Still in the vigour of manhood, for he was but thirty-five, Edward the
Third stood at the height of his renown. He had won the greatest victory of
his age. France, till now the first of European states, was broken and
dashed from her pride of place at a single blow. The kingdom seemed to lie
at Edward's mercy, for Guienne was recovered, Flanders was wholly on his
side, and Britanny, where the capture of Charles of Blois secured the
success of his rival and the English party which supported him, opened the
road to Paris. At home his government was popular, and Scotland, the one
enemy he had to dread, was bridled by the capture of her king. How great
his renown was in Europe was seen in 1347, when on the death of Lewis of
Bavaria the electors offered him the Imperial Crown. Edward was in truth a
general of a high order, and he had shown himself as consummate a
strategist in the campaign as a tactician in the field. But to the world
about him he was even more illustrious as the foremost representative of
the showy chivalry of his day. He loved the pomp of tournaments; he revived
the Round Table of the fabled Arthur; he celebrated his victories by the
creation of a new order of knighthood. He had varied the sterner operations
of the siege of Calais by a hand-to-hand combat with one of the bravest of
the French knights. A naval picture of Froissart sketches Edward for us as
he sailed to meet a Spanish fleet which was sweeping the narrow seas. We
see the king sitting on deck in his jacket of black velvet, his head
covered by a black beaver hat "which became him well," and calling on Sir
John Chandos to troll out the songs he had brought with him from Germany,
till the Spanish ships heave in sight and a furious fight begins which ends
in a victory that leaves Edward "King of the Seas."
But beneath all this glitter of chivalry lay the subtle, busy diplomatist.
None of our kings was so restless a negotiator. From the first hour of
Edward's rule the threads of his diplomacy ran over Europe in almost
inextricable confusion. And to all who dealt with him he was equally false
and tricky. Emperor was played off against Pope and Pope against Emperor,
the friendship of the Flemish towns was adroitly used to put a pressure on
their counts, the national wrath against the exactions of the Roman See was
employed to bridle the French sympathies of the court of Avignon, and when
the statutes which it produced had served their purpose they were set aside
for a bargain in which King and Pope shared the plunder of the Church
between them. His temper was as false in his dealings with his people as in
his dealings with the European powers. Edward aired to country and
parliament his English patriotism. "Above all other lands and realms," he
made his chancellor say, "the King had most tenderly at heart his land of
England, a land more full of delight and honour and profit to him than any
other." His manners were popular; he donned on occasion the livery of a
city gild; he dined with a London merchant. His perpetual parliaments, his
appeals to them and to the country at large for counsel and aid, seemed to
promise a ruler who was absolutely one at heart with the people he ruled.
But when once Edward passed from sheer carelessness and gratification at
the new source of wealth which the Parliament opened to a sense of what its
power really was becoming, he showed himself as jealous of freedom as any
king that had gone before him. He sold his assent to its demands for heavy
subsidies, and when he had pocketed the money coolly declared the statutes
he had sanctioned null and void. The constitutional progress which was made
during his reign was due to his absorption in showy schemes of foreign
ambition, to his preference for war and diplomatic intrigue over the sober
business of civil administration. The same shallowness of temper, the same
showiness and falsehood, ran through his personal character. The king who
was a model of chivalry in his dealings with knight and noble showed
himself a brutal savage to the burgesses of Calais. Even the courtesy to
his Queen which throws its halo over the story of their deliverance went
hand in hand with a constant disloyalty to her. When once Philippa was dead
his profligacy threw all shame aside. He paraded a mistress as Queen of
Beauty through the streets of London, and set her in pomp over tournaments
as the Lady of the Sun. The nobles were quick to follow their lord's
example. "In those days," writes a chronicler of the time, "arose a rumour
and clamour among the people that wherever there was a tournament there
came a great concourse of ladies, of the most costly and beautiful but not
of the best in the kingdom, sometimes forty and fifty in number, as if they
were a part of the tournament, ladies clad in diverse and wonderful male
apparel, in parti-coloured tunics, with short caps and bands wound
cord-wise round their heads, and girdles bound with gold and silver, and
daggers in pouches across their body. And thus they rode on choice coursers
to the place of tourney; and so spent and wasted their goods and vexed
their bodies with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of the people
sounded everywhere. But they neither feared God nor blushed at the chaste
voice of the people."
The "chaste voice of the people" was soon to grow into the stern moral
protest of the Lollards, but for the moment all murmurs were hushed by the
king's success. The truce which followed the capture of Calais seemed a
mere rest in the career of victories which opened before Edward. England
was drunk with her glory and with the hope of plunder. The cloths of Caen
had been brought after the sack of that town to London. "There was no
woman," says Walsingham, "who had not got garments, furs, feather-beds, and
utensils from the spoils of Calais and other foreign cities." The court
revelled in gorgeous tournaments and luxury of dress; and the establishment
in 1346 of the Order of the Garter which found its home in the new castle
that Edward was raising at Windsor marked the highest reach of the spurious
"Chivalry" of the day. But it was at this moment of triumph that the whole
colour of Edward's reign suddenly changed. The most terrible plague the
world has ever witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating
Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic swooped at the
close of 1348 upon Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness and the
panic-struck words of the statutes passed after its visitation have been
amply justified by modern research. Of the three or four millions who then
formed the population of England more than one-half were swept away in its
repeated visitations. Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns where
filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and
fever. In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay purchased
for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the
Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been
interred. Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the
living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black Death fell on the
villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More than one-half of the
priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the diocese of Norwich
two-thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents. The whole organization
of labour was thrown out of gear. The scarcity of hands produced by the
terrible mortality made it difficult for villeins to perform the services
due for their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent by
the landowners induced the farmers of their demesnes to refrain from the
abandonment of their farms. For a time cultivation became impossible. "The
sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary,
"and there were none left who could drive them." Even when the first burst
of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on the enormous
diminution in the supply of labour, though accompanied by a corresponding
rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the course of industrial
employments. Harvests rotted on the ground and fields were left untilled
not merely from scarcity of hands but from the strife which now for the
first time revealed itself between capital and labour.
Nowhere was the effect of the Black Death so keenly felt as in its bearing
on the social revolution which had been steadily going on for a century
past throughout the country. At the moment we have reached the lord of a
manor had been reduced over a large part of England to the position of a
modern landlord, receiving a rental in money from his tenants and supplying
their place in the cultivation of his demesne lands by paid labourers. He
was driven by the progress of enfranchisement to rely for the purposes of
cultivation on the supply of hired labour, and hitherto this supply had
been abundant and cheap. But with the ravages of the Black Death and the
decrease of population labour at once became scarce and dear. There was a
general rise of wages, and the farmers of the country as well as the
wealthier craftsmen of the town saw themselves threatened with ruin by what
seemed to their age the extravagant demands of the labour class. Meanwhile
the country was torn with riot and disorder. An outbreak of lawless
self-indulgence which followed everywhere in the wake of the plague told
especially upon the "landless men," workers wandering in search of work who
found themselves for the first time masters of the labour market; and the
wandering labourer or artizan turned easily into the "sturdy beggar," or
the bandit of the woods. A summary redress for these evils was at once
provided by the Crown in a royal proclamation. "Because a great part of the
people," runs this ordinance, "and principally of labourers and servants,
is dead of the plague, some, seeing the need of their lords and the
scarcity of servants, are unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive
wages, and others are rather begging in idleness than supporting themselves
by labour, we have ordained that any able-bodied man or woman, of
whatsoever condition, free or serf, under sixty years of age, not living of
merchandise nor following a trade nor having of his own wherewithal to
live, either his own land with the culture of which he could occupy
himself, and not serving another, shall if so required serve another for
such wages as was the custom in the twentieth year of our reign or five or
six years before."
It was the failure of this ordinance to effect its ends which brought about
at the close of 1349 the passing of the Statute of Labourers. "Every man or
woman," runs this famous provision, "of whatsoever condition, free or bond,
able in body, and within the age of threescore years, ... and not having of
his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which
he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve
the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages
which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood where he is bound to
serve" two years before the plague began. A refusal to obey was punished by
imprisonment. But sterner measures were soon found to be necessary. Not
only was the price of labour fixed by the Parliament of 1351 but the labour
class was once more tied to the soil. The labourer was forbidden to quit
the parish where he lived in search of better paid employment; if he
disobeyed he became a "fugitive," and subject to imprisonment at the hands
of justices of the peace. To enforce such a law literally must have been
impossible, for corn rose to so high a price that a day's labour at the old
wages would not have purchased wheat enough for a man's support. But the
landowners did not flinch from the attempt. The repeated re-enactment of
the law shows the difficulty of applying it and the stubbornness of the
struggle which it brought about. The fines and forfeitures which were
levied for infractions of its provisions formed a large source of royal
revenue, but so ineffectual were the original penalties that the runaway
labourer was at last ordered to be branded with a hot iron on the forehead,
while the harbouring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down. Nor was it
merely the existing class of free labourers which was attacked by this
reactionary movement. The increase of their numbers by a commutation of
labour services for money payments was suddenly checked, and the ingenuity
of the lawyers who were employed as stewards of each manor was exercised in
striving to restore to the landowners that customary labour whose loss was
now severely felt. Manumissions and exemptions which had passed without
question were cancelled on grounds of informality, and labour services from
which they held themselves freed by redemption were again demanded from the
villeins. The attempt was the more galling that the cause had to be pleaded
in the manor-court itself, and to be decided by the very officer whose
interest it was to give judgement in favour of his lord. We can see the
growth of a fierce spirit of resistance through the statutes which strove
in vain to repress it. In the towns, where the system of forced labour was
applied with even more rigour than in the country, strikes and combinations
became frequent among the lower craftsmen. In the country the free
labourers found allies in the villeins whose freedom from manorial service
was questioned. These were often men of position and substance, and
throughout the eastern counties the gatherings of "fugitive serfs" were
supported by an organized resistance and by large contributions of money on
the part of the wealthier tenantry.
