house twenty monks and

three lay brothers, whose names are entered in other books. And

Walter, the abbot, and two monks were left alive there after the

sickness." At Leicester, "in the little parish of St. Leonard there

died more than 380, in the parish of Holy Cross more than 400, in that

of St. Margaret more than 700; and so in every parish great numbers."

The close arrangement of houses in the villages, the crowding of

dwellings along narrow streets in the towns, the promiscuous life in

the monasteries and in the inns, the uncleanly habits of living

universally prevalent, all helped to make possible this sweeping away

of perhaps a majority of the population by an attack of epidemic

disease. It had devastated several of the countries of Europe before

appearing in England, having been introduced into Europe apparently

along the great trade routes from the far East. Within a few months

the attack in each successive district subsided, the disease in the

southwestern counties of England having run its course between August,

1348, and May, 1349, in and about London between November, 1348, and

July, 1349, in the eastern counties in the summer of 1349, and in the

more northern counties through the last months of that year or within

the spring of 1350. Pestilence was frequent throughout the Middle

Ages, but this attack was not only vastly more destructive and general

than any which had preceded it, but the disease when once introduced

became a frequent scourge in subsequent times, especially during the

remainder of the fourteenth century. In 1361, 1368, and 1396 attacks

are noticed as occurring more or less widely through the country, but

none were so extensive as that which is usually spoken of as the

"Black Death" of 1348-1349. The term "Black Death" was not used

contemporaneously, nor until comparatively modern times. The

occurrence of the pestilence, however, made an extremely strong

impression on men's minds, and as "the great mortality," "the great

pestilence," or "the great death," it appears widely in the records

and the literature of the time.

Such an extensive and sudden destruction of life could not take place

without leaving its mark in many directions. Monasteries were

depopulated, and the value of their property and the strictness of

their discipline diminished. The need for priests led to the

ordination of those who were less carefully prepared and selected. The

number of students at Oxford and Cambridge was depleted; the building

and adornment of many churches suspended. The war between England and

France, though promptly renewed, involved greater difficulty in

obtaining equipment, and ultimately required new devices to meet its

expense. Many of the towns lost numbers and property that were never

regained, and the distribution of population throughout England was

appreciably changed.

But the most evident and far-reaching results of the series of

pestilences occurring through the last half of the fourteenth century

were those connected with rural life and the arrangement of classes

described in Chapter II.

The lords of manors might seem at first thought to have reaped

advantage from the unusually high death rate. The heriots collected on

the death of tenants were more numerous; reliefs paid by their

successors on obtaining the land were repeated far more frequently

than usual; much land escheated to the lord on the extinction of the

families of free tenants, or fell into his hands for redisposal on the

failure of descendants of villains or cotters. But these were only

temporary and casual results. In other ways the diminution of

population was distinctly disadvantageous to the lords of manors. They

obtained much lower rents for mills and other such monopolies, because

there were fewer people to have their grain ground and the tenants of

the mills could therefore not make as much profit. The rents of assize

or regular periodical payments in money and in kind made by free and

villain tenants were less in amount, since the tenants were fewer and

much land was unoccupied. The profits of the manor courts were less,

for there were not so many suitors to attend, to pay fees, and to be

fined. The manor court rolls for these years give long lists of

vacancies of holdings, often naming the days of the deaths of the

tenants. Their successors are often children, and in many cases whole

families were swept away and the land taken into the hands of the

lord of the manor. Juries appointed at one meeting of the manor court

are sometimes all dead by the time of the next meeting. There are

constant complaints by the stewards that certain land "is of no value

because the tenants are all dead;" in one place that a water-mill is

worthless because "all the tenants who used it are dead," in another

that the rents are £7 14_s._ less than in the previous year because

fourteen holdings, consisting of 102 acres of land, are in the hands

of the lord, in still another that the rents of assize which used to

be £20 are now only £2 and the court fees have fallen from 40 to 5

shillings "because the tenants there are dead." There was also less

required service performed on the demesne lands, for many of the

villain holdings from which it was owed were now vacant. Last, and

most seriously of all, the lords of manors suffered as employers of

labor. It had always been necessary to hire additional labor for the

cultivation of the demesne farm and for the personal service of the

manor, and through recent decades somewhat more had come to be hired

because of a gradual increase of the practice of commutation of

services. That is, villain tenants were allowed to pay the value of

their required days' work in money instead of in actual service. The

bailiff or reeve then hired men as they were wanted, so that quite an

appreciable part of the work of the manor had come to be done by

laborers hired for wages.

After the Black Death the same demesne lands were to be cultivated,

and in most cases the larger holdings remained or descended or were

regranted to those who would expect to continue their cultivation.

Thus the demand for laborers remained approximately as great as it had

been before. The number of laborers, on the other hand, was vastly

diminished. They were therefore eagerly sought for by employers.

Naturally they took advantage of their position to demand higher

wages, and in many cases combined to refuse to work at the old

accustomed rates. A royal ordinance of 1349 states that, "because a

great part of the people, especially of workmen and servants, have

lately died in the pestilence, many, seeing the necessity of masters

and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive

excessive wages." A contemporary chronicler says that "laborers were

so elated and contentious that they did not pay any attention to the

command of the king, and if anybody wanted to hire them he was bound

to pay them what they asked, and so he had his choice either to lose

his harvest and crops or give in to the proud and covetous desires of

the workmen." Thus, because of this rise in wages, at the very time

that many of the usual sources of income of the lords of manors were

less remunerative, the expenses of carrying on their farming

operations were largely increased. On closer examination, therefore,

it becomes evident that the income of the lords of manors, whether

individuals or corporations, was not increased, but considerably

diminished, and that their position was less favorable than it had

been before the pestilence.

The freeholders of land below lords of manors were disadvantageously

affected in as far as they had to hire laborers, but in other ways

were in a more favorable position. The rent which they had to pay was

often reduced. Land was everywhere to be had in plenty, and a threat

to give up their holdings and go to where more favorable terms could

be secured was generally effective in obtaining better terms where

they were.

The villain holders legally of course did not have this opportunity,

but practically they secured many of its advantages. It is probable

that many took up additional land, perhaps on an improved tenure.

