The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
of the feeling with which they were regarded. He would not have a serf taught anything. "My soul," he said, "naturally detests serfs, this being my sentiment towards them, circumstances must determine when they are fit to have kindness shown them." It is an English proverb, "Have hund to godsib and stent thir oder hand." (Go about with a dog and clench your fist.)
Nevertheless the labourers could work in hope, for one of their own class, a Carpenter's Son, one who had died the death of a Slave, was held to be Sovereign Lord of this feudal society. The innate royalty of the labourer was thereby acknowledged, the Christian Conscience was on his side.
And so was the course of events. The Crusades, the Rise of Commerce, the French Wars, all worked to pull down the mighty from their seats and raise those of a low degree. The Crusades brought many a baron into pecuniary difficulties, what with the outfit and the expensive tastes he acquired; so that he was glad to get out of embarrassment by selling his serfs their liberty. The rise of Commerce created great towns, and towns obtained markets at which the toilers sold their produce and thus obtained the means to purchase freedom.
The change, however, came so gradually that serfdom was a possible condition for Englishmen even in Tudor times. But the revolution had commenced three hundred years earlier, so that by the close of the thirteenth century there was a large class of serfs who had been able to commute their services into money payments, and in the fourteenth century working for wages had become common.
III.
The Ploughman Prophet.
The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman would be well-nigh as popular to-day as it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries if the language had not become archaic, for there is no book more thoroughly English in the best sense, none that better expresses the genius of the English labourer.
Langland's aim, however, was not to delineate the labourer but to expose the corruptions which were destroying the State, and he sought its reform by trying to arouse in its various members a determination to do their duty in that station of life to which God had called them. But there was only one upon whom he could look with satisfaction: the hardworking husbandman; the others, and above all those whose office it was to guide the people into the highest truth, being given over to selfishness and hypocrisy.
To the labouring class he pointed, not only as an example of life, but as the only one which at that difficult crisis had light enough to guide the rest, and accordingly Piers the Plowman is represented as occupying in relation to England very much the position of one of the Prophets in the old Hebrew Commonwealth. In the midst of a world in which all manner of men are working and wandering with no other reward for their pains but that of finding themselves prisoners in the Castle of Care, Piers the Plowman is ready and willing to lead them into the Truth. Saturated through and through with the thoughts that gave rise to Lollardism, social and religious, he is no mere leveller. He accepts the constitution of things into which he has been born; the king is to rule, the bishop to guide, the knight to defend, while he is to labour for the common weal. But this constitution of things he looks upon as implying a mutual covenant. When a knight tells him that he will try to do as he has been taught, Piers replies—
"Ye profre yow so faire
That I shall swynke and swete and sow for us bothe,
And other laboures do for thi love al my lyf-tyme,
In covenant that thow kepe holikirke and myselve Fro wastoures and fro wikked men that this world struyeth."
This idea of a mutual covenant was as revolutionary as Wiclif's theory of Dominion. As the latter relieved the Christian conscience from the necessity of obedience to rulers who were traitors to the Suzerain of the Universe, so the former destroyed the right of an undutiful lord over his serfs. In either case the appeal lay to the Individual Conscience and the Common Sense; thus it is that at the very outset Langland shows Conscience resisting the King and supported by Reason.
But the Plowman's theory is thorough; all classes are parties to this covenant, the labourer as well as the knight. Therefore, he is continually preaching "hard work" to the "dikeres and the delveres" and other workmen on the land; and is ceaseless in the expression of his abomination of idle and lazy vagabonds who waste what others win; and he has no toleration for beggars, especially of the canting sort, who array themselves as "heremites" and "freres," "ancres" and "pilgrymes," who,
"With hoked staves.
Wenten to Walsingham and here wenches after;
Grete lobyes and lenge that lothe were to swynke."
The stern way in which he carries out in his own family this duty of fulfilling by hard work the labourers' part of the covenant, is seen in the names of his wife and children—
"Dame-worche-whan-tyme-is Pieres wyf highte,
His doughter highte Do-righte-so-or-thi-dame-shal-the-bete,
His son highte Suffre-thi-sovereynes-to-haven-her-wille-
Deme-hem-nought-for-if-thow-doste-thow-shalt-it-dere-abugge (suffer for it)."
Behind this stern exterior he hides so tender a heart that he cannot bear even to see "wastoures wolves kynnes" starving; nevertheless he clokes his compassion in rough words. But his heart once opened, his pity for the miserable idlers increases with every beat, and from letting them "eat with hogges," he soon rises to feeding them on "melke and mene ale." For real poverty his sympathy is unbounded even if they have done evil; let God be the avenger. He has evidently known what it was himself to feel "Hunger at his maw."
For although the labourers' position was rising so fast that they would no longer dine of stale vegetables, and were not even content with penny ale and bacon, but expected fresh meat or fish fried or baked, and that straight from the fire, the husbandman who preferred independence to a full stomach had many a struggle, especially during the month preceding harvest.
"'I have no peny,' quod peres, 'poletes forto bigge,
Ne neyther gees ne grys, but two grene cheses,
A fewe cruddes and creem, and an haver cake,
And two loves of benes and bran, y-bake for my fauntis.
And yet I say, by my soule, I have no salt bacoun;
Ne no kokeney, bi cryst: coloppes forto maken.
Ac I have percil and porettes, and many kole-plantes,
And eke a cow and a kalf, and a cart-mare,
To draw a-felde my donge, the while the drought lasteth,
And bi this lyflode we mot lyve, til lammasse tyme.'"
All this indicates hard and careful living, and the ploughman's clothes "y clouted and hole," tell the same tale.
But what is most striking is that a ploughman should have so great a concern for the common weal, and should not only have been desirous to find the Truth for himself, but anxious to guide others to it. This independence of character combined with strong conservative instincts does not suggest a serf or one who had lately emerged from that condition. But in the fact that the Ploughman had not only his "half acre by the highway," but possessed a little homestead of his own, it seems far more probable that he was a member of one of those rural townships where there were "common fields" and "lot meadows."
Of course I recognise that Piers the Plowman is continually passing from a real into an allegorical character; but just as Bunyan's "Christian" was a fair type of the best Christians found among the poor in the seventeenth century, so Piers is a fair type of the English husbandman who has never been submitted to the degradation of personal slavery.
The popularity of the book, proved by the many copies extant in a rough penmanship, and still more by the fact that the leaders of the insurrection of 1381 couched their appeal to the country in its phraseology, renders it evident that Langland sketched from life.
IV.
The Labourer Demands Justice.
The