With plague, famine, and social strife in the land, it was no time for
reaping the fruits even of such a victory as Crécy. Luckily for England the
pestilence had fallen as heavily on her foe as on herself. A common
suffering and exhaustion forced both countries to a truce, and though
desultory fighting went on along the Breton and Aquitanian borders, the
peace which was thus secured lasted with brief intervals of fighting for
seven years. It was not till 1355 that the failure of a last effort to turn
the truce into a final peace again drove Edward into war. The campaign
opened with a brilliant prospect of success. Charles the Bad, King of
Navarre, held as a prince of descent from the house of Valois large fiefs
in Normandy; and a quarrel springing suddenly up between him and John, who
had now succeeded his father Philip on the throne of France, Charles
offered to put his fortresses into Edward's hands. Master of Cherbourg,
Avranches, Pontaudemer, Evreux and Meulan, Mantes, Mortain, Pontoise,
Charles held in his hands the keys of France; and Edward grasped at the
opportunity of delivering a crushing blow. Three armies were prepared to
act in Normandy, Britanny, and Guienne. But the first two, with Edward and
Henry of Derby, who had been raised to the dukedom of Lancaster, at their
head, were detained by contrary winds, and Charles, despairing of their
arrival, made peace with John. Edward made his way to Calais to meet the
tidings of this desertion and to be called back to England by news of a
recapture of Berwick by the Scots. But his hopes of Norman co-operation
were revived in 1356. The treachery of John, his seizure of the King of
Navarre, and his execution of the Count of Harcourt who was looked upon as
the adviser of Charles in his policy of intrigue, stirred a general rising
throughout Normandy. Edward at once despatched troops under the Duke of
Lancaster to its support. But the insurgents were soon forced to fall back.
Conscious of the danger to which an English occupation of Normandy would
expose him, John hastened with a large army to the west, drove Lancaster to
Cherbourg, took Evreux, and besieged Breteuil.
Here however his progress was suddenly checked by news from the south. The
Black Prince, as the hero of Crécy was called, had landed in Guienne during
the preceding year and won a disgraceful success. Unable to pay his troops,
he staved off their demands by a campaign of sheer pillage. While plague
and war and the anarchy which sprang up under the weak government of John
were bringing ruin on the northern and central provinces of France, the
south remained prosperous and at peace. The young prince led his army of
freebooters up the Garonne into "what was before one of the fat countries
of the world, the people good and simple, who did not know what war was;
indeed no war had been waged against them till the Prince came. The English
and Gascons found the country full and gay, the rooms adorned with carpets
and draperies, the caskets and chests full of fair jewels. But nothing was
safe from these robbers. They, and especially the Gascons, who are very
greedy, carried off everything." Glutted by the sack of Carcassonne and
Narbonne the plunderers fell back to Bordeaux, "their horses so laden with
spoil that they could hardly move." Worthier work awaited the Black Prince
in the following year. In the plan of campaign for 1356 it had been
arranged that he should march upon the Loire, and there unite with a force
under the Duke of Lancaster which was to land in Britanny and push rapidly
into the heart of France. Delays however hindered the Prince from starting
from Bordeaux till July, and when his march brought him to the Loire the
plan of campaign had already broken down. The outbreak in Normandy had
tempted the English Council to divert the force under Lancaster from
Britanny to that province; and the Duke was now at Cherbourg, hard pressed
by the French army under John. But if its original purpose was foiled, the
march of the Black Prince on the Loire served still more effectively the
English cause. His advance pointed straight upon Paris, and again as in the
Crécy campaign John was forced to leave all for the protection of the
capital. Hasty marches brought the king to the Loire while Prince Edward
still lay at Vierzon on the Cher. Unconscious of John's designs, he wasted
some days in the capture of Romorantin while the French troops were
crossing the Loire along its course from Orleans to Tours and John with the
advance was hurrying through Loches upon Poitiers in pursuit, as he
supposed, of the retreating Englishmen. But the movement of the French
army, near as it was, was unknown in the English camp; and when the news of
it forced the Black Prince to order a retreat the enemy was already far
ahead of him. Edward reached the fields north of Poitiers to find his line
of retreat cut off and a French army of sixty thousand men interposed
between his forces and Bordeaux.
If the Prince had shown little ability in his management of the campaign,
he showed tactical skill in the fight which was now forced on him. On the
nineteenth of September he took a strong position in the fields of
Maupertuis, where his front was covered by thick hedges and approachable
only by a deep and narrow lane which ran between vineyards. The vineyards
and hedges he lined with bowmen, and drew up his small body of men-at-arms
at the point where the lane opened upon the higher plain on which he was
himself encamped. Edward's force numbered only eight thousand men, and the
danger was great enough to force him to offer in exchange for a free
retreat the surrender of his prisoners and of the places he had taken, with
an oath not to fight against France for seven years to come. His offers
however were rejected, and the battle opened with a charge of three hundred
French knights up the narrow lane. But the lane was soon choked with men
and horses, while the front ranks of the advancing army fell back before a
galling fire of arrows from the hedgerows. In this moment of confusion a
body of English horsemen, posted unseen by their opponents on a hill to the
right, charged suddenly on the French flank, and the Prince watching the
disorder which was caused by the repulse and surprise fell boldly on their
front. The steady shot of the English archers completed the panic produced
by this sudden attack. The first French line was driven in, and on its rout
the second, a force of sixteen thousand men, at once broke in wild terror
and fled from the field. John still held his ground with the knights of the
reserve, whom he had unwisely ordered to dismount from their horses, till a
charge of the Black Prince with two thousand lances threw this last body
into confusion. The French king was taken, desperately fighting; and when
his army poured back at noon in utter rout to the gates of Poitiers eight
thousand of their number had fallen on the field, three thousand in the
flight, and two thousand men-at-arms, with a crowd of nobles, were taken
prisoners. The royal captive entered London in triumph, mounted on a big
white charger, while the Prince rode by his side on a little black hackney
to the palace of the Savoy, which was chosen as John's dwelling, and a
truce for two years seemed to give healing-time to France.
With the Scots Edward the Third had less good fortune. Recalled from Calais
by their seizure of Berwick, the king induced Balliol to resign into his
hands his shadowy sovereignty, and in the spring of 1356 marched upon
Edinburgh with an overpowering army, harrying and burning as he marched.
But the Scots refused an engagement, a fleet sent with provisions was
beaten off by a storm, and the famine-stricken army was forced to fall
rapidly back on the border in a disastrous retreat. The trial convinced
Edward that the conquest of Scotland was impossible, and by a rapid change
of policy which marks the man he resolved to seek the friendship of the
country he had wasted so long. David Bruce was released on promise of
ransom, a truce concluded for ten years, and the prohibition of trade
between the two kingdoms put an end to. But the fulness of this
reconciliation screened a dexterous intrigue. David was childless, and
Edward availed himself of the difficulty which the young king experienced
in finding means of providing the sum demanded for his ransom to bring him
over to a proposal which would have united the two countries for ever. The
scheme however was carefully concealed; and it was not till 1363 that David
proposed to his Parliament to set aside on his death the claims of the
Steward of Scotland to his crown, and to choose Edward's third son, Lionel,
Duke of Clarence, as his successor. Though the proposal was scornfully
rejected, negotiations were still carried on between the two kings for the
realization of this project, and were probably only put an end to by the
calamities of Edward's later years.
In France misery and misgovernment seemed to be doing Edward's work more
effectively than arms. The miserable country found no rest in itself. Its
routed soldiery turned into free companies of bandits, while the lords
captured at Crécy or Poitiers procured the sums needed for their ransom by
extortion from the peasantry. The reforms demanded by the States-General
which met in this agony of France were frustrated by the treachery of the
Regent, John's eldest son Charles, Duke of Normandy, till Paris, impatient
of his weakness and misrule, rose in arms against the Crown. The peasants
too, driven mad by oppression and famine, rose in wild insurrection,
butchering their lords and firing their castles over the whole face of
France. Paris and the Jacquerie, as this peasant rising was called, were at
last crushed by treachery and the sword: and, exhausted as it was, France
still backed the Regent in rejecting a treaty of peace by which John in
1359 proposed to buy his release. By this treaty Maine, Touraine, and
Poitou in the south, Normandy, Guisnes, Ponthieu, and Calais in the west
were ceded to the English king. On its rejection Edward in 1360 poured
ravaging over the wasted land. Famine however proved its best defence. "I
could not believe," said Petrarch of this time, "that this was the same
France which I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented itself
to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated,
houses in ruins. Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed everywhere marks of
desolation and conflagration. The streets are deserted, the roads overgrown
with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude." The utter desolation forced
Edward to carry with him an immense train of provisions, and thousands of
baggage waggons with mills, ovens, forges, and fishing-boats, formed a long
train which streamed for six miles behind his army. After a fruitless
attempt upon Reims he forced the Duke of Burgundy to conclude a treaty with
him by pushing forward to Tonnerre, and then descending the Seine appeared
with his army before Paris. But the wasted country forbade a siege, and
Edward after summoning the town in vain was forced to fall back for
subsistence on the Loire. It was during this march that the Duke of
Normandy's envoys overtook him with proposals of peace. The misery of the
land had at last bent Charles to submission, and in May a treaty was
concluded at Brétigny, a small place to the eastward of Chartres. By this
treaty the English king waived his claims on the crown of France and on the
Duchy of Normandy. On the other hand, his Duchy of Aquitaine, which
included Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, and Saintonge, the Limousin and the
Angoumois, Périgord and the counties of Bigorre and Rouergue, was not only
restored but freed from its obligations as a French fief and granted in
full sovereignty with Ponthieu, Edward's heritage from the second wife of
Edward the First, as well as with Guisnes and his new conquest of Calais.
The Peace of Brétigny set its seal upon Edward's glory. But within England
itself the misery of the people was deepening every hour. Men believed the
world to be ending, and the judgement day to be near. A few months after
the Peace came a fresh swoop of the Black Death, carrying off the Duke of
Lancaster. The repressive measures of Parliament and the landowners only
widened the social chasm which parted employer from employed. We can see
the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance both to the reactionary efforts
which were being made to bring back labour services and to the enactments
which again bound labour to the soil in statutes which strove in vain to
repress the strikes and combinations which became frequent in the towns and
the more formidable gatherings of villeins and "fugitive serfs" in the
country at large. A statute of later date throws light on the nature of the
resistance of the last. It tells us that "villeins and holders of land in
villeinage withdrew their customs and services from their lords, having
attached themselves to other persons who maintained and abetted them, and
who under colour of exemplifications from Domesday of the manors and
villages where they dwelt claimed to be quit of all manner of services
either of their body or of their lands, and would suffer no distress or
other course of justice to be taken against them; the villeins aiding their
maintainers by threatening the officers of their lords with peril to life
and limb as well by open assemblies as by confederacies to support each
other." It would seem not only as if the villein was striving to resist the
reactionary tendency of the lords of manors to regain his labour service
but that in the general overturning of social institutions the copyholder
was struggling to make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to be
recognized as proprietor of the demesne he held on lease.
A more terrible outcome of the general suffering was seen in a new revolt
against the whole system of social inequality which had till then passed
unquestioned as the divine order of the world. The Peace was hardly signed
when the cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the words of "a mad
priest of Kent" as the courtly Froissart calls him, who for twenty years to
come found audience for his sermons in spite of interdict and imprisonment
in the stout yeomen who gathered round him in the churchyards of Kent.