Their payments and their labor, whether done in the form of required

"week-work," or, if this were commuted, done for hire, were much

valued, and concessions made to them accordingly. They might, as they

frequently did, take to flight, giving up their land and either

obtaining a new grant somewhere else or becoming laborers without

lands of their own.

This last-named class, made up of those who depended entirely on

agricultural labor on the land of others for their support, was a

class which had been increasing in numbers, and which was the most

distinctly favored by the demand for laborers and the rise of wages.

They were the representatives of the old cotter class, recruited from

those who either inherited no land or found it more advantageous to

work for wages than to take up small holdings with their burdens.

But the most important social result of the Black Death and the period

of pestilence which followed it was the general shock it gave to the

old settled life and established relations of men to one another. It

introduced many immediate changes, and still more causes of ultimate

change; but above all it altered the old stability, so that change in

future would be easy.

*29. The Statutes of Laborers.*--The change which showed itself most

promptly, the rise in the prevailing rate of wages, was met by the

strenuous opposition of the law. In the summer of 1349, while the

pestilence was still raging in the north of England, the king, acting

on the advice of his Council, issued a proclamation to all the

sheriffs and the officials of the larger towns, declaring that the

laborers were taking advantage of the needs of their lords to demand

excessive wages, and prohibiting them from asking more than had been

due and accustomed in the year before the outbreak of the pestilence

or for the preceding five or six years. Every laborer when offered

service at these wages must accept it; the lords of manors having the

first right to the labor of those living on their manors, provided

they did not insist on retaining an unreasonable number. If any

laborers, men or women, bond or free, should refuse to accept such an

offer of work, they were to be imprisoned till they should give bail

to serve as required. Commissioners were then appointed by the king in

each county to inquire into and punish violations of this ordinance.

[Illustration: The Stocks at Shalford, near Guildford. Present State.

(Jusserand: _English Wayfaring Life in the Fourteenth Century_.

Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.)]

When Parliament next met, in February, 1351, the Commons sent a

petition to the king stating that his ordinance had not been obeyed

and that laborers were claiming double and treble what they had

received in the years before the pestilence. In response to the

petition what is usually called the "First Statute of Laborers" was

enacted. It repeated the requirement that men must accept work when it

was offered to them, established definite rates of wages for various

classes of laborers, and required all such persons to swear twice a

year before the stewards, bailiffs, or other officials that they would

obey this law. If they refused to swear or disobeyed the law, they

were to be put in the stocks for three days or more and then sent to

the nearest jail till they should agree to serve as required. It was

ordered that stocks should be built in each village for this purpose,

and that the judges should visit each county twice a year to inquire

into the enforcement of the law. In 1357 the law was reënacted, with

some changes of the destination of the fines collected for its breach.

In 1361 there was a further reënactment of the law with additional

penalties. If laborers will not work unless they are given higher

wages than those established by law, they can be taken and imprisoned

by lords of manors for as much as fifteen days, and then be sent to

the next jail to await the coming of the justices. If any one after

accepting service leaves it, he is to be arrested and sued before the

justices. If he cannot be found, he is to be outlawed and a writ sent

to every sheriff in England ordering that he should be arrested, sent

back, and imprisoned till he pays his fine and makes amends to the

party injured; "and besides for the falsity he shall be burnt in the

forehead with an iron made and formed to this letter F in token of

Falsity, if the party aggrieved shall ask for it." This last

provision, however, was probably intended as a threat rather than an

actual punishment, for its application was suspended for some months,

and even then it was to be inflicted only on the advice of the

judges, and the iron was to remain in the custody of the sheriff. The

statute was reënacted with slight variations thirteen times within the

century after its original introduction; namely, in addition to the

dates already mentioned, in 1362, 1368, 1378, 1388, 1402, 1406, 1414,

1423, 1427, 1429, and 1444.

[Illustration: Laborers Reaping. From a Fourteenth Century Manuscript.

(Jusserand: _English Wayfaring Life in the Fourteenth Century_.

Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.)]

The necessity for these repeated reissues of the statutes of laborers

indicates that the general rise of wages was not prevented. Forty

years after the pestilence the law of 1388 is said to be passed,

"because that servants and laborers are not, nor by a long time have

been willing to serve and labor without outrageous and excessive

hire." Direct testimony also indicates that the prevailing rate of

wages was much higher, probably half as much again, as it had been

before the pestilence. Nevertheless, the enforcement of the law in

individual cases must have been a very great hardship. The fines which

were collected from breakers of the law were of sufficient amount to

be estimated at one time as part payment of a tax, at another as a

valuable source of income to the lords of manors. Their enforcement

was intrusted at different times to the local justices of the peace,

the royal judges on circuit, and special commissioners.

The inducement to the passage of the laws prohibiting a rise in wages

was no doubt partly the self-interest of the employing classes who

were alone represented in Parliament, but partly also the feeling that

the laboring class were taking advantage of an abnormal condition of

affairs to change the well established customary rates of remuneration

of labor. The most significant fact indicated by the laws, however,

was the existence of a distinct class of laborers. In earlier times

when almost all rural dwellers held some land this can hardly have

been the case; it is quite evident that there was now an increasing

class who made their living simply by working for wages. Another fact

frequently referred to in the laws is the frequent passage of laborers

from one district to another; it is evident that the population was

becoming somewhat less stationary. Therefore while the years following

the great pestilence were a period of difficulty for the lords of

manors and the employing classes, for the lower classes the same

period was one of increasing opportunity and a breaking down of old

restrictions. Whether or not the statutes had any real effect in

keeping the rate of wages lower than it would have otherwise become is

hard to determine, but there is no doubt that the efforts to enforce

the law and the frequent punishment of individuals for its violation

embittered the minds of the laborers and helped to throw them into

opposition to the government and to the upper classes generally. The

statutes of laborers thus became one of the principal causes of the

growth of that hostility which culminated in the Peasants' Rebellion.

