The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
example of fear to the heirs of your servitude as that they may have you before their eyes and you may supply them with a perpetual ground of cursing and fearing you."
And now Richard knew how to keep his word: 1,500 of these brave men were searched out in various parts of the country, and hung and gibbeted as an example of fear to the heirs of their servitude.
V
A Parliament of Pharaohs.
The boy-king was only a tool in the hands of his Council. The Council itself was powerless before the determination of the lords not to let the people go. When the royal message addressed to the Parliament that met immediately after the quelling of the Insurrection, suggested that it would be well to enfranchise and set at liberty the serfs, Parliament replied, that the king's grant and letters were null and void, their serfs were their goods, and the king could not take their goods without their own consent. "And this consent," they declared, "we have never given, and never will give, were we all to die in one day."
And in this Pharaoh-like spirit they persisted. The impossible Statutes of Labourers were re-affirmed, their execution being enforced by cumulative penalties, and in case of final inability to pay, the labourer was to have forty days' imprisonment; anyone attempting to leave his place of residence without an official letter was to be put in the stocks; all who up to the age of twelve years had been employed in husbandry must remain in that occupation, even if already apprenticed to another.
In fact, the attempt on the part of the landless labourer to free his children by apprenticing them in the towns was directly forbidden by the Statute 7 Hen. IV., c. xvii., on pain of a year's imprisonment. And not content with closing to the poor serf emancipation by way of trade, they tried to prevent him getting it through the door of learning; Pariiament praying the King to ordain that no bondman or bondwoman shall place their children at school, as had been done, with a view to their entering into the Church. And the same influence induced the new College at the Universities to close their gates to villeins.
To render the bondage still tighter. Parliament gave the Council the right to arrest and imprison, regardless of all former statutes, any person speaking evil of dukes, earls, barons, nobles, and gentlemen (gntz), or of any of the great officers of the realm (12 Rich. II., c. xi.).
However, it was one thing to make laws, another to compel a reluctant people to give them obedience. But the labourers were isolated; each set of serfs had to settle matters with their individual lord, each particular serf to make the best of his position. The audacious, the violent, the unscrupulous, forced their necks out of the collar; the meek, the faithful, bore a double load, and sank a grade lower. The first alone received a place in history. Their growing wealth, all through the fifteenth century, rendered them an important addition to the middle class, and helped greatly to increase its power.
This impetus given to industry by the wide-spread hope of rising a step in life, added greatly to the national wealth. We have abundant proof that the poor man, and especially the small husbandman, was far better off at this period than at any other. The labourer, according to Statute, received 4d. a day, if not fed in the house, and this continued his nominal wage throughout the century. At this rate, about eighteen days' work would buy him a quarter of wheat; six days, a calf; seven or eight days, a hog for fatting. A lamb would cost him between sixpence and a shilling; a hen, 2d.; a pullet, 1d. Eggs he could get at the rate of twenty for a penny; butter was a penny, and cheese was three-farthings a pound. His garden produced no potatoes, but it gave him fat peascods, and good apples and cherries. As to his drink, Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice in 1442, merrily says, "He drank no water except at certain times, and that by way of doing penance." The same authority tells us that in these days English labourers were clothed throughout in good woollens; the bedding and other articles in their houses were of wool, and that in great store. And if the sumptuary law of 1464 was not a malicious satire, the labourer indulged in broadcloth of which the yard sometimes reached the price of two shillings.
It is clear that the Statute of Labourers was frequently violated, and that the labourer's actual income was even better than the prices just quoted would suggest. Engaged by the year, and frequently living on the farm, he must often have saved money enough to become a husbandman himself. This position, though it involved harder living than that of the labourer, was the most happy in the realm. Too lowly to be troubled by the storms of jealousy which raged over the surface of society, he ate the bread of independence, and lived surrounded by such an England as Chaucer depicts.
A revolution had clearly taken place, a revolution which was completed by the Civil Wars in which this century closed, and which gave the coup de grace to feudalism. For the Day of Judgment had come for the old slave-holding baronage of Norman and Angevin England. In the wars of the Roses it committed the happy dispatch; and at the accession of Henry VII. the House of Lords had been reduced to twenty-eight members.
How envenomed the English barons were against each other, we may learn from what Stow tells us of the battle of Northampton, "The earls of March and Warwicke let crie through the field that no man should lay hand upon the king, ne on the common people, but on the lordes, knights, and esquires." As the war grew this could not be maintained. After the battle of Towton it is said that nearly 40,000 men lay dead on the field. These were not labouring men, but the retainers of the barons, a class of beings who were to the country what the vulture was to Prometheus. Towton and the Tudors cleared the air of these hawks and kites.
VI.
The Tudor Kingdom of Heaven.
The Tudors and the Middle Class rise together, they symbolize each other, they are the makers of modern England. No noble plays a leading part in the revolutionary reign of Henry VIII.: Wolsey, More, Latimer, Cromwell, all came from the middle class.
During the reign of Edward, the Sixth, the turbulent spirit of aristocracy prevails, but only to accelerate the Nemesis which fell on the old families even to their remotest branches. One of the most striking facts in English history is the steady support given by the Tudor Parliaments to every bill of Attainder. Noble after noble went to the block, one great family after another was crushed, each stroke was an advantage gained.
But the rising power had another arm equally effective, the nobles it did not crush, it bribed. The Church was made to disgorge wealth, which to-day would equal in value the total annual revenue of Great Britain, and the greater part of this was spent in getting great Lords to support the Revolution.
Not that the Revolution owed all its success to force and fraud. The spread of knowledge through the revival of letters, the invention of printing, the rapid development of Commerce, and above all the tremendous blow given to the clerical aristocracy by the Reformation, all concurred to put wealth and power into the hands of the Middle Class.
But the Labouring Class reaped but little benefit from this change, the legislation in which Middle Class interests prevailed proving if possible more tyrannical and corrupting than that more purely aristocratic.
The new régime, however, commenced with some signs of relenting. The Statute of Labourers of 1426 speaks of "his Grace's pitty," but the notion of royal pity, held by Henry the Seventh's Parliament, was compatible with putting "vagabonds and idle and suspected persons," i.e., persons apparently without a master, in the stocks three days and three nights with no sustenance but bread and water.
In former times the chief object had been to retain the labourer in servitude, but now he was free; the point was to extract from him as much labour as possible. Thus it is that the Tudor cry is always, "Ye are idle, ye are idle." "Go therefore now and work."
The Tudors gave themselves to the work of ruling with all the ardour of the founders of a new and successful business. Henry the Eighth is said himself to have written the Act relating to labour passed in the 27th year of his reign, as he probably did that of the 22nd. Sympathy with his vigorous efforts to extirpate "Ydelnesse, mother and rote of all vyces" from the land will be lessened when we reflect what a bitter tyranny we should feel it to be if we were bound down to a certain spot, compelled to pursue an occupation we disliked, and that, during the