"Mad" as the landowners held him to be, it was in the preaching of John
Ball that England first listened to a declaration of the natural equality
and rights of man. "Good people," cried the preacher, "things will never be
well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be
villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater
folk than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in
serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how
can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they
make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are
clothed in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are
covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we
oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses;
we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is
of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." It was the tyranny
of property that then as ever roused the defiance of socialism. A spirit
fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rime
which condensed the levelling doctrine of John Ball:
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
More impressive, because of the very restraint and moderation of its tone,
is the poem in which William Langland began at the same moment to embody
with a terrible fidelity all the darker and sterner aspects of the time,
its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the misery of the
poor, the selfishness and corruption of the rich. Nothing brings more
vividly home to us the social chasm which in the fourteenth century severed
the rich from the poor than the contrast between his "Complaint of Piers
the Ploughman" and the "Canterbury Tales." The world of wealth and ease and
laughter through which the courtly Chaucer moves with, eyes downcast as in
a pleasant dream is a far-off world of wrong and of ungodliness to the
gaunt poet of the poor. Born probably in Shropshire, where he had been put
to school and received minor orders as a clerk, "Long Will," as Langland
was nicknamed from his tall stature, found his way at an early age to
London, and earned a miserable livelihood there by singing "placebos" and
"diriges" in the stately funerals of his day. Men took the moody clerk for
a madman; his bitter poverty quickened the defiant pride that made him
loth, as he tells us, to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode decked in
silver and minivere along the Cheap or to exchange a "God save you" with
the law sergeants as he passed their new house in the Temple. His world is
the world of the poor; he dwells on the poor man's life, on his hunger and
toil, his rough revelry and his despair, with the narrow intensity of a man
who has no outlook beyond it. The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of
the life he paints reflect themselves in his verse. It is only here and
there that a love of nature or a grim earnestness of wrath quickens his
rime into poetry; there is not a gleam of the bright human sympathy of
Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the gaiety, the tenderness, the daring of
the world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest
contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous
allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed texts from Scripture which form
the staple of Langland's work, are only broken here and there by phrases of
a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad
Hogarthian humour. What chains one to the poem is its deep undertone of
sadness: the world is out of joint, and the gaunt rimer who stalks silently
along the Strand has no faith in his power to put it right.
Londoner as he is, Will's fancy flies far from the sin and suffering of the
great city to a May-morning in the Malvern Hills. "I was weary forwandered
and went me to rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I lay and
leaned and looked in the water I slumbered in a sleeping, it sweyved
(sounded) so merry." Just as Chaucer gathers the typical figures of the
world he saw into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers into a wide
field his army of traders and chafferers, of hermits and solitaries, of
minstrels, "japers and jinglers," bidders and beggars, ploughmen that "in
setting and in sowing swonken (toil) full hard," pilgrims "with their
wenches after," weavers and labourers, burgess and bondman, lawyer and
scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, and pardoners "parting the
silver" with the parish priest. Their pilgrimage is not to Canterbury but
to Truth; their guide to Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the
Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in his field. He it is who bids the
knight no more wrest gifts from his tenant nor misdo with the poor. "Though
he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven that he be worthier set
and with more bliss than thou.... For in charnel at church churles be evil
to know, or a knight from a knave there." The gospel of equality is backed
by the gospel of labour. The aim of the Ploughman is to work, and to make
the world work with him. He warns the labourer as he warns the knight.
Hunger is God's instrument in bringing the idlest to toil, and Hunger waits
to work her will on the idler and the waster. On the eve of the great
struggle between wealth and labour, Langland stands alone in his fairness
to both, in his shrewd political and religious common sense. In the face of
the popular hatred which was to gather round John of Gaunt, he paints the
Duke in a famous apologue as the cat who, greedy as she might be, at any
rate keeps the noble rats from utterly devouring the mice of the people.
Though the poet is loyal to the Church, he proclaims a righteous life to be
better than a host of indulgences, and God sends His pardon to Piers when
priests dispute it. But he sings as a man conscious of his loneliness and
without hope. It is only in a dream that he sees Corruption, "Lady Mede,"
brought to trial, and the world repenting at the preaching of Reason. In
the waking life reason finds no listeners. The poet himself is looked
upon--he tells us bitterly--as a madman. There is a terrible despair in the
close of his later poem, where the triumph of Christ is only followed by
the reign of Antichrist; where Contrition slumbers amidst the revel of
Death and Sin; and Conscience, hard beset by Pride and Sloth, rouses
himself with a last effort, and seizing his pilgrim staff, wanders over the
world to find Piers Ploughman.
The strife indeed which Langland would have averted raged only the fiercer
as the dark years went by. If the Statutes of Labourers were powerless for
their immediate ends, either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in
restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas of employment,
they proved effective in sowing hatred between employer and employed,
between rich and poor. But this social rift was not the only rift which was
opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The close of William
Langland's poem is the prophecy of a religious revolution; and the way for
such a revolution was being paved by the growing bitterness of strife
between England and the Papacy. In spite of the sharp protests from king
and parliament the need for money at Avignon was too great to allow any
relaxation in the Papal claims. Almost on the eve of Crécy Edward took the
decisive step of forbidding the entry into England of any Papal bulls or
documents interfering with the rights of presentation belonging to private
patrons. But the tenacity of Rome was far from loosening its grasp on this
source of revenue for all Edward's protests. Crécy however gave a new
boldness to the action of the State, and a Statute of Provisors was passed
by the Parliament in 1351 which again asserted the rights of the English
Church and enacted that all who infringed them by the introduction of Papal
"provisors" should suffer imprisonment. But resistance to provisors only
brought fresh vexations. The patrons who withstood a Papal nominee in the
name of the law were summoned to defend themselves in the Papal Court. From
that moment the supremacy of the Papal law over the law of the land became
a great question in which the lesser question of provisors merged. The
pretension of the Court of Avignon was met in 1353 by a statute which
forbade any questioning of judgements rendered in the King's Courts or any
prosecution of a suit in foreign courts under pain of outlawry, perpetual
imprisonment, or banishment from the land. It was this act of Prĉmunire--as
it came in after renewals to be called--which furnished so terrible a
weapon to the Tudors in their later strife with Rome. But the Papacy paid
little heed to these warnings, and its obstinacy in still receiving suits
and appeals in defiance of this statute roused the pride of a conquering
people. England was still fresh from her glory at Brétigny when Edward
appealed to the Parliament of 1365. Complaints, he said, were constantly
being made by his subjects to the Pope as to matters which were cognizable
in the King's Courts. The practice of provisors was thus maintained in the
teeth of the laws, and "the laws, usages, ancient customs, and franchises
of his kingdom were thereby much hindered, the King's crown degraded, and
his person defamed." The king's appeal was hotly met. "Biting words," which
it was thought wise to suppress, were used in the debate which followed,
and the statutes against provisors and appeals were solemnly confirmed.
What gave point to this challenge was the assent of the prelates to the
proceedings of the Parliament; and the pride of Urban V. at once met it by
a counter-defiance. He demanded with threats the payment of the annual sum
of a thousand marks promised by King John in acknowledgement of the
suzerainty of the See of Rome. The insult roused the temper of the realm.
The king laid the demand before Parliament, and both houses replied that
"neither King John nor any king could put himself, his kingdom, nor his
people under subjection save with their accord or assent." John's
submission had been made "without their assent and against his coronation
oath" and they pledged themselves, should the Pope attempt to enforce his
claim, to resist him with all their power. Even Urban shrank from
imperilling the Papacy by any further demands, and the claim to a Papal
lordship over England was never again heard of. But the struggle had
brought to the front a man who was destined to give a far wider scope and
significance to this resistance to Rome than any as yet dreamed of. Nothing
is more remarkable than the contrast between the obscurity of John Wyclif's
earlier life and the fulness and vividness of our knowledge of him during
the twenty years which preceded its close. Born in the earlier part of the
fourteenth century, he had already passed middle age when he was appointed
to the mastership of Balliol College in the University of Oxford and
recognized as first among the schoolmen of his day. Of all the scholastic
doctors those of England had been throughout the keenest and most daring in
philosophical speculation. A reckless audacity and love of novelty was the
common note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as against the sober and
more disciplined learning of the Parisian schoolmen, Albert and Thomas
Aquinas. The decay of the University of Paris during the English wars was
transferring her intellectual supremacy to Oxford, and in Oxford Wyclif
stood without a rival. From his predecessor, Bradwardine, whose work as a
scholastic teacher he carried on in the speculative treatises he published
during this period, he inherited the tendency to a predestinarian
Augustinianism which formed the groundwork of his later theological revolt.
His debt to Ockham revealed itself in his earliest efforts at Church
reform. Undismayed by the thunder and excommunications of the Church,
Ockham had supported the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria in his recent struggle,
and he had not shrunk in his enthusiasm for the Empire from attacking the
foundations of the Papal supremacy or from asserting the rights of the
civil power. The spare, emaciated frame of Wyclif, weakened by study and
asceticism, hardly promised a reformer who would carry on the stormy work
of Ockham; but within this frail form lay a temper quick and restless, an
immense energy, an immovable conviction, an unconquerable pride. The
personal charm which ever accompanies real greatness only deepened the
influence he derived from the spotless purity of his life. As yet indeed
even Wyclif himself can hardly have suspected the immense range of his
intellectual power. It was only the struggle that lay before him which
revealed in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later English
prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous
politician, an audacious partizan, the organizer of a religious order, the
unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of
controversialists, the first Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone,
to question and deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break
through the tradition of the past, and with his last breath to assert the
freedom of religious thought against the dogmas of the Papacy.
At the moment of the quarrel with Pope Urban however Wyclif was far from
having advanced to such a position as this. As the most prominent of
English scholars it was natural that he should come forward in defence of
the independence and freedom of the English Church; and he published a
formal refutation of the claims advanced by the Papacy to deal at its will
with church property in the form of a report of the Parliamentary debates
which we have described. As yet his quarrel was not with the doctrines of
Rome but with its practices; and it was on the principles of Ockham that he
defended the Parliament's refusal of the "tribute" which was claimed by
Urban. But his treatise on "The Kingdom of God," "De Dominio Divino," which
can hardly have been written later than 1368, shows the breadth of the
ground he was even now prepared to take up. In this, the most famous of his
works, Wyclif bases his argument on a distinct ideal of society. All
authority, to use his own expression, is "founded in grace." Dominion in
the highest sense is in God alone; it is God who as the suzerain of the
universe deals out His rule in fief to rulers in their various stations on
tenure of their obedience to Himself. It was easy to object that in such a
case "dominion" could never exist, since mortal sin is a breach of such a
tenure and all men sin. But, as Wyclif urged it, the theory is a purely
ideal one. In actual practice he distinguishes between dominion and power,
power which the wicked may have by God's permission, and to which the
Christian must submit from motives of obedience to God. In his own
scholastic phrase, so strangely perverted afterwards, here on earth "God
must obey the devil." But whether in the ideal or practical view of the
matter all power and dominion was of God. It was granted by Him not to one
person, His Vicar on earth, as the Papacy alleged, but to all. The king was
as truly God's Vicar as the Pope. The royal power was as sacred as the
ecclesiastical, and as complete over temporal things, even over the
temporalities of the Church, as that of the Church over spiritual things.