*30. The Peasants' Rebellion of 1381.*--From the scanty contemporary

records still remaining we can obtain glimpses of a widespread

restlessness among the masses of the English people during the latter

half of the fourteenth century. According to a petition submitted to

Parliament in 1377 the villains were refusing to pay their customary

services to their lords and to acknowledge the requirements of their

serfdom. They were also gathering together in great bodies to resist

the efforts of the lords to collect from them their dues and to force

them to submit to the decisions of the manor courts. The ready

reception given to the religious revival preached by the Lollards

throughout the country indicates an attitude of independence and of

self-assertion on the part of the people of which there had been no

sign during earlier times. The writer who represents most nearly

popular feeling, the author of the _Vision of Piers Plowman_, reflects

a certain restless and questioning mysticism which has no particular

plan of reform to propose, but is nevertheless thoroughly dissatisfied

with the world as it is. Lastly, a series of vague appeals to revolt,

written in the vernacular, partly in prose, partly in doggerel rhyme,

have been preserved and seem to testify to a deliberate propaganda of

lawlessness. Some of the general causes of this rising tide of

discontent are quite apparent. The efforts to enforce the statutes of

laborers, as has been said, kept continual friction between the

employing and the employed class. Parliament, which kept petitioning

for reënactments of these laws, the magistrates and special

commissioners who enforced them, and the landowners who appealed to

them for relief, were alike engaged in creating class antagonism and

multiplying individual grievances. Secondly, the very improvement in

the economic position of the lower classes, which was undoubtedly in

progress, made them doubly impatient of the many burdens which still

pressed upon them. Another cause for the prevalent unrest may have

lain in the character of much of the teaching of the time. Undisguised

communism was preached by a wandering priest, John Ball, and the

injustice of the claims of the property-holding classes was a very

natural inference from much of the teachings of Wycliffe and his "poor

priests." Again, the corruption of the court, the incapacity of the

ministers, and the failure of the war in France were all reasons for

popular anger, if the masses of the people can be supposed to have had

any knowledge of such distant matters.

[Illustration: Adam and Eve. From a Fourteenth Century Manuscript.

(Jusserand: _English Wayfaring Life in the Fourteenth Century_.

Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.)]

But the most definite and widespread cause of discontent was probably

the introduction of a new form of taxation, the general poll tax.

Until this time taxes had either been direct taxes laid upon land and

personal property, or indirect taxes laid upon various objects of

export and import. In 1377, however, Parliament agreed to the

imposition of a tax of four pence a head on all laymen, and

Convocation soon afterward taxed all the clergy, regular and secular,

the same amount. Notwithstanding this grant and increased taxes of the

old forms, the government still needed more money for the expenses of

the war with France, and in April, 1379, a graduated poll tax was laid

on all persons above sixteen years of age. This was regulated

according to the rank of the payer from mere laborers, who were to pay

four pence, up to earls, who must pay £4. But this only produced some

£20,000, while more than £100,000 were needed; therefore in November

of 1380 a third poll tax was laid in the following manner. The tax was

to be collected at the rate of three groats or one shilling for each

person over fifteen years of age. But although the total amount

payable from any town or manor was to be as many shillings as there

were inhabitants over fourteen years of age, it was to be assessed in

each manor upon individuals in proportion to their means, the more

well-to-do paying more, the poorer paying less; but with the limits

that no one should have to pay more than £1 for himself and his wife,

and no one less than four pence for himself and his wife.

The poll tax was extremely unpopular. In the first place, it was a new

tax, and to all appearances an additional weight given to the burden

of contributing to the never ending expenses of the government of

which the people were already weary. Moreover, it fell upon everybody,

even upon those who from their lack of property had probably never

before paid any tax. The inhabitants of every cottage were made to

realize, by the payment of what amounted to two or three days' wages,

that they had public and political as well as private and economic

burdens. Lastly, the method of assessing the tax gave scope for much

unfairness and favoritism.

In addition to this general unpopularity of the poll tax there was a

special reason for opposition in the circumstances of that imposed in

1380. As the returns began to come in they were extremely

disappointing to the government. Therefore in March, 1381, the king,

suspecting negligence on the part of the collectors, appointed groups

of commissioners for a number of different districts who were directed

to go from place to place investigating the former collection and

enforcing payment from any who had evaded it before. This no doubt

seemed to many of the ignorant people the imposition of a second tax.

The first rumors of disorder came in May from some of the villages of

Essex, where the tax-collectors and the commissioners who followed

them were driven away violently by the people. Finally, during the

second week in June, rioting began in several parts of England almost

simultaneously. In Essex those who had refused to pay the poll tax and

driven out the collectors now went from village to village persuading

or compelling the people to join them. In Kent the villagers seized

pilgrims on their way to Canterbury and forced them to take an oath to

resist any tax except the old taxes, to be faithful to "King Richard

and the Commons," to join their party when summoned, and never to

allow John of Gaunt to become king. A riot broke out at Dartford in

Kent, then Canterbury was overrun and the sheriff was forced to give

up the tax rolls to be destroyed. They proceeded to break into

Maidstone jail and release the prisoners there, and subsequently

entered Rochester. These Kentish insurgents then set out toward

London, wishing no doubt to obtain access to the young king, who was

known to be there, but also directed by an instinctive desire to

strike at the capital of the kingdom. By Wednesday, the 12th of June,

they had formed a rendezvous at Blackheath some five miles below the

city. Some of the Essex men had crossed the river and joined them,

others had also taken their way toward London, marching along the

northern side of the Thames. At the same time, or by the next day,

another band was approaching London from Hertfordshire on the north.

