The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
their courses during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to set the labourer free. Whether Wiclif was the product or the producer of the awakening that during these centuries went on all over the Continent, it would be hard to say, certain it is that England was one of the chief springs, if not the spring-head of the movement. It was, as is well known, a movement in favour of a return to primitive Christianity and the regeneration of Europe in harmony with it. It was therefore socialist and democratic, and awakened in the hearts of the population of Europe the memories of a golden age and the promise of the Millennium.
The Black Death in 1349 swept away more than half the population of England. Those that remained soon found that their labour had doubled in value, and the labourer became at once an important person in the realm. Parliament representing only the landlords, accordingly enacted in 1349 and 1350 Statutes by which the Labourer under pain of imprisonment and fines was bound to work at the same wages that he had received before the Plague. These iniquitous statutes acted like goads to the new life stirring in the soul of the English serf.[1]
The first Statutes of Labourers having been disregarded. Parliament in 1360 passed a severer law. Instead of three days in the stocks, a labourer refusing to work at the old wages was to be imprisoned for fifteen days. If he fled from his service to another town or county he was to be outlawed and a writ for his recovery to be sent to every Sheriff in England, and if taken he was to have the letter F burnt into his forehead for his falsity. Towns harbouring such fugitives were to deliver them up under penalty of Ten pounds to the King and one hundred shillings to the master, an enormous fine when tested by such wages as these statutes allowed: for example, 1d. a day to weeders and haymakers. This Act of 1360 strictly forbade all combination among workmen.
While these statutes if obeyed would have rendered existence by labour almost impossible, wheat at this time averaging 7s. the quarter, the people managed to obtain such high wages, that Parliament in 1363 passed another Act to restrain the sumptuousness of their apparel! Carters, ploughmen, plough-drivers, ox-herds, neat-herds, shepherds, pig-drivers, deyes and all other attendants on cattle, threshers and other labourers employed in husbandry were to use no other cloth than what was called blanket or russet of the value of 12d. a yard, and to wear linen girdles suitable to their condition. The same statute restrained their diet.
Notwithstanding facts patent to all but the wilfully blind, Parliament confirmed the Statute of Labourers by several subsequent Acts, relying perhaps on a clause by which it hoped to entangle its subjects' consciences: labourers were to be sworn twice a year to observe these impossible regulations.[2]
What wonder that such legislation produced in pious men a horror of oaths, and in the more daring a reckless contempt of all law. Eden tells us many became staff-strikers and wandered in parties of two, three, and four from village to village; others became "sturdy rogues," and infested the kingdom with frequent robberies. Iniquitous laws are the chief authors of crime.
This was the state of things when Langland composed his second edition of Piers Plowman, and the rising tide of discontent is pictured in the Prologue, where he introduces the fable of the rats and mice holding a council to protect themselves against the ravages of the cat; the rats and mice being the town and country labourers, or perhaps the husbandmen and the labourers. Langland describes the lords as treating their people in such a way "that us loathed the lyf." The object of the council was to find out "if they might by any wit their lords' will withstand."
Whether Langland meant to spur the people by representing them as infirm in purpose and in courage I cannot say, but as a matter of fact they were quite the opposite. They had evidently made up their minds they would submit to these tyrannies no longer. They began to refuse their customary services, and the stewards were so little able to enforce them, that the lords' corn was left uncut. Later on the lords complained that their villeins were flying to the towns, and that those who remained behaved insolently, knowing that the masters were afraid to exercise their powers lest they should lose the serfs irrecoverably.
For now town and country were one. In the former the system of forced labour being applied even more vigorously than in the country, the lower craftsmen were in alliance with the agricultural serfs.
This discontent began to make itself felt, and came to a height during the exhaustion that followed after the Peace of Bretigny. The Black Prince died, the King was falling into dotage, John of Gaunt was unpopular in London and with the Church: all things rendered the Government feeble. A universal upheaving commenced: while the serf was striving to obtain liberty and a fair wage, the classes immediately above him thought it a good opportunity each to push its way a grade higher. Meanwhile there were some few who only sought the reign of Justice on earth, who had no personal ends in view, but who for that very reason were gibbeted in their own day and stoned and pelted with ugly names ever since. Such an one was John Ball, the so-called "crazy priest of Kent." Which, however, was most crazy, the Parliaments which made laws such as the Statute of Labourers, or the Servant of Christ who preached the Kingdom of Justice?
John Ball had half England at his back. A thousand voices sent his messages over the land with as much precision and almost as quickly as the nineteenth century telegram, "John Ball greeteth you all, and doth for to understand he hath rung your bell, now right and might, will and skill, God speed every dele." And again:—
"Johan the Miller heth y grownde smal, smal, smal,
The Kynge's sone of heavene shalle paye for alle;
Be ware or ye be wo;
Knoweth your frende from youre foo,
Haveth ynowe and seythe 'Hoo,'
And do welle and bettre, and fleth synne
And seketh pees, and holde therynne;
And so biddeth Johan Trewman and alle his felawes."
The actual cause of the explosion was the Poll-tax of 1380, and the outbreak commenced the following summer in Kent.
John Ball was in prison in Canterbury, hither therefore the people surged, and the whole town being of their mind Ball was soon set free. The men of Kent marched triumphant to London, killing all the lawyers that fell in their way, burning the houses of the stewards of the manors, and flinging the rolls of the manor-courts into the flames.
When they reached London the poorer artizans within the city rose and flung open the gates. The people proudly boasted that they were seekers of Truth and Justice, not thieves or robbers, so instead of wasting their time in rioting, they went direct to their object which was to gain possession of the king. For though the people did not love their lords they had a firm faith in the king as the fountain of Justice and the avenger of the oppressed. Sad to say it was this beautiful faith that ruined their cause. Richard II., educated in that haughty contempt of labouring-men which comes out in Froissart's courtly Chronicle, where these very labourers are called vermin—Richard II. played as false a part as any king ever played. In his eyes it seems to have been no more a crime for a prince to circumvent vile and odious rustics than to trap stoats and weasels; to catch them in his net and hang them by hundreds no worse than slaughtering wild hogs. With his pretty face he did to perfection the ingenuous young king, willing himself to become the leader of his people and to redress all their injuries. When they cried, "We will that you free us and our lands for ever, and that we be never named or held serfs!" "I grant it," was the ready reply, and thirty clerks were sent for, who sat hard at work, writing out charters of manumission. In the same glib manner the king stilled the Kentishmen, furious at the infamous assassination of their leader, Wat Tyler. The neck of the rebellion broken by this timely mixture of cajolery and truculence, and the danger over, Richard quickly threw off his mask. When the Commons of Essex came to remind him of promises hardly a fortnight old, he cried out contemptuously, "O vile and odious by land or sea, you are not worthy to live compared with the lords whom ye have attacked; you should be forthwith punished with the vilest of deaths were it not for the office you bear. Go back to your comrades and bear the king's answer, you were and are rustic, and shall remain in bondage, not that of old but infinitely worse. For as long as we live, and by God's help rule over this realm, we will attempt by all our faculties, powers, and means to make you