So far as the question of Church and State therefore was concerned the
distinction between the ideal and practical view of "dominion" was of
little account. Wyclif's application of the theory to the individual
conscience was of far higher and wider importance. Obedient as each
Christian might be to king or priest, he himself as a possessor of
"dominion" held immediately of God. The throne of God Himself was the
tribunal of personal appeal. What the Reformers of the sixteenth century
attempted to do by their theory of Justification by Faith Wyclif attempted
to do by his theory of Dominion, a theory which in establishing a direct
relation between man and God swept away the whole basis of a mediating
priesthood, the very foundation on which the mediaeval church was built.
As yet the full bearing of these doctrines was little seen. But the social
and religious excitement which we have described was quickened by the
renewal of the war, and the general suffering and discontent gathered
bitterness when the success which had flushed England with a new and
warlike pride passed into a long series of disasters in which men forgot
the glories of Crécy and Poitiers. Triumph as it seemed, the treaty of
Brétigny was really fatal to Edward's cause in the south of France. By the
cession of Aquitaine to him in full sovereignty the traditional claim on
which his strength rested lost its force. The people of the south had clung
to their Duke, even though their Duke was a foreign ruler. They had
stubbornly resisted incorporation with Northern France. While preserving
however their traditional fealty to the descendants of Eleanor they still
clung to the equally traditional suzerainty of the kings of France. But the
treaty of Brétigny not only severed them from the realm of France, it
subjected them to the realm of England. Edward ceased to be their
hereditary Duke, he became simply an English king ruling Aquitaine as an
English dominion. If the Southerners loved the North-French little, they
loved the English less, and the treaty which thus changed their whole
position was followed by a quick revulsion of feeling from the Garonne to
the Pyrenees. The Gascon nobles declared that John had no right to transfer
their fealty to another and to sever them from the realm of France. The
city of Rochelle prayed the French king not to release it from its fealty
to him. "We will obey the English with our lips," said its citizens, "but
our hearts shall never be moved towards them." Edward strove to meet this
passion for local independence, this hatred of being ruled from London, by
sending the Black Prince to Bordeaux and investing him in 1362 with the
Duchy of Aquitaine. But the new Duke held his Duchy as a fief from the
English king, and the grievance of the Southerners was left untouched.
Charles V. who succeeded his father John in 1364 silently prepared to reap
this harvest of discontent. Patient, wary, unscrupulous, he was hardly
crowned before he put an end to the war which had gone on without a pause
in Britanny by accepting homage from the claimant whom France had hitherto
opposed. Through Bertrand du Guesclin, a fine soldier whom his sagacity had
discovered, he forced the king of Navarre to a peace which closed the
fighting in Normandy. A more formidable difficulty in the way of
pacification and order lay in the Free Companies, a union of marauders whom
the disbanding of both armies after the peace had set free to harry the
wasted land and whom the king's military resources were insufficient to
cope with. It was the stroke by which Charles cleared his realm of these
scourges which forced on a new struggle with the English in the south.
In the judgement of the English court the friendship of Castille was of the
first importance for the security of Aquitaine. Spain was the strongest
naval power of the western world, and not only would the ports of Guienne
be closed but its communication with England would be at once cut off by
the appearance of a joint French and Spanish fleet in the Channel. It was
with satisfaction therefore that Edward saw the growth of a bitter
hostility between Charles and the Castilian king, Pedro the Cruel, through
the murder of his wife, Blanche of Bourbon, the French king's
sister-in-law. Henry of Trastamara, a bastard son of Pedro's father Alfonso
the Eleventh, had long been a refugee at the French court, and soon after
the treaty of Brétigny Charles in his desire to revenge this murder on
Pedro gave Henry aid in an attempt on the Castilian throne. It was
impossible for England to look on with indifference while a dependant of
the French king became master of Castille; and in 1362 a treaty offensive
and defensive was concluded between Pedro and Edward the Third. The time
was not come for open war; but the subtle policy of Charles saw in this
strife across the Pyrenees an opportunity both of detaching Castille from
the English cause and of ridding himself of the Free Companies. With
characteristic caution he dexterously held himself in the background while
he made use of the Pope, who had been threatened by the Free Companies in
his palace at Avignon and was as anxious to get rid of them as himself.
Pedro's cruelty, misgovernment, and alliance with the Moslem of Cordova
served as grounds for a crusade which was proclaimed by Pope Urban; and Du
Guesclin, who was placed at the head of the expedition, found in the Papal
treasury and in the hope of booty from an unravaged land means of gathering
the marauders round his standard. As soon as these Crusaders crossed the
Ebro Pedro was deserted by his subjects, and in 1366 Henry of Trastamara
saw himself crowned without a struggle at Burgos as king of Castille. Pedro
with his two daughters fled for shelter to Bordeaux and claimed the aid
promised in the treaty. The lords of Aquitaine shrank from fighting for
such a cause, but in spite of their protests and the reluctance of the
English council to embark in so distant a struggle Edward held that he had
no choice save to replace his ally, for to leave Henry seated on the throne
was to leave Aquitaine to be crushed between France and Castille.
The after course of the war proved that in his anticipations of the fatal
result of a combination of the two powers Edward was right, but his policy
jarred not only against the universal craving for rest, but against the
moral sense of the world. The Black Prince however proceeded to carry out
his father's design in the teeth of the general opposition. His call to
arms robbed Henry of the aid of those English Companies who had marched
till now with the rest of the crusaders, but who returned at once to the
standard of the Prince; the passes of Navarre were opened with gold, and in
the beginning of 1367 the English army crossed the Pyrenees. Advancing to
the Ebro the Prince offered battle at Navarete with an army already reduced
by famine and disease in its terrible winter march, and Henry with double
his numbers at once attacked him. But in spite of the obstinate courage of
the Castilian troops the discipline and skill of the English soldiers once
more turned the wavering day into a victory. Du Guesclin was taken, Henry
fled across the Pyrenees, and Pedro was again seated on his throne. The pay
however which he had promised was delayed; and the Prince, whose army had
been thinned by disease to a fifth of its numbers and whose strength never
recovered from the hardships of this campaign, fell back sick and beggared
to Aquitaine. He had hardly returned when his work was undone. In 1368
Henry reentered Castille; its towns threw open their gates; a general
rising chased Pedro from the throne, and a final battle in the spring of
1369 saw his utter overthrow. His murder by Henry's hand left the bastard
undisputed master of Castille. Meanwhile the Black Prince, sick and
disheartened, was hampered at Bordeaux by the expenses of the campaign
which Pedro had left unpaid. To defray his debt he was driven in 1368 to
lay a hearth-tax on Aquitaine, and the tax served as a pretext for an
outbreak of the long-hoarded discontent. Charles was now ready for open
action. He had won over the most powerful among the Gascon nobles, and
their influence secured the rejection of the tax in a Parliament of the
province which met at Bordeaux. The Prince, pressed by debt, persisted
against the counsel of his wisest advisers in exacting it; and the lords of
Aquitaine at once appealed to the king of France. Such an appeal was a
breach of the treaty of Brétigny in which the French king had renounced his
sovereignty over the south; but Charles had craftily delayed year after
year the formal execution of the renunciations stipulated in the treaty,
and he was still able to treat it as not binding on him. The success of
Henry of Trastamara decided him to take immediate action, and in 1369 he
summoned the Black Prince as Duke of Aquitaine to meet the appeal of the
Gascon lords in his court.
The Prince was maddened by the summons. "I will come," he replied, "but
with helmet on head, and with sixty thousand men at my back." War however
had hardly been declared when the ability with which Charles had laid his
plans was seen in his seizure of Ponthieu and in a rising of the whole
country south of the Garonne. Du Gueselin returned in 1370 from Spain to
throw life into the French attack. Two armies entered Guienne from the
east; and a hundred castles with La Réole and Limoges threw open their
gates to Du Guesclin. But the march of an English army from Calais upon
Paris recalled him from the south to guard the capital at a moment when the
English leader advanced to recover Limoges, and the Black Prince borne in a
litter to its walls stormed the town and sullied by a merciless massacre of
its inhabitants the fame of his earlier exploits. Sickness however recalled
him home in the spring of 1371; and the war, protracted by the caution of
Charles who forbade his armies to engage, did little but exhaust the energy
and treasure of England. As yet indeed the French attack had made small
impression on the south, where the English troops stoutly held their ground
against Du Guesclin's inroads. But the protracted war drained Edward's
resources, while the diplomacy of Charles was busy in rousing fresh dangers
from Scotland and Castille. It was in vain that Edward looked for allies to
the Flemish towns. The male line of the Counts of Flanders ended in Count
Louis le Mâle; and the marriage of his daughter Margaret with Philip, Duke
of Burgundy, a younger brother of the French king, secured Charles from
attack along his northern border. In Scotland the death of David Bruce put
an end to Edward's schemes for a reunion of the two kingdoms; and his
successor, Robert the Steward, renewed in 1371 the alliance with France.
Castille was a yet more serious danger; and an effort which Edward made to
neutralize its attack only forced Henry of Trastamara to fling his whole
weight into the struggle. The two daughters of Pedro had remained since
their father's flight at Bordeaux. The elder of these was now wedded to
John of Gaunt, Edward's fourth son, whom he had created Duke of Lancaster
on his previous marriage with Blanche, a daughter of Henry of Lancaster and
the heiress of that house, while the younger was wedded to Edward's fifth
son, the Earl of Cambridge. Edward's aim was that of raising again the
party of King Pedro and giving Henry of Trastamara work to do at home which
would hinder his interposition in the war of Guienne. It was with this view
that John of Gaunt on his marriage took the title of king of Castille. But
no adherent of Pedro's cause stirred in Spain, and Henry replied to the
challenge by sending a Spanish fleet to the Channel. A decisive victory
which this fleet won over an English convoy off Rochelle proved a fatal
blow to the English cause. It wrested from Edward the mastery of the seas,
and cut off all communication between England and Guienne. Charles was at
once roused to new exertions. Poitou, Saintonge, and the Angoumois yielded
to his general Du Guesclin; and Rochelle was surrendered by its citizens in
1372. The next year saw a desperate attempt to restore the fortune of the
English arms. A great army under John of Gaunt penetrated into the heart of
France. But it found no foe to engage. Charles had forbidden any fighting.