The body of insurgents gathered at Blackheath, who were stated by

contemporary chroniclers, no doubt with the usual exaggeration, to

have numbered 60,000, succeeded in communicating with King Richard, a

boy of fourteen years, who was residing at the Tower of London with

his mother and principal ministers and several great nobles, asking

him to come to meet them. On the next day, Corpus Christi day, June

12th, he was rowed with a group of nobles to the other bank of the

river, where the insurgents were crowding to the water side. The

confusion and danger were so great that the king did not land, and the

conference amounted to nothing. During the same day, however, the

rebels pressed on to the city, and a part of the populace of London

having left the drawbridge open for them, they made their way in. The

evening of the same day the men from Essex entered through one of the

city gates which had also been opened for them by connivance from

within. There had already been much destruction of property and of

life. As the rebels passed along the roads, the villagers joined them

and many of the lower classes of the town population as well. In

several cases they burned the houses of the gentry and of the great

ecclesiastics, destroyed tax and court rolls and other documents, and

put to death persons connected with the law. When they had made their

way into London they burned and pillaged the Savoy palace, the city

house of the duke of Lancaster, and the houses of the Knights

Hospitallers at Clerkenwell and at Temple Bar. By this time leaders

had arisen among the rebels. Wat Tyler, John Ball, and Jack Straw were

successful in keeping their followers from stealing and in giving some

semblance of a regular plan to their proceedings. On the morning of

Friday, the 14th, the king left the Tower, and while he was absent the

rebels made their way in, ransacked the rooms, seized and carried out

to Tower Hill Simon Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury, who was Lord

Chancellor, Robert Hales, Grand Master of the Hospitallers, who was

then Lord Treasurer, and some lower officials. These were all put

through the hasty forms of an irregular trial and then beheaded. There

were also many murders throughout the city. Foreigners especially were

put to death, probably by Londoners themselves or by the rural

insurgents at their instigation. A considerable number of Flemings

were assassinated, some being drawn from one of the churches where

they had taken refuge. The German merchants of the Steelyard were

attacked and driven through the streets, but took refuge in their

well-defended buildings.

During the same three days, insurrection had broken out in several

other parts of England. Disorders are mentioned in Kent, Essex,

Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge, Huntingdon,

Hampshire, Sussex, Somerset, Leicester, Lincoln, York, Bedford,

Northampton, Surrey, and Wiltshire. There are also indications of

risings in nine other counties. In Suffolk the leadership was taken by

a man named John Wrawe, a priest like John Ball. On June 12th, the

same day that the rendezvous was held on Blackheath, a great body of

peasants under Wrawe attacked and pillaged a manor house belonging to

Richard Lyons, an unpopular minister of the last days of Edward III.

The next day they looted a parish church where were stored the

valuables of Sir John Cavendish, Chief Justice of the Court of King's

Bench and Chancellor of the town of Cambridge. On the 14th they

occupied Bury, where they sacked the houses of unpopular men and

finally captured and put to death Cavendish himself, John of

Cambridge, prior of the St. Edmund's Abbey, and John of Lakenheath, an

officer of the king. The rioters also forced the monks of the abbey to

hand over to them all the documents giving to the monastery power over

the townsmen. There were also a large number of detached attacks on

persons and on manor houses, where manor court rolls and other

documents were destroyed and property carried off. There was more

theft here than in London; but much of the plundering was primarily

intended to settle old disputes rather than for its own sake. In

Norfolk the insurrection broke out a day or two later than in Suffolk,

and is notable as having among its patrons a considerable number of

the lesser gentry and other well-to-do persons. The principal leader,

however, was a certain Geoffrey Lister. This man had issued a

proclamation calling in all the people to meet on the 17th of June on

Mushold Heath, just outside the city of Norwich. A great multitude

gathered, and they summoned Sir Robert Salle, who was in the military

service of the king, but was living at Norwich, and who had risen from

peasant rank to knighthood, to come out for a conference. When he

declined their request to become their leader they assassinated him,

and subsequently made their way into the city, of which they kept

control for several days. Throughout Norfolk and Cambridgeshire we

hear of the same murders of men who had obtained the hatred of the

lower classes in general, or that of individuals who were temporarily

influential with the insurgents. There were also numerous instances of

the destruction of court rolls found at the manor houses of lay lords

of manors or obtained from the muniment rooms of the monasteries. It

seems almost certain that there was some agreement beforehand among

the leaders of the revolt in the eastern districts of England, and

probably also with the leaders in Essex and Kent.

Another locality where we have full knowledge of the occurrences

during the rebellion is the town and monastery of St. Albans, just

north of London. The rising here was either instigated by, or, at

least, drew its encouragement from, the leaders who gathered at

London. The townsmen and villains from surrounding manors invaded the

great abbey, opened the prison, demanded and obtained all the charters

bearing on existing disputes, and reclaimed a number of millstones

which were kept by the abbey as a testimony to the monopoly of all

grinding by the abbey mill. In many other places disorders were in

progress. For a few days in the middle of June a considerable part of

England was at the mercy of the revolted peasants and artisans, under

the leadership partly of men who had arisen among their own class,

partly of certain persons of higher position who had sufficient reason

for throwing in their lot with them.

[Illustration: Extension of the Peasant's Insurrection of 1381.

Engraved by Bormay & Co., N.Y.]

The culmination of the revolt was at the time of the execution of the

great ministers of government on Tower Hill on the morning of the

14th. At that very time the young king had met a body of the rebels,

mostly made up of men from Essex and Hertfordshire at Mile End, just

outside of one of the gates of London. In a discussion in which they

stated their grievances, the king apparently in good faith, but as it

afterward proved in bad, promised to give them what they demanded,

begged them to disperse and go to their homes, only leaving

representatives from each village to take back the charters of

emancipation which he proceeded to have prepared and issued to them.

There had been no intentional antagonism to the king himself, and a

great part of the insurgents took him at his word and scattered to

their homes. The charters which they took with them were of the

following form:--

"Richard, by the grace of God, King of England and France, and Lord of

Ireland, to all his bailiffs and faithful ones, to whom these present

letters shall come, greeting. Know that of our special grace, we have

manumitted all of our lieges and each of our subjects and others of

the County of Hertford; and them and each of them have made free from

all bondage, and by these presents make them quit. And moreover we

pardon our same lieges and subjects for all kinds of felonies,

treasons, transgressions, and extortions, however done or perpetrated

by them or any of them, and also outlawry, if any shall have been

promulgated on this account against them or any of them; and our most

complete peace to them and each of them we concede in these matters.

In testimony of which things we have caused these our letters to be

made patent. Witness, myself, at London, on the fifteenth day of June,

in the fourth year of our reign."

The most prominent leaders remained behind, and a large body of

rioters spent the rest of Friday and the following night in London.

