1

ally became practically a mere form, though the landowners, supported by the lawyers,2 interposed many obstacles in the path of emancipation, and a great Revolt was necessary to enable the villeins to show their power. This revolt and its result must now engage our attention.3

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. ch. xvi. p. 254. "It was by a mere legal form that the villein was described as less than free."

2 Ib., p. 455. The lawyers seem to have been against the freedom of villeins ever since the Norman Conquest. Cf. Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, pp. 134, 150, &c., &c.

3 Of course villeinage did not die out all at once; nor would it be necessary for me to say so, were it not for the perversity of certain critics, who imagine that, because I attach great importance to the Plague and the Peasant's Revolt, I maintain that villeinage ceased suddenly. For survivals, see later, p. 171.

4

CHAPTER XII

THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381, AND THE SUBSEQUENT

CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES

§ 101. The Place of the Revolt in English History. THE Revolt to which allusion has just been made has been described by one of our greatest and most careful historians as "one of the most portentous phenomena to be found in the whole of our history"; nor has the criticism 2 of those who have endeavoured to minimise its results succeeded in depriving it of its historical importance. "The extent of the area over which it spread, the extraordinary rapidity with which intelligence and communication passed between the different sections of the revolt, the variety of cries and causes which combined to produce it, the mystery that pervades its organisation, its sudden collapse and its indirect permanent results, give it a singular importance both constitutionally and socially." It is therefore of interest to note the various influences which produced such an uprising, and to examine the various grievances which the villeins of the fourteenth century endeavoured to redress by such revolutionary methods. The revolt was undoubtedly serious, and would certainly have had far more sanguinary consequences, had it occurred later than it actually did. Fortunately the working classes of England were not so utterly ground down beneath the heel of their superiors as was the case across the Channel, and they resented their

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. ch. xvi. p. 449.

2 Cf. Ashley's criticism of J. E. Thorold Rogers in The Political Science Quarterly, Vol. IV., No. 3, September 1889. Also Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, Vol. I. p. 360. But these historians practically admit all that Rogers really wished to prove, as my quotations show. See below, p. 172.

3 Stubbs, ut ante, p. 450.

L

injuries sooner, otherwise England might have witnessed a few centuries later that volcanic upheaval of a slow peasantry, enraged by ages of seigneurial oppression, which burst with such terrific and long-contained violence over eighteenth century France. Fortunately, also, the upper classes of England seem to have taken warning in time from what happened in 1381, and did not in actual fact, whatever they may have said and thought, proceed to such foolish extremities as would have infallibly endangered both their property and their position.

§ 102. New Social Doctrines.

By no means the least important among the effects of the Great Plague was the spirit of independence which it helped to raise in the breasts of the villeins and labourers, more especially as they now gained some consciousness of the power of labour, and of its value as a prime necessity in the economic life of the nation.1 There was, indeed, a revolutionary spirit in the air in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and the villeins could not help breathing it. The social teaching of the author of Piers the Plowman, with his outspoken denunciation of those who are called the upper classes, the bold religious preaching of Wiklif and the wandering friars, and the marked political assertion of the rights of Parliament by the "Good Parliament" of 1376, were all manifestations of this spirit. It was natural, too, that, feeling their power as they did, the villeins should become restive when they heard from the followers of Wiklif that, as it was lawful to withdraw tithes from priests who lived in sin, so "servants and tenants may withdraw their services and rents from their lords that live openly a cursed life."4

1 Cf. Gower, Vox Clamantis, in Stubbs, u. s., ii. p. 454, where he describes hired labourers of the period of the Revolt, and accuses them of wishing to have too much of their own way.

2 See below, p. 167. I have treated this more at length in English Social Reformers, pp. 5-25.

3 Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. ch. xvi. pp. 428-433. "It marked the climax of a long rising excitement," p. 428.

4 Wiklif, English Works (E. E.T.S.), p. 229, Of Lords and Servants.

"1

Wiklif.

§ 103. The Coming of the Friars. Such, indeed, was the teaching that Wiklif promulgated, and it was carried throughout all England by that great association of wandering friars which he founded under the title of the "poor priests." These men were like the mendicant friars who had come to England a century before 2 to work in the poorer parts of the English towns; though Wiklif's priests generally wandered out 3 into the isolated and remote country villages, and spread abroad the independent doctrines and the revolutionary spirit of the times. Spending their lives in moving about among the "upland folk," as the country people were called, clad in coarse, undyed, brown woollen garments, they won the confidence of the peasants, and what is more, helped them to combine in very effectual unions. They served as messengers between those in different parts of the country, having passwords and a secret language of their own.5 Their preaching was similar to that of the celebrated priest of Kent, John Ball, who for twenty years before the great rising (1360-80) openly spoke words like these-"Good people, things will never be well in England so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? They have leisure and fine houses we have pain and labour, and the wind and rain in the fields. And yet it is of us and our toil that these men hold their estate." These searching questions as to the rights of the lords, and the bold but true statement 1 Green, History, i. 474.

2 The Black Friars of Dominic came in 1221, and the Grey Friars of Francis in 1224. Jessop, Coming of the Friars, 32, 34. The Dominicans were "trained men of education addressing themselves mainly to the educated classes"; the Franciscans appealed to the lowest and poorest class, and worked in the slums of the towns of those days. Ib., 28, 21. 3 Friars and "poor priests" were found everywhere; cf. Wylie, England under Henry IV., ch. xvi.

4 These unions or confederacies are complained of and prohibited (uselessly) by the Statute 1 Rich. II., c. 6 (1377).

5 See the message of John Ball (himself, of course, a priest) to the commons of Essex, quoted in Skeat's Preface to Piers the Plowman, p. xxvi., and Green's History, i. p. 475.

-and paid for the peasants.

that it was the villeins and labouring classes who supported their high estate, came closely home to They were influenced also by the independent religious views of the Lollards, which encouraged indeAnd this independence of pendent thought in other ways. social and religious tenets was hardly calculated to make the villeins bear with equanimity the exactions of their lords after the Great Plague.

§ 104. The Renewed Exactions of the Landlords.

For it must be remembered that the Great Plague did not emancipate the villeins, nor cause the landowners to give up farming on their own account immediately. The process, of course, took a few years, and in these few years the landowners made desperate efforts to avoid paying As it had now higher wages than formerly for labour. become costly, they insisted more severely upon the performance by their tenants of such labour dues as were not yet commuted for money payments.2 They even tried to make those tenants who had emerged from a condition of villeinage to a free tenancy return back to villeinage again,3 If a man with all its old labour dues and casual services. could not prove by legal documentary evidence that he held his land in a free tenancy, the landowner might pretend he was a villein tenant, and subject to all a villein's services, although these services might long ago have been commuted for a money rent without any legal formality.*

1 Note the complaints against Lollard teaching in the Statute 2 Henry V., I. c. 7.

2 As Stubbs puts it - "The villeins ignored the Statute [i.e., of labourers], and the lords fell back upon their demesne rights over the villeins" (Const. Hist., II. ch. xvi. p. 455). The point of view of the lords is expressed, plaintively enough, in the Statute 1 Rich. II., c. 6— "The villeins and land-tenants in villeinage who owe services and customs to the said lords have now lately withdrawn and do daily withdraw their services and customs," &c., &c.

"The old rolls were searched, the pedigree of the labourer was tested like the pedigree of the peer, and there was a dread of worse things coming" (Stubbs, ut ante, p. 455).

This was no doubt the cause of the particular animosity shown against manorial documents, which in many cases the villeins tried to burn; cf. Walsingham, Hist. Angl., i. 455.