"If a storm rages over the land," said the king coolly, "it disperses of
itself; and so will it be with the English." Winter in fact overtook the
Duke of Lancaster in the mountains of Auvergne, and a mere fragment of his
host reached Bordeaux. The failure of this attack was the signal for a
general defection, and ere the summer of 1374 had closed the two towns of
Bordeaux and Bayonne were all that remained of the English possessions in
Southern France. Even these were only saved by the exhaustion of the
conquerors. The treasury of Charles was as utterly drained as the treasury
of Edward; and the kings were forced to a truce.
Only fourteen years had gone by since the Treaty of Brétigny raised England
to a height of glory such as it had never known before. But the years had
been years of a shame and suffering which stung the people to madness.
Never had England fallen so low. Her conquests were lost, her shores
insulted, her commerce swept from the seas. Within she was drained by the
taxation and bloodshed of the war. Its popularity had wholly died away.
When the Commons were asked in 1354 whether they would assent to a treaty
of perpetual peace if they might have it, "the said Commons responded all,
and all together, 'Yes, yes!'" The population was thinned by the ravages of
pestilence, for till 1369, which saw its last visitation, the Black Death
returned again and again. The social strife too gathered bitterness with
every effort at repression. It was in vain that Parliament after Parliament
increased the severity of its laws. The demands of the Parliament of 1376
show how inoperative the previous Statutes of Labourers had proved. They
prayed that constables be directed to arrest all who infringed the Statute,
that no labourer should be allowed to take refuge in a town and become an
artizan if there were need of his service in the county from which he came,
and that the king would protect lords and employers against the threats of
death uttered by serfs who refused to serve. The reply of the Royal Council
shows that statesmen at any rate were beginning to feel that repression
might be pushed too far. The king refused to interfere by any further and
harsher provisions between employers and employed, and left cases of breach
of law to be dealt with in his ordinary courts of justice. On the one side
he forbade the threatening gatherings which were already common in the
country, but on the other he forbade the illegal exactions of the
employers. With such a reply however the proprietary class were hardly
likely to be content. Two years later the Parliament of Gloucester called
for a Fugitive-slave Law, which would have enabled lords to seize their
serfs in whatever county or town they found refuge, and in 1379 they prayed
that judges might be sent five times a year into every shire to enforce the
Statute of Labourers.
But the strife between employers and employed was not the only rift which
was opening in the social structure. Suffering and defeat had stripped off
the veil which hid from the nation the shallow and selfish temper of Edward
the Third. His profligacy was now bringing him to a premature old age. He
was sinking into the tool of his ministers and his mistresses. The glitter
and profusion of his court, his splendid tournaments, his feasts, his Table
Round, his new order of chivalry, the exquisite chapel of St. Stephen whose
frescoed walls were the glory of his palace at Westminster, the vast keep
which crowned the hill of Windsor, had ceased to throw their glamour round
a king who tricked his Parliament and swindled his creditors. Edward paid
no debts. He had ruined the wealthiest bankers of Florence by a cool act of
bankruptcy. The sturdier Flemish burghers only wrested payment from him by
holding his royal person as their security. His own subjects fared no
better than foreigners. The prerogative of "purveyance" by which the king
in his progresses through the country had the right of first purchase of
all that he needed at fair market price became a galling oppression in the
hands of a bankrupt king who was always moving from place to place. "When
men hear of your coming," Archbishop Islip wrote to Edward, "everybody at
once for sheer fear sets about hiding or eating or getting rid of their
geese and chickens or other possessions that they may not utterly lose them
through your arrival. The purveyors and servants of your court seize on men
and horses in the midst of their field work. They seize on the very
bullocks that are at plough or at sowing, and force them to work for two or
three days at a time without a penny of payment. It is no wonder that men
make dole and murmur at your approach, for, as the truth is in God, I
myself, whenever I hear a rumour of it, be I at home or in chapter or in
church or at study, nay if I am saying mass, even I in my own person
tremble in every limb." But these irregular exactions were little beside
the steady pressure of taxation. Even in the years of peace fifteenths and
tenths, subsidies on wool and subsidies on leather, were demanded and
obtained from Parliament; and with the outbreak of war the royal demands
became heavier and more frequent. As failure followed failure the expenses
of each campaign increased an ineffectual attempt to relieve Rochelle cost
nearly a million; the march of John of Gaunt through France utterly drained
the royal treasury. Nor were these legal supplies all that the king drew
from the nation. He had repudiated his pledge to abstain from arbitrary
taxation of imports and exports. He sold monopolies to the merchants in
exchange for increased customs. He wrested supplies from the clergy by
arrangements with the bishops or the Pope. There were signs that Edward was
longing to rid himself of the control of Parliament altogether. The power
of the Houses seemed indeed as high as ever; great statutes were passed.
Those of Provisors and Prĉmunire settled the relations of England to the
Roman Court. That of Treason in 1352 defined that crime and its penalties.
That of the Staples in 1353 regulated the conditions of foreign trade and
the privileges of the merchant gilds which conducted it. But side by side
with these exertions of influence we note a series of steady encroachments
by the Crown on the power of the Houses. If their petitions were granted,
they were often altered in the royal ordinance which professed to embody
them. A plan of demanding supplies for three years at once rendered the
annual assembly of Parliament less necessary. Its very existence was
threatened by the convocation in 1352 and 1353 of occasional councils with
but a single knight from every shire and a single burgess from a small
number of the greater towns, which acted as Parliament and granted
subsidies.
What aided Edward above all in eluding or defying the constitutional
restrictions on arbitrary taxation, as well as in these more insidious
attempts to displace the Parliament, was the lessening of the check which
the Baronage and the Church had till now supplied. The same causes which
had long been reducing the number of the greater lords who formed the upper
house went steadily on. Under Edward the Second little more than seventy
were commonly summoned to Parliament; little more than forty were summoned
under Edward the Third, and of these the bulk were now bound to the Crown,
partly by their employment on its service, partly by their interest in the
continuance of the war. The heads of the Baronage too were members of the
royal family. Edward had carried out on a far wider scale than before the
policy which had been more or less adhered to from the days of Henry the
Third, that of gathering up in the hands of the royal house all the greater
heritages of the land. The Black Prince was married to Joan of Kent, the
heiress of Edward the First's younger son, Earl Edmund of Woodstock. His
marriage with the heiress of the Earl of Ulster brought to the king's
second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a great part of the possessions of
the de Burghs. Later on the possessions of the house of Bohun passed by
like matches to his youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, and to his grandson,
Henry of Lancaster. But the greatest English heritage fell to Edward's
third living son, John of Gaunt as he was called from his birth at Ghent
during his father's Flemish campaign. Originally created Earl of Richmond,
the death of his father-in-law, Henry of Lancaster, and of Henry's eldest
daughter, raised John in his wife's right to the Dukedom of Lancaster and
the Earldoms of Derby, Leicester, and Lincoln. But while the baronage were
thus bound to the Crown, they drifted more and more into an hostility with
the Church which in time disabled the clergy from acting as a check on it.
What rent the ruling classes in twain was the growing pressure of the war.
The nobles and knighthood of the country, already half ruined by the rise
in the labour market and the attitude of the peasantry, were pressed harder
than ever by the repeated subsidies which were called for by the
continuance of the struggle. In the hour of their distress they cast their
eyes greedily--as in the Norman and Angevin days--on the riches of the
Church. Never had her wealth been greater. Out of a population of some
three millions the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty
thousand. Wild tales of their riches floated about the country. They were
said to own in landed property alone more than a third of the soil, while
their "spiritualities" in dues and offerings amounted to twice the king's
revenue. Exaggerated as such statements were, the wealth of the Church was
really great; but even more galling to the nobles was its influence in the
royal councils. The feudal baronage, flushed with a new pride by its
victories at Crécy and Poitiers, looked with envy and wrath at the throng
of bishops around the council-board, and attributed to their love of peace
the errors and sluggishness which had caused, as they held, the disasters
of the war. To rob the Church of wealth and of power became the aim of a
great baronial party.
The efforts of the baronage indeed would have been fruitless had the
spiritual power of the Church remained as of old. But the clergy were rent
by their own dissensions. The higher prelates were busy with the cares of
political office, and severed from the lower priesthood by the scandalous
inequality between the revenues of the wealthier ecclesiastics and the
"poor parson" of the country. A bitter hatred divided the secular clergy
from the regular; and this strife went fiercely on in the Universities.
Fitz-Ralf, the Chancellor of Oxford, attributed to the friars the decline
which was already being felt in the number of academical students, and the
University checked by statute their practice of admitting mere children
into their order. The clergy too at large shared in the discredit and
unpopularity of the Papacy. Though they suffered more than any other class
from the exactions of Avignon, they were bound more and more to the Papal
cause. The very statutes which would have protected them were practically
set aside by the treacherous diplomacy of the Crown. At home and abroad the
Roman See was too useful for the king to come to any actual breach with it.
However much Edward might echo the bold words of his Parliament, he shrank
from an open contest which would have added the Papacy to his many foes,
and which would at the same time have robbed him of his most effective
means of wresting aids from the English clergy by private arrangement with
the Roman court. Rome indeed was brought to waive its alleged right of
appointing foreigners to English livings. But a compromise was arranged
between the Pope and the Crown in which both united in the spoliation and
enslavement of the Church. The voice of chapters, of monks, of
ecclesiastical patrons, went henceforth for nothing in the election of
bishops or abbots or the nomination to livings in the gift of churchmen.
The Crown recommended those whom it chose to the Pope, and the Pope
nominated them to see or cure of souls. The treasuries of both King and
Pope profited by the arrangement; but we can hardly wonder that after a
betrayal such as this the clergy placed little trust in statutes or royal
protection, and bowed humbly before the claims of Rome.
But what weakened the clergy most was their severance from the general
sympathies of the nation, their selfishness, and the worldliness of their
temper. Immense as their wealth was, they bore as little as they could of
the common burthens of the realm. They were still resolute to assert their
exemption from the common justice of the land, though the mild punishments
of the bishops' courts carried as little dismay as ever into the mass of
disorderly clerks. But privileged as they thus held themselves against all
interference from the lay world without them, they carried on a ceaseless
interference with the affairs of this lay world through their control over
wills, contracts and divorces. No figure was better known or more hated
than the summoner who enforced the jurisdiction and levied the dues of
their courts. By their directly religious offices they penetrated into the
very heart of the social life about them. But powerful as they were, their
moral authority was fast passing away. The wealthier churchmen with their
curled hair and hanging sleeves aped the costume of the knightly society
from which they were drawn and to which they still really belonged. We see
the general impression of their worldliness in Chaucer's pictures of the
hunting monk and the courtly prioress with her love-motto on her brooch.