The king, after the interview at Mile End, had returned to the Tower,

then to the Queen's Wardrobe, a little palace at the other side of

London, where he spent the night with his mother. In the morning he

mounted his horse, and with a small group of attendants rode toward

the Tower. As he passed through the open square of Smithfield he met

Wat Tyler, also on horseback, accompanied by the great body of rebels.

Tyler rode forward to confer with the king, but an altercation having

broken out between him and some of the king's attendants, the mayor of

London, Sir William Walworth, suddenly dashed forward, struck him from

his horse with the blow of a sword, and while on the ground he was

stabbed to death by the other attendants of the king. There was a

moment of extreme danger of an attack by the leaderless rebels on the

king and his companions, but the ready promises of the king, his

natural gifts of pretence, and the strange attachment which the

peasants showed to him through all the troubles, tided over a little

time until they had been led outside of the city gates, and the armed

forces which many gentlemen had in their houses in the city had at

last been gathered together and brought to where they had the

disorganized body of rebels at their mercy. These were then disarmed,

bidden to go to their homes, and a proclamation issued that if any

stranger remained in London over Sunday he would pay for it with his

life.

The downfall of Tyler and the dispersion of the insurgents at London

turned the tide of the whole revolt. In the various districts where

disorders were in progress the news of that failure came as a blow to

all their own hopes of success. The revolt had been already

disintegrating rather than gaining in strength and unity; and now its

leaders lost heart, and local bodies of gentry proportionately took

courage to suppress revolt in their own localities. The most

conspicuous and influential of such efforts was that of Henry de

Spencer, bishop of Norwich. This warlike prelate was in Rutlandshire

when the news of the revolt came. He hastened toward Norwich; on his

way met an embassy from the rioters to the king; seized and beheaded

two of its peasant members, and still pushing on met the great body of

the rebels near Walsham, where after a short conflict and some

parleying the latter were dispersed, and their leaders captured and

hung without any ceremony other than the last rites of religion. As a

matter of fact the rising had no cohesion sufficient to withstand

attack from any constituted authority or from representatives of the

dominant classes.

The king's government acted promptly. On the 17th of June, two days

after the death of Tyler, a proclamation was issued forbidding

unauthorized gatherings of people; on the 23d a second, requiring all

tenants, villains, and freemen alike to perform their usual services

to their lords; and on the 2d of July a third, withdrawing the

charters of pardon and manumission which had been granted on the 15th

of June. Special sessions of the courts were organized in the

rebellious districts, and the leaders of the revolt were searched out

and executed by hanging or decapitation.

On the 3d of November Parliament met. The king's treasurer explained

that he had issued the charters under constraint, and recognizing

their illegality, with the expectation of withdrawing them as soon as

possible, which he had done. The suggestion of the king that the

villains should be regularly enfranchised by a statute was declined in

vigorous terms by Parliament. Laws were passed relieving all those who

had made grants under compulsion from carrying them out, enabling

those whose charters had been destroyed to obtain new ones under the

great seal, granting exemption from prosecution to all who had

exercised illegal violence in putting down the late insurrection, and

finally granting a general pardon, though with many exceptions, to the

late insurgents.

Thus the rising of June, 1381, had become a matter of the past by the

close of the year. The general conditions which brought about a

popular uprising have already been discussed. The specific objects

which the rioters had in view in each part of the country are a much

more obscure and complicated question.

There is no reason to believe that there was any general political

object, other than opposition to the new and burdensome taxation, and

disgust with the existing ministry. Nor was there any religious object

in view. No doubt a large part of the disorder had no general purpose

whatever, but consisted in an attempt, at a period of confusion and

relaxation of the law, to settle by violence purely local or personal

disputes and grievances.

Apart from these considerations the objects of the rioters were of an

economic nature. There was a general effort to destroy the rolls of

the manor courts. These rolls, kept either in manor houses, or in the

castles of great lords, or in the monasteries, were the record of the

burdens and payments and disabilities of the villagers. Previous

payments of heriot, relief, merchet, and fines, acknowledgments of

serfdom, the obtaining of their land on burdensome conditions, were

all recorded on the rolls and could be produced to prove the custom of

the manor to the disadvantage of the tenant. It is true that these

same rolls showed who held each piece of ground and defined the

succession to it, and that they were long afterward to be recognized

in the national courts as giving to the customary holder the right of

retaining and of inheriting the land, so that it might seem an injury

to themselves to destroy the manor court records. But in that period

when tenants were in such demand their hold on their land had been in

no danger of being disturbed. If these records were destroyed, the

villains might well expect that they could claim to be practically

owners of the houses and little groups of acres which they and their

ancestors had held from time immemorial; and this without the

necessity for payments and reservations to which the rolls testified.

Again, lawyers and all connected with the law were the objects of

special hostility on the part of insurgents. This must have been

largely from the same general cause as that just mentioned. It was

lawyers who acted as stewards for the great lords, it was through

lawyers that the legal claims of lords of manors were enforced in the

king's courts. It was also the judges and lawyers who put in force the

statutes of laborers, and who so generally acted as collectors of the

poll tax.

More satisfactory relations with their lords were demanded by

insurgents who were freeholders, as well as by those who were

villains. Protests are recorded against the tolls on sales and

purchases, and against attendance at the manorial courts, and a

maximum limit to the rent of land is asked for. Finally, the removal

of the burdens of serfdom was evidently one of the general objects of

the rebels, though much of the initiative of the revolt was taken by

men from Kent, where serfdom did not exist. The servitude of the

peasantry is the burden of the sermon of John Ball at Blackheath, its

abolition was demanded in several places by the insurgents, and the

charters of emancipation as given by the king professed to make them

"free from all bondage."

These objects were in few if any cases obtained. It is extremely

difficult to trace any direct results from the rising other than

those involved in its failure, the punishment of the leaders, and the

effort to restore everything to its former condition. There was indeed

a conservative reaction in several directions. The authorities of

London forbade the admission of any former villain to citizenship, and

the Commons in Parliament petitioned the king to reduce the rights of

villains still further. On the whole, the revolt is rather an

illustration of the general fact that great national crises have left

but a slight impress on society, while the important changes have

taken place slowly and by an almost imperceptible development. The

results of the rising are rather to be looked for in giving increased

rapidity and definite direction to changes already in progress, than

in starting any new movement or in obtaining the results which the

insurgents may have wished.

