Imatges de pàgina
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§ 12. The Black

Death and

the Peasants' Revolt.

lower classes was roused against their oppressors. Gradually there had been growing up a literature of satirical songs directed against the vices of the rich. The author of 'Piers the Ploughman' now stepped forward to weigh the clergy, the nobles, the traders, and the knights in the balance, and to find them wanting. True industry and true innocence, he declared, were to be found in those alone whose lives were spent in manual labour. This poem was the sharp reply to the romances of chivalry and to chronicles like those of Froissart, in which the rich and the noble were depicted in the brightest colours, and in which life appeared to be one long holiday. Assuredly the picture drawn was highly exaggerated. But it revealed the great fact of the time-the fact that the consolidating work of earlier days needed to be carried on further still, and that the limits of the nation were not yet comprehensive enough for the task that lay before it.

If the demands of the landowners were higher, the position of the peasants for resistance was stronger than it had been before. The condition of the serfs or villeins had been one of improvement for some time past. Some of them had been set free and had given rise to a class of labourers working like the modern labourer for his hire. If the great part of the peasants were still bound to the soil, and if they were unable to leave the landlord's estate without their landlord's leave, most of them had changed the uncertain tenure of their cottages and of the plots of ground around them for one which was more definite. Instead of being called on to plough and sow at their master's direction, they had some fixed work to do, some ascertained labour rent to give, or, in the majority of cases, a fixed money rent to pay in commutation for the labour rent. Suddenly an event occurred which made all past progress seem small. The Black

Death swept over Europe, that devastating scourge to which neither the cholera of our own days, nor the plague of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, can afford a parallel. At least one half of the population, it can hardly be doubted, disappeared before its ravages. The relations between the landowning and the labouring classes were at once altered by the blow. Whatever number may have perished out of the families of the landowners, there were sure to be kinsmen left to gather the inheritance of those who were gone. There would be a new face at the head of the table in the hall of the manor house, a new exacter of service and of rent. In the cottage the change would work in a very different fashion. Where there had been two labourers before there would be but one now, and the same amount of work would have to be done. Men who worked for pay would feel it hard that they did not have more pay when their services were in greater request, and men who paid rent in labour without receiving pay at all would feel it harder than ever that they did not receive money for the work of their hands which had now become twice as valuable as it had been before. Nor is it unlikely, though it is not absolutely certain, that an attempt was made by the lords to enforce the service of labour in the large number of instances in which it had been tacitly permitted to fall into desuetude in consideration of the payment of rent. Other grievances of the labouring classes came to swell the tide of agitation, and before Richard II. had been long upon the throne the peasants were ready to join in an active opposition to the propertied classes, of which the main cry was one for the entire abolition of villenage. In 1381 they burst out into open insurrection. But they were not strong enough to gain their ends. The upper classes were too strong in organisation to be overwhelmed by an un

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$13. Wyclif's Principles.

organised crowd, and the insurrection was quenched in blood.

Revolutions are only possible when the interests of the masses can be welded into a permanent political force by the leadership of the thoughtful few. In the latter part of the fourteenth century, the masses were ready to act, and the thinker was present to think. That thinker was Wyclif. But between the two there was no common ground, and the failure of his movement for religious reform was inevitable. His ideas developed themselves not out of the new social aspirations of the multitude, but out of the old national aspirations of the upper classes. He began by demanding that England should be more independent of the Papacy than it had hitherto been, less a prey to the needy foreign clergy who came to batten on its ecclesiastical pastures.

It was the

cause alike of the English clergy who disliked seeing the benefices which they coveted in the hands of Italians, and of the English landowners, who disliked the loss of the patronage which they counted as their own. But Wyclif was not a man to be content with the defence of merely material interests. He asked that English benefices should be placed not merely in the hands of men of English birth, but in the hands of men whose high moral worth fitted them for the fulfilment of spiritual functions. He cast down his doctrine of Dominion founded on Grace as his challenge to a worldly and self-seeking clergy. At once he had on his side the still more worldly and self-seeking aristocracy, with John of Gaunt at its head. They fancied it would be easy, under the cover of reforming the Church, to draw a large portion of its revenues into their own pockets. They did not see that Wyclif's challenge had opened wider issues than they were aware of. Stripped of its scholastic and ecclesiastical form, Dominion founded on

Grace was the doctrine with which we are so familiar at the present day, that no authority or institution can, in the long run, justify its existence except by the services which it is capable of rendering. John of Gaunt and his comrades were happy in finding such a weapon wherewith to cut down their rivals the bishops till, on a sudden, they discovered that their own authority was at stake. The dominion which they claimed over the 'peasants, the hard compulsion to forced service, the scanty pay doled out, did not seem to the wretched labourers to be in any way founded on grace. The insurrection of 1381 came to remind the barons that they were playing with edged tools, and that the less they had to do with Wyclif the better they would consult their own interests.

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If Wyclif thus lost his hold upon one side in the social 14. Wystrife, he gained no hold on the other. A few months Failure. before the insurrection, he entered boldly on the path of a religious reformer by his denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation. He was not without numerous followers, and the Lollardism which sprang out of his teaching was a living force in England for some time to come. But it was weak through its connection with subversive social doctrines. He himself stood aloof from such doctrines, but he could not prevent his followers from mingling in the social fray. It was perhaps their merit that they did so. The established constitutional order was but another name for oppression and wrong to the lower classes. But as yet the lower classes were not sufficiently advanced in moral and political training to make it safe to entrust them with the task of righting their own wrongs as they would have attempted to right them if they had gained the mastery. It had nevertheless become impossible to leave the peasants to be once more goaded by suffering into re

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$ 15. The Conserva

tive Reac

tion.

bellion. The attempt, if it had been made, to enforce absolute labour-rents was tacitly abandoned, and gradually during the next century the mass of the villeins passed into the position of freemen.

For the moment, nobles and prelates, landowners and clergy, banded themselves together to form one great party of resistance. The church came to be but an outwork of the baronage. Courtneys and Arundels, Beauforts and Bourchiers, sate on the high seats of prelacy; no longer vigorous scholars like Stephen Langton, or humble saints like Edmund Rich. If there still lingered a feeling of appetite for the goods of the clergy, it was among the burgesses and lesser gentry of the House of Commons, not among the great houses, the chiefs of which were to be found in the House of Lords. Such a union of interests was certain to increase the weight of parliament in the constitutional system. Parliaments are weak when they will nothing strongly; when the aims of the more devoted and intelligent fall flat upon the ears of those who care for nothing but present ease. The defence of interests appeals alike to all who share in those interests. Not, indeed, that the better minds amongst the sharers in this great conservative reaction were without some sense of higher duty. To them it seemed that the battle was not for the preservation of pelf and power, but for the salvation of society from those who were undermining its foundations in Church and State. Such a combination would, in any case, have raised into increased prominence the parliament which represented the upper classes. Its progress to power was accelerated, if only accelerated, by the weakness of the king. Richard II. had this special failing, that he stood on neither side of the great controversy of the age. He had not the large-heartedness and the heroism to place himself at the head of the peasants,

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