the peasant Death in for the first time in the ranks of the common people. The peasant revolt, which Richard was called upon to quell upon Causes of the threshold of his career, was the result of causes which the revolt. pressure of perpetual war, and the visitations of the great plague, had set to work in his father's time. When, at the Condition close of 1348, the Black Death began its desolating march ing classes through the English kingdom, the laboring classes, amongst at the beginning of whom its results are historically most prominent, had for a the Black century or more been moving from the lower stages of serf- 1348. age, in which the duties of the villein to his lord were discharged by personal services, to a state of comparative freedom, in which personal services were commuted by money payments. So rapidly had the process of enfranchisement advanced, that lords of manors were obliged to rely for the cultivation of their lands upon hired laborers who took the places of the villeins, who were now discharging their duties to their lords by rentals in money in lieu of base services. Upon this hopeful condition of things the great plague fell like a blight. By its ravages the total population was so Population reduced that hired labor, which had heretofore been cheap that hired and abundant, now became dear and scarce. It is probable labor be that not much less than half of the entire population was and scarce. destroyed,1 and the number of laborers was so reduced that those who survived demanded double the old rate of wages. As a remedy for this condition of things, which threatened ruin to the great landowners, and to the wealthier craftsmen so reduced came dear regulate the wages by of the towns, the council in 1349 passed an ordinance which The council attempted to regulate the price of labor by providing that all attempts to laborers should be forced to serve at the rate of wages which rate of had prevailed before the plague began.2 This ordinance, pub- ordinance. lished in June, was afterwards turned into the statute known Statute of as the Statute of Laborers. This measure the parliament of Laborers, 1351 rendered still more stringent by denying to the laborer the right to quit his parish in search of better employment.* When the villeins refused to accept the starvation wages thus held out to them, the landlords fell back upon their demesne 1 Cf. Rogers, History of Prices, i. p. 60. 2 Knighton, c. 2600; Fœdera, iii. c. 198; Statutes, i. 307. 8 23 Edw. III. "This ordinance was afterwards by stat. 3 Rich. II., st. I, c. viii., made an act of parliament, and 128. 1349. Conflict between sified by rights, which when contested were tried in the manor court, presided over by the steward, whose interest it was to have the judgment given against the villein and in favor of the lord.1 The wide-spread irritation and discontent among the lower capital and classes which grew out of this bitter conflict between capital labor inten- and labor was also quickened and intensified by the teachings the teach- of some of the Lollard preachers, who went about not only ings of the Lollard inveighing against the right of the clergy to hold property, preachers. but against the whole system of social inequality, which during the middle ages held the rich and the poor so wide apart. Foremost among agitators of this class stood John Ball, "a mad priest of Kent," who openly proclaimed a new doctrine of social equality, based upon the natural rights of man, which found quaint yet pointed expression in the popular rhyme :When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman ? 2 The poll tax. The social discontent which thus smouldered at the end of Edward's reign broke into flame when, shortly after the accession of his son, the pressure of taxation was applied with fresh force, and through a new device, to every hearth and home in the realm. In the last year of Edward's reign the parliament of 1377, in order to meet the urgent need of money to carry on the war with France, devised a new form of general taxation by granting to the crown a poll-tax of a groat a head. Two years after Richard's accession the parliament of 1379, in response to another pressing demand for money, granted a second poll-tax, under which every man was charged with a direct contribution in proportion to his rank or dignity. In the next year still another and severer Rising of poll-tax was granted.5 The collection of this last tax in June, 1381, was the signal for revolt, on the 5th of June the rising of the commons began. Although the grounds of discontent seem to have varied somewhat in every district, two great motives for revolt stood out above all the rest, clearly The politi- and distinctly defined. The first was the political grievance which grew out of the imposition of the poll-tax, whereby the the com mons be gins on the 5th June, 1381. cal griev ance. 1 As to such proceedings, see Seebohm, Eng. Village Community, pp. 30. 31; Reeves, Hist. Eng. Law, vol. iii. pp. 130-132, notes, Finlason, ed. 2 Cf. Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. i. p. 440. 8 Rot. Parl., ii. p. 364. Ibid., iii. pp. 57, 58. and the and the counties. pressure of the war was brought home to the laboring classes, already in a state of seething discontent, by subjecting them to a burden which had not before been imposed upon them. The second was the social grievance which grew out of the The social attempts of the landlords to exact work from the laborer at grievance. low wages, or, in default of that, to revive their demesne rights to base services from men who had begun to regard. themselves as no longer villeins. The first actual outbreak, Wat Tyler which began in Kent on the 5th of June, was provoked by Kentish the collection of the poll-tax; this seems to have been the men. main grievance of the hundred thousand Kentish men who gathered around Wat Tyler of Essex to march upon London: their cry was for the suppression of the poll-tax and better government. On the other hand, the grievance of the men The men from Essex and the eastern counties seems to have been from Essex rather social than political; their demand was that bondage eastern should be abolished, that tolls and other imposts on trade should be done away with, that the native-born villein should be emancipated, and that all villein service should be commuted for a rent of fourpence the acre. When, on the Richard's morning of the 14th of June, Richard rode from the Tower pledges to to Mile-end to meet the Essex men, their