*31. Commutation of Services.*--One of these changes, already in

progress long before the outbreak of the revolt, has already been

referred to. A silent transformation was going on inside of the

manorial life in the form of a gradual substitution of money payments

by the villain tenants for the old labor for two, three, or four days

a week, and at special times during the year. This was often described

as "selling to the tenants their services." They "bought" their

exemption from furnishing actual work by paying the value of it in

money to the official representing the lord of the manor.

This was a mutually advantageous arrangement. The villain's time would

be worth more to himself than to his lord; for if he had sufficient

land in his possession he could occupy himself profitably on it, or if

he had not so much land he could choose his time for hiring himself

out to the best advantage. The lord, on the other hand, obtained money

which could be spent in paying men whose services would be more

willing and interested, and who could be engaged at more available

times. It is not, therefore, a matter of surprise that the practice of

allowing tenants to pay for their services arose early. Commutation is

noticeable as early as the thirteenth century and not very unusual in

the first half of the fourteenth. After the pestilence, however, there

was a very rapid substitution of money payments for labor payments.

The process continued through the remainder of the fourteenth century

and the early fifteenth, and by the middle of that century the

enforcement of regular labor services had become almost unknown. The

boon-works continued to be claimed after the week-work had

disappeared, since labor was not so easy to obtain at the specially

busy seasons of the year, and the required few days' services at

ploughing or mowing or harvesting were correspondingly valuable. But

even these were extremely unusual after the middle of the fifteenth

century.

This change was dependent on at least two conditions, an increased

amount of money in circulation and an increased number of free

laborers available for hire. These conditions were being more and more

completely fulfilled. Trade at fairs and markets and in the towns was

increasing through the whole fourteenth century. The increase of

weaving and other handicrafts produced more wealth and trade. Money

coming from abroad and from the royal mints made its way into

circulation and came into the hands of the villain tenants, through

the sale of surplus products or as payment for their labor. The sudden

destruction of one-half of the population by the Black Death while the

amount of money in the country remained the same, doubled the

circulation _per capita_. Tenants were thus able to offer regular

money payments to their lords in lieu of their personal services.

During the same period the number of free laborers who could be hired

to perform the necessary work on the demesne was increasing. Even

before the pestilence there were men and women on every manor who held

little or no land and who could be secured by the lord for voluntary

labor if the compulsory labor of the villains was given up. Some of

these laborers were fugitive villains who had fled from one manor to

another to secure freedom, and this class became much more numerous

under the circumstance of disorganization after the Black Death. Thus

the second condition requisite for the extensive commutation was

present also.

It might be supposed that after the pestilence, when wages were high

and labor was so hard to procure, lords of manors would be unwilling

to allow further commutation, and would even try to insist on the

performance of actual labor in cases where commutation had been

previously allowed. Indeed, it has been very generally stated that

there was such a reaction. The contrary, however, was the case.

Commutation was never more rapid than in the generation immediately

after the first attack of the pestilence. The laborers seem to have

been in so favorable a position, that the dread of their flight was a

controlling inducement to the lords to allow the commutation of their

services if they desired it. The interest of the lords in their labor

services was also, as will be seen, becoming less.

When a villain's labor services had been commuted into money, his

position must have risen appreciably. One of the main characteristics

of his position as a villain tenant had been the uncertainty of his

services, the fact that during the days in which he must work for his

lord he could be put to any kind of labor, and that the number of days

he must serve was itself only restricted by the custom of the manor

His services once commuted into a definite sum of money, all

uncertainty ceased. Moreover, his money payments to the lord, although

rising from an entirely different source, were almost indistinguishable

from the money rents paid by the freeholder. Therefore, serf though he

might still be in legal status, his position was much more like that

of a freeman.

*32. The Abandonment of Demesne Farming.*--A still more important change

than the commutation of services was in progress during the fourteenth

and fifteenth centuries. This was the gradual withdrawal of the lords

of manors from the cultivation of the demesne farms. From very early

times it had been customary for lords of manors to grant out small

portions of the demesne, or of previously uncultivated land, to

tenants at a money rent. The great demesne farm, however, had been

still kept up as the centre of the agricultural system of the vill.

But now even this was on many manors rented out to a tenant or group

of tenants. The earliest known instances are just at the beginning of

the fourteenth century, but the labor troubles of the latter half of

the century made the process more usual, and within the next hundred

years the demesne lands seem to have been practically all rented out

to tenants. In other words, whereas, during the earlier Middle Ages

lords of manors had usually carried on the cultivation of the demesne

lands themselves, under the administration of their bailiffs and with

the labor of the villains, making their profit by obtaining a food

supply for their own households or by selling the surplus products,

now they gave up their cultivation and rented them out to some one

else, making their profit by receiving a money payment as rent. They

became therefore landlords of the modern type. A typical instance of

this change is where the demesne land of the manor of Wilburton in

Cambridgeshire, consisting of 246 acres of arable land and 42 acres

of meadow, was rented in 1426 to one of the villain tenants of the

manor for a sum of £8 a year. The person who took the land was usually

either a free or a villain tenant of the same or a neighboring manor.

The land was let only for a certain number of years, but afterward was

usually relet either to the same or to another tenant. The word

_farmer_ originally meant one of these tenants who took the demesne or

some other piece of land, paying for it a "farm" or _firma_, that is,

a settled established sum, in place of the various forms of profit

that might have been secured from it by the lord of the manor. The

free and villain holdings which came into the hands of the lord by

failure of heirs in those times of frequent extinction of families

were also granted out very generally at a money rent, so that a large

number of the cultivators of the soil came to be tenants at a money

rent, that is, lease-holders or "farmers." These free renting farmers,

along with the smaller freeholders, made up the "yeomen" of England.