The older religious orders in fact had sunk into mere landowners, while the
enthusiasm of the friars had in great part died away and left a crowd of
impudent mendicants behind it. Wyclif could soon with general applause
denounce them as sturdy beggars, and declare that "the man who gives alms
to a begging friar is ipso facto excommunicate."
It was this weakness of the Baronage and the Church, and the consequent
withdrawal of both as represented in the temporal and spiritual Estates of
the Upper House from the active part which they had taken till now in
checking the Crown that brought the Lower House to the front. The Knight of
the Shire was now finally joined with the Burgess of the Town to form the
Third Estate of the realm: and this union of the trader and the country
gentleman gave a vigour and weight to the action of the Commons which their
House could never have acquired had it remained as elsewhere a mere
gathering of burgesses. But it was only slowly and under the pressure of
one necessity after another that the Commons took a growing part in public
affairs. Their primary business was with taxation, and here they stood firm
against the evasions by which the king still managed to baffle their
exclusive right of granting supplies by voluntary agreements with the
merchants of the Staple. Their steady pressure at last obtained in 1362 an
enactment that no subsidy should henceforth be set upon wool without assent
of Parliament, while Purveyance was restricted by a provision that payments
should be made for all things taken for the king's use in ready money. A
hardly less important advance was made by the change of Ordinances into
Statutes. Till this time, even when a petition of the Houses was granted,
the royal Council had reserved to itself the right of modifying its form in
the Ordinance which professed to embody it. It was under colour of this
right that so many of the provisions made in Parliament had hitherto been
evaded or set aside. But the Commons now met this abuse by a demand that on
the royal assent being given their petitions should be turned without
change into Statutes of the Realm and derive force of law from their entry
on the Rolls of Parliament. The same practical sense was seen in their
dealings with Edward's attempt to introduce occasional smaller councils
with parliamentary powers. Such an assembly in 1353 granted a subsidy on
wool. The Parliament which met in the following year might have challenged
its proceedings as null and void, but the Commons more wisely contented
themselves with a demand that the ordinances passed in the preceding
assembly should receive the sanction of the Three Estates. A precedent for
evil was thus turned into a precedent for good, and though irregular
gatherings of a like sort were for a while occasionally held they were soon
seen to be fruitless and discontinued. But the Commons long shrank from
meddling with purely administrative matters. When Edward in his anxiety to
shift from himself the responsibility of the war referred to them in 1354
for advice on one of the numerous propositions of peace, they referred him
to the lords of his Council. "Most dreaded lord," they replied, "as to this
war and the equipment needful for it we are so ignorant and simple that we
know not how nor have the power to devise. Wherefore we pray your Grace to
excuse us in this matter, and that it please you with the advice of the
great and wise persons of your Council to ordain what seems best for you
for the honour and profit of yourself and of your kingdom. And whatsoever
shall be thus ordained by assent and agreement on the part of you and your
Lords we readily assent to and will hold it firmly established."
But humble as was their tone the growing power of the Commons showed itself
in significant changes. In 1363 the Chancellor opened Parliament with a
speech in English, no doubt as a tongue intelligible to the members of the
Lower House. From a petition in 1376 that knights of the shire may be
chosen by common election of the better folk of the shire and not merely
nominated by the sheriff without due election, as well as from an earlier
demand that the sheriffs themselves should be disqualified from serving in
Parliament during their term of office, we see that the Crown had already
begun not only to feel the pressure of the Commons but to meet it by
foisting royal nominees on the constituencies. Such an attempt at packing
the House would hardly have been resorted to had it not already proved too
strong for direct control. A further proof of its influence was seen in a
prayer of the Parliament that lawyers practising in the King's Courts might
no longer be eligible as knights of the shire. The petition marks the rise
of a consciousness that the House was now no mere gathering of local
representatives, but a national assembly, and that a seat in it could no
longer be confined to dwellers within the bounds of this county or that.
But it showed also a pressure for seats, a passing away of the old dread of
being returned as a representative and a new ambition to gain a place among
the members of the Commons. Whether they would or no indeed the Commons
were driven forward to a more direct interference with public affairs. From
the memorable statute of 1322 their right to take equal part in all matters
brought before Parliament had been incontestable, and their waiver of much
of this right faded away before the stress of time. Their assent was needed
to the great ecclesiastical statutes which regulated the relation of the
See of Rome to the realm. They naturally took a chief part in the enactment
and re-enactment of the Statute of Labourers. The Statute of the Staple,
with a host of smaller commercial and economical measures, was of their
origination. But it was not till an open breach took place between the
baronage and the prelates that their full weight was felt. In the
Parliament of 1371, on the resumption of the war, a noble taunted the
Church as an owl protected by the feathers which other birds had
contributed, and which they had a right to resume when a hawk's approach
threatened them. The worldly goods of the Church, the metaphor hinted, had
been bestowed on it for the common weal, and could be taken from it on the
coming of a common danger. The threat was followed by a prayer that the
chief offices of state, which had till now been held by the leading
bishops, might be placed in lay hands. The prayer was at once granted:
William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, resigned the Chancellorship,
another prelate the Treasury, to lay dependants of the great nobles; and
the panic of the clergy was seen in large grants which were voted by both
Convocations.
At the moment of their triumph the assailants of the Church found a leader
in John of Gaunt. The Duke of Lancaster now wielded the actual power of the
Crown. Edward himself was sinking into dotage. Of his sons the Black
Prince, who had never rallied from the hardships of his Spanish campaign,
was fast drawing to the grave; he had lost a second son by death in
childhood; the third, Lionel of Clarence, had died in 1368. It was his
fourth son therefore, John of Gaunt, to whom the royal power mainly fell.
By his marriage with the heiress of the house of Lancaster the Duke had
acquired lands and wealth, but he had no taste for the policy of the
Lancastrian house or for acting as leader of the barons in any
constitutional resistance to the Crown. His pride, already quickened by the
second match with Constance to which he owed his shadowy kingship of
Castille, drew him to the throne; and the fortune which placed the royal
power practically in his hands bound him only the more firmly to its cause.
Men held that his ambition looked to the Crown itself, for the approaching
death of Edward and the Prince of Wales left but a boy, Richard, the son of
the Black Prince, a child of but a few years old, and a girl, the daughter
of the Duke of Clarence, between John and the throne. But the Duke's
success fell short of his pride. In the campaign of 1373 he traversed
France without finding a foe and brought back nothing save a ruined army to
English shores. The peremptory tone in which money was demanded for the
cost of this fruitless march while the petitions of the Parliament were set
aside till it was granted roused the temper of the Commons. They
requested--it is the first instance of such a practice--a conference with
the lords, and while granting fresh subsidies prayed that the grant should
be spent only on the war. The resentment of the government at this advance
towards a control over the actual management of public affairs was seen in
the calling of no Parliament through the next two years. But the years were
disastrous both at home and abroad. The war went steadily against the
English arms. The long negotiations with the Pope which went on at Bruges
through 1375, and in which Wyclif took part as one of the royal
commissioners, ended in a compromise by which Rome yielded nothing. The
strife over the Statute of Labourers grew fiercer and fiercer, and a return
of the plague heightened the public distress. Edward was now wholly swayed
by Alice Perrers, and the Duke shared his power with the royal mistress.
But if we gather its tenor from the complaints of the succeeding Parliament
his administration was as weak as it was corrupt. The new lay ministers
lent themselves to gigantic frauds. The chamberlain, Lord Latimer, bought
up the royal debts and embezzled the public revenue. With Richard Lyons, a
merchant through whom the king negotiated with the gild of the Staple, he
reaped enormous profits by raising the price of imports and by lending to
the Crown at usurious rates of interest. When the empty treasury forced
them to call a Parliament the ministers tampered with the elections through
the sheriffs.
But the temper of the Parliament which met in 1376, and which gained from
after times the name of the Good Parliament, shows that these precautions
had utterly failed. Even their promise to pillage the Church had failed to
win for the Duke and his party the good will of the lesser gentry or the
wealthier burgesses who together formed the Commons. Projects of wide
constitutional and social change, of the humiliation and impoverishment of
an estate of the realm, were profoundly distasteful to men already
struggling with a social revolution on their own estates and in their own
workshops. But it was not merely its opposition to the projects of
Lancaster and his party among the baronage which won for this assembly the
name of the Good Parliament. Its action marked a new period in our
Parliamentary history, as it marked a new stage in the character of the
national opposition to the misrule of the Crown. Hitherto the task of
resistance had devolved on the baronage, and had been carried out through
risings of its feudal tenantry. But the misgovernment was now that of the
baronage or of a main part of the baronage itself in actual conjunction
with the Crown. Only in the power of the Commons lay any adequate means of
peaceful redress. The old reluctance of the Lower House to meddle with
matters of State was roughly swept away therefore by the pressure of the
time. The Black Prince, anxious to secure his child's succession by the
removal of John of Gaunt, the prelates with William of Wykeham at their
head, resolute again to take their place in the royal councils and to check
the projects of ecclesiastical spoliation put forward by their opponents,
alike found in it a body to oppose to the Duke's administration. Backed by
powers such as these, the action of the Commons showed none of their old
timidity or self-distrust. The presentation of a hundred and forty
petitions of grievances preluded a bold attack on the royal Council.
"Trusting in God, and standing with his followers before the nobles,
whereof the chief was John Duke of Lancaster, whose doings were ever
contrary," their speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare, denounced the
mis-management of the war, the oppressive taxation, and demanded an account
of the expenditure. "What do these base and ignoble knights attempt?" cried
John of Gaunt. "Do they think they be kings or princes of the land?" But
the movement was too strong to be stayed. Even the Duke was silenced by the
charges brought against the ministers. After a strict enquiry Latimer and
Lyons were alike thrown into prison, Alice Perrers was banished, and
several of the royal servants were driven from the Court. At this moment
the death of the Black Prince shook the power of the Parliament. But it
only heightened its resolve to secure the succession. His son, Richard of
Bordeaux, as he was called from the place of his birth, was now a child of
but ten years old; and it was known that doubts were whispered on the
legitimacy of his birth and claim. An early marriage of his mother Joan of
Kent, a granddaughter of Edward the First, with the Earl of Salisbury had
been annulled; but the Lancastrian party used this first match to throw
doubts on the validity of her subsequent union with the Black Prince and on
the right of Richard to the throne. The dread of Lancaster's ambition is
the first indication of the approach of what was from this time to grow
into the great difficulty of the realm, the question of the succession to
the Crown. From the death of Edward the Third to the death of Charles the
First no English sovereign felt himself secure from rival claimants of his
throne. As yet however the dread was a baseless one; the people were
heartily with the Prince and his child. The Duke's proposal that the
succession should be settled in case of Richard's death was rejected; and
the boy himself was brought into Parliament and acknowledged as heir of the
Crown.