cry was, "We will men. that you free us forever, us and our lands; and that we be never named nor held for serfs." In reply the king promptly pledged his royal word that their demands should be granted; and as soon as the charters of freedom and amnesty could be drawn, the mass of those seeking emancipation withdrew to their homes. The same happy result followed when, on the next day, Richard, meeting the Kentish men, made to them the same pledges of freedom, coupled with the reminder that he was their captain and their king. In a little more than a Revolt fortnight the revolt was over, and then came a period of lasted little reaction, during which the confiding peasants were taught to a fortnight. feel how little trust could be placed even in the written pledges of a king. On the 30th of June a royal proclamation was issued ordering all tenants of land to continue their accustomed services; 2 on the 2d of July the charters of freedom and pardon were revoked, and on the 18th the local 2 Fadera, iv. p. 126. 3 Ibid., iv. p. 126. 1 For a full statement of the crisis and its causes, see Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. ii. pp. 449–463. more than In spite of cruelty and repression, of the re volt fully courts were ordered not to release their prisoners.1 Tressilian, the chief justice, then began to bring the law to bear upon the insurgents, who were punished with the greatest cruelty. And yet, in spite of all the cruelty and repression thus applied by the government to the laboring classes durthe purpose ing the period of reaction which followed the revolt, the great purpose of the revolution was fully accomplished. The cancellation of charters upon the part of the crown, the attempt upon the part of the landlords to revive their old demesne rights, could not conceal the fact that villeinage had received. Within a its death-blow. The process of enfranchisement, so hopea half after fully progressing when the advent of the plague arrested the rising, its progress, advanced again so rapidly that, at the end of an obsolete a century and a half from the time of the rising, villeinage institution. was looked upon as a rare if not an obsolete institution. accom plished. century and villeinage Yeoman class be comes the And as the work of enfranchisement advanced, the number of small freeholders was so increased by the constant acbasis of the cession of new freemen that the yeoman class soon came to be regarded in every shire as the basis of the electoral system.3 electoral system. The marked change in temper the French 1396. In 1394 the queen, Anne of Bohemia, died, and two years thereafter the king married a second wife, Isabella, the Richard's daughter of Charles VI. of France. From that time dates dates from the marked change of temper which prompted Richard to marriage in drop all disguises, and to exhibit his purpose of ruling as an absolute monarch, surrounded by a profuse and profligate court. While the king was in this mood an effort was made by the parliament of 1397 to reform, among other things, the royal household. When the bill of complaint upon that subject, which originated with the commons, was presented to the lords, the king sent for them, and requested them to inform the lower house of the offence they had given in presuming to "take on themselves any ordinance or governance of the person of the king, or his hostel, or of any persons of estate whom he might be pleased to have in his company." 1 Fadera, p. 128. 2 "The landlords gave up the practice of demanding base services: they let their lands to leasehold tenants, and accepted money payments in lieu of labor; they ceased to recall the emancipated laborer into serfdom, or to oppose his assertion of right in the courts of the manor and the county." Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. ii. p. 462. 8 Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. i. p. 486. 4 Rot. Parl., iii. pp. 338-340. rebukes the de the offend Not content with this rebuke, he also commanded the Duke Richard of Lancaster to demand of the house, through the speaker, to commons, give up the name of the member who had dared to bring andnds the forward the offensive proposal. In response to the demand name of the obsequious commons gave up the name of Sir Thomas ing memHaxey, a prebendary of Southwell, who was condemned by the lords to suffer the death of a traitor,1-a fate from which he was saved by being claimed as a clergyman by Archbishop Arundel. ber. definition 1397. of Shrewsbury, Jan., Richard In the new parliament, which met in September of this A fresh year, the crime of treason, which with its penalty had first of the crime been defined by a law passed in 1352,2 received a fresh defini- of treason, tion in a statute which declared the four articles of treason to be, the compassing of the king's death or deposition, the levying of war against him, and the surrendering the liege homage due to him.3 After the king had procured such further legislation as enabled him to punish his enemies, chief among whom were the appellants Arundel, Gloucester, and Warwick, this parliament, which had been elected under the open pressure of royal influence, was adjourned to Shrewsbury, where it sat for three days. During these days, Parliament through parliamentary action which purported to be voluntary, Richard was transformed into a practically absolute 1398, made monarch, and parliamentary government for a time brought practically to an end. After granting a subsidy on wool, woolfells, and leather to the king for life, — such a grant as had never been Grant of a subsidy for before made, the parliament terminated its existence by life. delegating its authority to a committee of eighteen members, who were empowered not only to hear petitions, but also "to examine and determine all matters and subjects which had been moved in the presence of the king, with all the dependencies thereof." In this wise, by bringing about the surrender of the authority of parliament into the hands of a committee, selected from those who were supposed to be his faithful adherents, Richard accomplished for a time the great constitutional change to which his policy since the French marriage had been openly directed. 5 1 Haxey was condemned under an ex post facto ordinance passed by the lords and the king. Rot. Parl., iii. pp. 339, 341, 407, 408. Ibid., ii. p. 239. Rot. Parl., iii. p. 343. See Reeves, Hist. of Eng. Law, vol. iii. pp. 187, 315 Rot. Parl., iii. p. 368. 6 Ibid., iii. pp. 369, 372, 385. absolute. |