*33. The Decay of Serfdom.*--It is in the changes discussed in the last

two paragraphs that is to be found the key to the disappearance of

serfdom in England. Men had been freed from villainage in individual

cases by various means. Manumission of serfs had occurred from time to

time through all the mediæval centuries. It was customary in such

cases either to give a formal charter granting freedom to the man

himself and to his descendants, or to have entered on the manor court

roll the fact of his obtaining his enfranchisement. Occasionally men

were manumitted in order that they might be ordained as clergymen. In

the period following the pestilences of the fourteenth century the

difficulty in recruiting the ranks of the priesthood made the practice

more frequent The charters of manumission issued by the king to the

insurgents of 1381 would have granted freedom on a large scale had

they not been disowned and subsequently withdrawn. Still other

villains had obtained freedom by flight from the manors where they had

been born. When a villain who had fled was discovered he could be

reclaimed by the lord of the manor by obtaining a writ from the court,

but many obstacles might be placed in the way of obtaining this writ,

and it must always have involved so much difficulty as to make it

doubtful whether it was worth while. So long as a villain was anywhere

else than on the manor to which he belonged, he was practically a free

man, but few of the disabilities of villainage existing except as

between him and his own lord. Therefore, if a villain was willing to

sacrifice his little holding and make the necessary break with his

usual surroundings, he might frequently escape into a veritable

freedom.

The attitude of the common law was favorable to liberty as against

servitude, and in cases of doubt the decisions of the royal courts

were almost invariably favorable to the freedom of the villain.

But all these possibilities of liberty were only for individual cases.

Villainage as an institution continued to exist and to characterize

the position of the mass of the peasantry. The number of freemen

through the country was larger, but the serfdom of the great majority

can scarcely have been much influenced by these individual cases. The

commutation of services, however, and still more the abandonment of

demesne farming by the lords of manors, were general causes conducive

to freedom. The former custom indicated that the lords valued the

money that could be paid by the villains more than they did their

compulsory services. That is, villains whose services were paid for in

money were practically renters of land from the lords, no longer

serfs on the land of the lords. The lord of the manor could still of

course enforce his claim to the various payments and restrictions

arising from the villainage of his tenants, but their position as

payers of money was much less servile than as performers of forced

labor. The willingness of the lords to accept money instead of service

showed as before stated that there were other persons who could be

hired to do the work. The villains were valued more as tenants now

that there were others to serve as laborers. The occupants of

customary holdings were a higher class and a class more worth the

lord's consideration and favor than the mere laborers. The villains

were thus raised into partial freedom by having a free class still

below them.

[Illustration: An Old Street in Worcester. (Britton: _Picturesque

Antiquities of English Cities_.)]

The effect of the relinquishment of the old demesne farms by the lords

of the manors was still more influential in destroying serfdom. The

lords had valued serfdom above all because it furnished an adequate

and absolutely certain supply of labor. The villains had to stay on

the manor and provide the labor necessary for the cultivation of the

demesne. But if the demesne was rented out to a farmer or divided

among several holders, the interest of the lord in the labor supply on

the manor was very much diminished. Even if he agreed in his lease of

the demesne to the new farmer that the villains should perform their

customary services in as far as these had not been commuted, yet the

farmer could not enforce this of himself, and the lord of the manor

was probably languid or careless or dilatory in doing so. The other

payments and burdens of serfdom were not so lucrative, and as the

ranks of the old villain class were depleted by the extinction of

families, and fewer inhabitants were bound to attend the manor courts,

they became less so. It became, therefore, gradually more common, then

quite universal, for the lords of manors to cease to enforce the

requirements of serfdom. A legal relation of which neither party is

reminded is apt to become obsolete; and that is what practically

happened to serfdom in England. It is true that many persons were

still legally serfs, and occasionally the fact of their serfdom was

asserted in the courts or inferred by granting them manumission. These

occasional enfranchisements continued down into the second half of the

sixteenth century, and the claim that a certain man was a villain was

pleaded in the courts as late as 1618. But long before this time

serfdom had ceased to have much practical importance. It may be said

that by the middle of the fifteenth century the mass of the English

rural population were free men and no longer serfs. With their labor

services commuted to money and the other conditions of their

villainage no longer enforced, they became an indistinguishable part

either of the yeomanry or of the body of agricultural laborers.

[Illustration: Town Houses in the Fifteenth Century. (Wright, T.:

_History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments_.)]

*34. Changes in Town Life and Foreign Trade.*--The changes discussed in

the last three sections apply in the main to rural life. The economic

and social history of the towns during the same period, except in as

far as it was part of the general national experience, consisted in a

still more complete adoption of those characteristics which have

already been described in Chapter III. Their wealth and prosperity

became greater, they were still more independent of the rural

districts and of the central government, the intermunicipal character

of their dealings, the closeness of connection between their

industrial interests and their government, the completeness with which

all occupations were organized under the "gild system," were all of

them still more marked in 1450 than they had been in 1350. It is true

that far-reaching changes were beginning, but they were only

beginning, and did not reach an important development until a time

later than that included in this chapter. The same thing is true in

the field of foreign trade. The latter part of the fourteenth and the

early fifteenth century saw a considerable increase and development of

the trade of England, but it was still on the same lines and carried

on by the same methods as before. The great proportion of it was in

the hands of foreigners, and there was the same inconsistency in the

policy of the central government on the occasions when it did

intervene or take any action on the subject. The important changes in

trade and in town life which have their beginning in this period will

be discussed in connection with those of the next period in Chapter

VI.

*35. BIBLIOGRAPHY*

Jessop, Augustus: _The Coming of the Friars and other Essays_. Two

interesting essays in this volume are on _The Black Death in East

Anglia_.

Gasquet, F. A.: _The Great Pestilence of 1349_.

Creighton, C.: _History of Epidemics in Britain_, two volumes. This

gives especial attention to the nature of the disease.

Trevelyan, G. M.: _England in the Age of Wycliffe_. This book,

published in 1899, gives by far the fullest account of the Peasant

Rising which has so far appeared in English.

Petit-Dutaillis, C., et Reville, A.: _Le Soulèvement des Travailleurs

d'Angleterre en 1381_. The best account of the Rebellion.

Powell, Edgar: _The Peasant Rising in East Anglia in 1381_. Especially

valuable for its accounts of the poll tax.

Powell, Edgar, and Trevelyan, G. M.: _Documents Illustrating the

Peasants' Rising and the Lollards_.