To secure their work the Commons ended by obtaining the addition of nine
lords with William of Wykeham and two other prelates among them to the
royal Council. But the Parliament was no sooner dismissed than the Duke at
once resumed his power. His anger at the blow which had been dealt at his
projects was no doubt quickened by resentment at the sudden advance of the
Lower House. From the Commons who shrank even from giving counsel on
matters of state to the Commons who dealt with such matters as their
special business, who investigated royal accounts, who impeached royal
ministers, who dictated changes in the royal advisers, was an immense step.
But it was a step which the Duke believed could be retraced. His haughty
will flung aside all restraints of law. He dismissed the new lords and
prelates from the Council. He called back Alice Perrers and the disgraced
ministers. He declared the Good Parliament no parliament, and did not
suffer its petitions to be enrolled as statutes. He imprisoned Peter de la
Mare, and confiscated the possessions of William of Wykeham. His attack on
this prelate was an attack on the clergy at large, and the attack became
significant when the Duke gave his open patronage to the denunciations of
Church property which formed the favourite theme of John Wyclif. To Wyclif
such a prelate as Wykeham symbolized the evil which held down the Church.
His administrative ability, his political energy, his wealth and the
colleges at Winchester and at Oxford which it enabled him to raise before
his death, were all equally hateful. It was this wealth, this intermeddling
with worldly business, which the ascetic reformer looked upon as the curse
that robbed prelates and churchmen of that spiritual authority which could
alone meet the vice and suffering of the time. Whatever baser motives might
spur Lancaster and his party, their projects of spoliation must have seemed
to Wyclif projects of enfranchisement for the Church. Poor and powerless in
worldly matters, he held that she would have the wealth and might of heaven
at her command. Wyclif's theory of Church and State had led him long since
to contend that the property of the clergy might be seized and employed
like other property for national purposes. Such a theory might have been
left, as other daring theories of the schoolmen had been left, to the
disputation of the schools. But the clergy were bitterly galled when the
first among English teachers threw himself hotly on the side of the party
which threatened them with spoliation, and argued in favour of their
voluntary abandonment of all Church property and of a return to their
original poverty. They were roused to action when Wyclif came forward as
the theological bulwark of the Lancastrian party at a moment when the
clergy were freshly outraged by the overthrow of the bishops and the
plunder of Wykeham. They forced the king to cancel the sentence of
banishment from the precincts of the Court which had been directed against
the Bishop of Winchester by refusing any grant of supply in Convocation
till William of Wykeham took his seat in it. But in the prosecution of
Wyclif they resolved to return blow for blow. In February 1377 he was
summoned before Bishop Courtenay of London to answer for his heretical
propositions concerning the wealth of the Church.
The Duke of Lancaster accepted the challenge as really given to himself,
and stood by Wyclif's side in the Consistory Court at St. Paul's. But no
trial took place. Fierce words passed between the nobles and the prelate:
the Duke himself was said to have threatened to drag Courtenay out of the
church by the hair of his head; at last the London populace, to whom John
of Gaunt was hateful, burst in to their Bishop's rescue, and Wyclif's life
was saved with difficulty by the aid of the soldiery. But his boldness only
grew with the danger. A Papal bull which was procured by the bishops,
directing the University to condemn and arrest him, extorted from him a
bold defiance. In a defence circulated widely through the kingdom and laid
before Parliament, Wyclif broadly asserted that no man could be
excommunicated by the Pope "unless he were first excommunicated by
himself." He denied the right of the Church to exact or defend temporal
privileges by spiritual censures, declared that a Church might justly be
deprived by the king or lay lords of its property for defect of duty, and
defended the subjection of ecclesiastics to civil tribunals. It marks the
temper of the time and the growing severance between the Church and the
nation that, bold as the defiance was, it won the support of the people as
of the Crown. When Wyclif appeared at the close of the year in Lambeth
Chapel to answer the Archbishop's summons a message from the Court forbade
the primate to proceed and the Londoners broke in and dissolved the
session.
Meanwhile the Duke's unscrupulous tampering with elections had packed the
Parliament of 1377 with his adherents. The work of the Good Parliament was
undone, and the Commons petitioned for the restoration of all who had been
impeached by their predecessors. The needs of the treasury were met by a
novel form of taxation. To the earlier land-tax, to the tax on personality
which dated from the Saladin Tithe, to the customs duties which had grown
into importance in the last two reigns, was now added a tax which reached
every person in the realm, a poll-tax of a groat a head. In this tax were
sown the seeds of future trouble, but when the Parliament broke up in March
the Duke's power seemed completely secured. Hardly three months later it
was wholly undone. In June Edward the Third died in a dishonoured old age,
robbed on his death-bed even of his rings by the mistress to whom he clung,
and the accession of his grandson, Richard the Second, changed the whole
face of affairs. The Duke withdrew from Court, and sought a reconciliation
with the party opposed to him. The men of the Good Parliament surrounded
the new king, and a Parliament which assembled in October took vigorously
up its work. Peter de la Mare was released from prison and replaced in the
chair of the House of Commons. The action of the Lower House indeed was as
trenchant and comprehensive as that of the Good Parliament itself. In
petition after petition the Commons demanded the confirmation of older
rights and the removal of modern abuses. They complained of administrative
wrongs such as the practice of purveyance, of abuses of justice, of the
oppressions of officers of the exchequer and of the forest, of the ill
state of prisons, of the customs of "maintenance" and "livery" by which
lords extended their protection to shoals of disorderly persons and
overawed the courts by means of them. Amid ecclesiastical abuses they noted
the state of the Church courts, and the neglect of the laws of Provisors.
They demanded that the annual assembly of Parliament, which had now become
customary, should be defined by law, and that bills once sanctioned by the
Crown should be forthwith turned into statutes without further amendment or
change on the part of the royal Council. With even greater boldness they
laid hands on the administration itself. They not only demanded that the
evil counsellors of the last reign should be removed, and that the
treasurer of the subsidy on wool should account for its expenditure to the
lords, but that the royal Council should be named in Parliament, and chosen
from members of either estate of the realm. Though a similar request for
the nomination of the officers of the royal household was refused, their
main demand was granted. It was agreed that the great officers of state,
the chancellor, treasurer, and barons of exchequer should be named by the
lords in Parliament, and removed from their offices during the king's
"tender years" only on the advice of the lords. The pressure of the war,
which rendered the existing taxes insufficient, gave the House a fresh hold
on the Crown. While granting a new subsidy in the form of a land and
property tax, the Commons restricted its proceeds to the war, and assigned
two of their members, William Walworth and John Philpot, as a standing
committee to regulate its expenditure. The successor of this Parliament in
the following year demanded and obtained an account of the way in which the
subsidy had been spent.
The minority of the king, who was but eleven years old at his accession,
the weakness of the royal council amidst the strife of the baronial
factions, above all the disasters of the war without and the growing
anarchy within the realm itself, alone made possible this startling
assumption of the executive power by the Houses. The shame of defeat abroad
was being added to the misery and discomfort at home. The French war ran
its disastrous course. One English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a
second sunk by a storm; and a campaign in the heart of France ended, like
its predecessors, in disappointment and ruin. Meanwhile the strife between
employers and employed was kindling into civil war. The Parliament, drawn
as it was wholly from the proprietary classes, struggled as fiercely for
the mastery of the labourers as it struggled for the mastery of the Crown.
The Good Parliament had been as strenuous in demanding the enforcement of
the Statute of Labourers as any of its predecessors. In spite of statutes,
however, the market remained in the labourers' hands. The comfort of the
worker rose with his wages. Men who had "no land to live on but their hands
disdained to live on penny ale or bacon, and called for fresh flesh or
fish, fried or bake, and that hot and hotter for chilling of their maw."
But there were dark shades in this general prosperity of the labour class.
There were seasons of the year during which employment for the floating
mass of labour was hard to find. In the long interval between harvest-tide
and harvest-tide work and food were alike scarce in every homestead of the
time. Some lines of William Langland give us the picture of a farm of the
day. "I have no penny pullets for to buy, nor neither geese nor pigs, but
two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oaten cake, and two loaves
of beans and bran baken for my children. I have no salt bacon nor no cooked
meat collops for to make, but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbage
plants, and eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare to draw afield my dung
while the drought lasteth, and by this livelihood we must all live till
Lammas-tide [August, and by that I hope to have harvest in my croft." But
it was not till Lammas-tide that high wages and the new corn bade "Hunger
go to sleep," and during the long spring and summer the free labourer and
the "waster that will not work but wander about, that will eat no bread but
the finest wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest ale," was a source
of social and political danger. "He grieveth him against God and grudgeth
against Reason, and then curseth he the King and all his council after such
law to allow labourers to grieve." Such a smouldering mass of discontent as
this needed but a spark to burst into flame; and the spark was found in the
imposition of fresh taxation.
If John of Gaunt was fallen from his old power he was still the leading
noble in the realm, and it is possible that dread of the encroachments of
the last Parliament on the executive power drew after a time even the new
advisers of the Crown closer to him. Whatever was the cause, he again came
to the front. But the supplies voted in the past year were wasted in his
hands. A fresh expedition against France under the Duke himself ended in
failure before the walls of St. Malo, while at home his brutal household
was outraging public order by the murder of a knight who had incurred
John's anger in the precincts of Westminster. So great was the resentment
of the Londoners at this act that it became needful to summon Parliament
elsewhere than to the capital; and in 1378 the Houses met at Gloucester.