Page, Thomas Walker: _The End of Villainage in England_. This

monograph, published in 1900, is particularly valuable for the new

facts which it gives concerning the rural changes of the fourteenth

century.

CHAPTER VI

THE BREAKING UP OF THE MEDIÆVAL SYSTEM

Economic Changes Of The Later Fifteenth And The Sixteenth Centuries

*36. National Affairs from 1461 to 1603.*--The close of the fifteenth

and the opening of the sixteenth century has been by universal consent

settled upon as the passage from one era to another, from the Middle

Ages to modern times. This period of transition was marked in England

by at least three great movements: a new type of intellectual life, a

new ideal of government, and the Reformation. The greatest changes in

English literature and intellectual interests are traceable to foreign

influence. In the fifteenth century the paramount foreign influence

was that of Italy. From the middle of the fifteenth century an

increasing number of young Englishmen went to Italy to study, and

brought back with them an interest in the study of Greek and of other

subjects to which this led. Somewhat later the social intercourse of

Englishmen with Italy exercised a corresponding influence on more

courtly literature. In 1491 the teaching of Greek was begun at Oxford

by Grocyn, and after this time the passion for classical learning

became deep, widespread, and enthusiastic. But not only were the

subjects of intellectual interest different, but the attitude of mind

in the study of these subjects was much more critical than it had been

in the Middle Ages. The discoveries of new routes to the far East and

of America, as well as the new speculations in natural science which

came at this time, reacted on the minds of men and broadened their

whole mental outlook. The production of works of pure literature had

suffered a decline after the time of Wycliffe and Chaucer, from which

there was no considerable revival till the early part of the sixteenth

century. Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_, written in Latin in 1514, was a

philosophical work thrown into the form of a literary dialogue and

description of an imaginary commonwealth. But writing became

constantly more abundant and more varied through the reigns of Henry

VIII, 1509-1547, Edward VI, 1547-1553, and Mary, 1553-1558, until it

finally blossomed out into the splendid Elizabethan literature, just

at the close of our period.

A stronger royal government had begun with Edward IV. The conclusion

of the war with France made the king's need for money less, and at the

same time new sources of income appeared. Edward, therefore, from

1461, neglected to call Parliament annually, as had been usual, and

frequently allowed three or more years to go by without any

consultation with it. He also exercised very freely what was called

the dispensing power, that is, the power to suspend the law in certain

cases, and in other ways asserted the royal prerogative as no previous

king had done for two hundred years. But the true founder of the

almost absolute monarchy of this period was Henry VII, who reigned

from 1485 to 1509. He was not the nearest heir to the throne, but

acted as the representative of the Lancastrian line, and by his

marriage with the lady who represented the claim of the York family

joined the two contending factions. He was the first of the Tudor

line, his successors being his son, Henry VIII, and the three children

of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. Henry VII was an able,

shrewd, far-sighted, and masterful man. During his reign he put an

end to the disorders of the nobility; made Parliament relatively

insignificant by calling it even less frequently than Edward IV had

done, and by initiating its legislation when it did meet. He also

increased and regulated the income of the crown, and rendered its

expenditures subject to control. He was able to keep ambassadors

regularly abroad, for the first time, and in many other ways to

support a more expensive administration, though often by unpopular and

illegal means of extortion from the people. He formed foreign

political and commercial treaties in all directions, and encouraged

the voyages of the Cabots to America. He brought a great deal of

business constantly before the Royal Council, but chose its members

for their ability rather than for their high rank. In these various

ways he created a strong personal government, which left but little

room for Parliament or people to do anything except carry out his

will. In these respects Henry's immediate successors and their

ministers followed the same policy. In fact, the Reformation in the

reign of Henry VIII, and new internal and foreign difficulties in the

reign of Elizabeth, brought the royal power into a still higher and

more independent position.

The need for a general reformation of the church had long been

recognized. More than one effort had been made by the ecclesiastical

authorities to insist on higher intellectual and moral standards for

the clergy and to rid the church of various evil customs and abuses.

Again, there had been repeated efforts to clothe the king, who was at

the head of all civil government, with extensive control and oversight

of church affairs also. Men holding different views on questions of

church government and religious belief from those held by the general

Christian church in the Middle Ages, had written and taught and found

many to agree with them. Thus efforts to bring about changes in the

established church had not been wanting, but they had produced no

permanent result. In the early years of the sixteenth century,

however, several causes combined to bring about a movement of this

nature extending over a number of years and profoundly affecting all

subsequent history. This is known as the Reformation. The first steps

of the Reformation in England were taken as the result of a dispute

between King Henry VIII and the Pope. In the first place, several laws

were passed through Parliament, beginning with the year 1529,

abolishing a number of petty evils and abusive practices in the church

courts. The Pope's income from England was then cut off, and his

jurisdiction and all other forms of authority in England brought to an

end. Finally, the supremacy of the king over the church and clergy and

over all ecclesiastical affairs was declared and enforced. By the year

1535 the ancient connection between the church in England and the Pope

was severed. Thus in England, as in many continental countries at

about the same time, a national church arose independent of Rome.

Next, changes began to be made in the doctrine and practices of the

church. The organization under bishops was retained, though they were

now appointed by the king. Pilgrimages and the worship of saints were

forbidden, the Bible translated into English, and other changes

gradually introduced. The monastic life came under the condemnation of

the reformers. The monasteries were therefore dissolved and their

property confiscated and sold, between the years 1536 and 1542. In the

reign of Edward VI, 1547-1553, the Reformation was carried much

further. An English prayerbook was issued which was to be used in all

religious worship, the adornments of the churches were removed, the

services made more simple, and doctrines introduced which assimilated

the church of England to the contemporary Protestant churches on the

Continent.

Queen Mary, who had been brought up in the Roman faith, tried to make

England again a Roman Catholic country, and in the later years of her

reign encouraged severe persecutions, causing many to be burned at the

stake, in the hope of thus crushing out heresy. After her death,

however, in 1558, Queen Elizabeth adopted a more moderate position,

and the church of England was established by law in much the form it

had possessed at the death of Henry VIII.