The Duke succeeded in bringing the Lords to refuse those conferences with
the Commons which had given unity to the action of the late Parliament, but
he was foiled in an attack on the clerical privilege of sanctuary and in
the threats which his party still directed against Church property, while
the Commons forced the royal Council to lay before them the accounts of the
last subsidy and to appoint a commission to examine into the revenue of the
Crown. Unhappily the financial policy of the preceding year was persisted
in. The check before St. Malo had been somewhat redeemed by treaties with
Charles of Evreux and the Duke of Britanny which secured to England the
right of holding Cherbourg and Brest; but the cost of these treaties only
swelled the expenses of the war. The fresh supplies voted at Gloucester
proved insufficient for their purpose, and a Parliament in the spring of
1379 renewed the Poll-tax in a graduated form. But the proceeds of the tax
proved miserably inadequate, and when fresh debts beset the Crown in 1380 a
return was again made to the old system of subsidies. But these failed in
their turn; and at the close of the year the Parliament again fell back on
a severer Poll-tax. One of the attractions of the new mode of taxation
seems to have been that the clergy, who adopted it for themselves, paid in
this way a larger share of the burthens of the state; but the chief ground
for its adoption lay, no doubt, in its bringing within the net of the
tax-gatherer a class which had hitherto escaped him, men such as the free
labourer, the village smith, the village tiler. But few courses could have
been more dangerous. The Poll-tax not only brought the pressure of the war
home to every household; it goaded into action precisely the class which
was already seething with discontent. The strife between labour and capital
was going on as fiercely as ever in country and in town. The landlords were
claiming new services, or forcing men who looked on themselves as free to
prove they were no villeins by law. The free labourer was struggling
against the attempt to exact work from him at low wages. The wandering
workman was being seized and branded as a vagrant. The abbey towns were
struggling for freedom against the abbeys. The craftsmen within boroughs
were carrying on the same strife against employer and craft-gild. And all
this mass of discontent was being heightened and organized by agencies with
which the Government could not cope. The poorer villeins and the free
labourers had long since banded together in secret conspiracies which the
wealthier villeins supported with money. The return of soldiers from the
war threw over the land a host of broken men, skilled in arms, and ready to
take part in any rising. The begging friars, wandering and gossiping from
village to village and street to street, shared the passions of the class
from which they sprang. Priests like Ball openly preached the doctrines of
communism. And to these had been recently added a fresh agency, which could
hardly fail to stir a new excitement. With the practical ability which
marked his character, Wyclif set on foot about this time a body of poor
preachers to supply, as he held, the place of those wealthier clergy who
had lost their hold on the land. The coarse sermons, bare feet, and russet
dress of these "Simple Priests" moved the laughter of rector and canon, but
they proved a rapid and effective means of diffusing Wyclif's protests
against the wealth and sluggishness of the clergy, and we can hardly doubt
that in the general turmoil their denunciation of ecclesiastical wealth
passed often into more general denunciations of the proprietary classes.
As the spring went by quaint rimes passed through the country, and served
as a summons to revolt. "John Ball," ran one, "greeteth you all, and doth
for to understand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might, will and
skill, God speed every dele." "Help truth," ran another, "and truth shall
help you! Now reigneth pride in price, and covetise is counted wise, and
lechery withouten shame, and gluttony withouten blame. Envy reigneth with
treason, and sloth is take in great season. God do bote, for now is tyme!"
We recognize Ball's hand in the yet more stirring missives of "Jack the
Miller" and "Jack the Carter." "Jack Miller asketh help to turn his mill
aright. He hath grounden small, small: the King's Son of Heaven he shall
pay for all. Look thy mill go aright with the four sailes, and the post
stand with steadfastness. With right and with might, with skill and with
will; let might help right, and skill go before will, and right before
might, so goeth our mill aright." "Jack Carter," ran the companion missive,
"prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well,
and aye better and better: for at the even men heareth the day." "Falseness
and guile," sang Jack Trewman, "have reigned too long, and truth hath been
set under a lock, and falseness and guile reigneth in every stock. No man
may come truth to, but if he sing 'si dedero.' True love is away that was
so good, and clerks for wealth work them woe. God do bote, for now is
time." In the rude jingle of these lines began for England the literature
of political controversy: they are the first predecessors of the pamphlets
of Milton and of Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the
mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants: their longing for
a right rule, for plain and simple justice; their scorn of the immorality
of the nobles and the infamy of the court; their resentment at the
perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.
From the eastern and midland counties the restlessness spread to all
England south of the Thames. But the grounds of discontent varied with
every district. The actual outbreak began on the 5th of June at Dartford,
where a tiler killed one of the collectors of the poll-tax in vengeance for
a brutal outrage on his daughter. The county at once rose in arms.
Canterbury, where "the whole town was of their mind," threw open its gates
to the insurgents who plundered the Archbishop's palace and dragged John
Ball from his prison. A hundred thousand Kentishmen gathered round Walter
Tyler of Essex and John Hales of Malling to march upon London. Their
grievance was mainly a political one. Villeinage was unknown in Kent. As
the peasants poured towards Blackheath indeed every lawyer who fell into
their hands was put to death; "not till all these were killed would the
land enjoy its old freedom again," the Kentishmen shouted as they fired the
houses of the stewards and flung the rolls of the manor-courts into the
flames. But this action can hardly have been due to anything more than
sympathy with the rest of the realm, the sympathy which induced the same
men when pilgrims from the north brought news that John of Gaunt was
setting free his bondmen to send to the Duke an offer to make him Lord and
King of England. Nor was their grievance a religious one. Lollardry can
have made little way among men whose grudge against the Archbishop of
Canterbury sprang from his discouragement of pilgrimages. Their discontent
was simply political; they demanded the suppression of the poll-tax and
better government; their aim was to slay the nobles and wealthier clergy,
to take the king into their own hands, and pass laws which should seem good
to the Commons of the realm. The whole population joined the Kentishmen as
they marched along, while the nobles were paralyzed with fear. The young
king--he was but a boy of sixteen--addressed them from a boat on the river;
but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of Archbishop Sudbury to
allow him to land kindled the peasants to fury, and with cries of "Treason"
the great mass rushed on London. On the 13th of June its gates were flung
open by the poorer artizans within the city, and the stately palace of John
of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses
of the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze. But the insurgents, as they
proudly boasted, were "seekers of truth and justice, not thieves or
robbers," and a plunderer found carrying off a silver vessel from the sack
of the Savoy was flung with his spoil into the flames. Another body of
insurgents encamped at the same time to the east of the city. In Essex and
the eastern counties the popular discontent was more social than political.
The demands of the peasants were that bondage should be abolished, that
tolls and imposts on trade should be done away with, that "no acre of land
which is held in bondage or villeinage be held at higher rate than
fourpence a year," in other words for a money commutation of all villein
services. Their rising had been even earlier than that of the Kentishmen.
Before Whitsuntide an attempt to levy the poll-tax gathered crowds of
peasants together, armed with clubs, rusty swords, and bows. The royal
commissioners who were sent to repress the tumult were driven from the
field, and the Essex men marched upon London on one side of the river as
the Kentishmen marched on the other. The evening of the thirteenth, the day
on which Tyler entered the city, saw them encamped without its walls at
Mile-end. At the same moment Highbury and the northern heights were
occupied by the men of Hertfordshire and the villeins of St. Albans, where
a strife between abbot and town had been going on since the days of Edward
the Second.
The royal Council with the young king had taken refuge in the Tower, and
their aim seems to have been to divide the forces of the insurgents. On the
morning of the fourteenth therefore Richard rode from the Tower to Mile-end
to meet the Essex men. "I am your King and Lord, good people," the boy
began with a fearlessness which marked his bearing throughout the crisis,
"what will you?" "We will that you free us for ever," shouted the peasants,
"us and our lands; and that we be never named nor held for serfs!" "I grant
it," replied Richard; and he bade them go home, pledging himself at once to
issue charters of freedom and amnesty. A shout of joy welcomed the promise.
Throughout the day more than thirty clerks were busied writing letters of
pardon and emancipation, and with these the mass of the Essex men and the
men of Hertfordshire withdrew quietly to their homes. But while the king
was successful at Mile-end a terrible doom had fallen on the councillors he
left behind him. Richard had hardly quitted the Tower when the Kentishmen
who had spent the night within the city appeared at its gates. The general
terror was shown ludicrously enough when they burst in and taking the
panic-stricken knights of the royal household in rough horse-play by the
beard promised to be their equals and good comrades in the days to come.
But the horse-play changed into dreadful earnest when they found that
Richard had escaped their grasp, and the discovery of Archbishop Sudbury
and other ministers in the chapel changed their fury into a cry for blood.
The Primate was dragged from his sanctuary and beheaded. The same vengeance
was wreaked on the Treasurer and the Chief Commissioner for the levy of the
hated poll-tax, the merchant Richard Lyons who had been impeached by the
Good Parliament. Richard meanwhile had ridden round the northern wall of
the city to the Wardrobe near Blackfriars, and from this new refuge he
opened his negotiations with the Kentish insurgents. Many of these
dispersed at the news of the king's pledge to the men of Essex, but a body
of thirty thousand still surrounded Wat Tyler when Richard on the morning
of the fifteenth encountered that leader by a mere chance at Smithfield.
Hot words passed between his train and the peasant chieftain who advanced
to confer with the king, and a threat from Tyler brought on a brief
struggle in which the Mayor of London, William Walworth, struck him with
his dagger to the ground. "Kill! kill!" shouted the crowd: "they have slain
our captain!" But Richard faced the Kentishmen with the same cool courage
with which he faced the men of Essex. "What need ye, my masters?" cried the
boy-king as he rode boldly up to the front of the bowmen. "I am your
Captain and your King; follow me!" The hopes of the peasants centred in the
young sovereign; one aim of their rising had been to free him from the evil
counsellors who, as they believed, abused his youth; and at his word they
followed him with a touching loyalty and trust till he entered the Tower.
His mother welcomed him within its walls with tears of joy. "Rejoice and
praise God," Richard answered, "for I have recovered to-day my heritage
which was lost and the realm of England!" But he was compelled to give the
same pledge of freedom to the Kentishmen as at Mile-end, and it was only
after receiving his letters of pardon and emancipation that the yeomen
dispersed to their homes.
The revolt indeed was far from being at an end. As the news of the rising
ran through the country the discontent almost everywhere broke into flame.
There were outbreaks in every shire south of the Thames as far westward as
Devonshire. In the north tumults broke out at Beverley and Scarborough, and
Yorkshire and Lancashire made ready to rise. The eastern counties were in
one wild turmoil of revolt. At Cambridge the townsmen burned the charters
of the University and attacked the colleges. A body of peasants occupied
St. Albans. In Norfolk a Norwich artizan, called John the Litster or Dyer,
took the title of King of the Commons, and marching through the country at
the head of a mass of peasants compelled the nobles whom he captured to act
as his meat-tasters and to serve him on their knees during his repast. The
story of St. Edmundsbury shows us what was going on in Suffolk. Ever since
the accession of Edward the Third the townsmen and the villeins of their
lands around had been at war with the abbot and his monks. The old and more
oppressive servitude had long passed away, but the later abbots had set
themselves against the policy of concession and conciliation which had
brought about this advance towards freedom. The gates of the town were
still in the abbot's hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the
wardship of all orphans born within his domain. From claims such as these
the town could never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from
Pope or King, interpreted cunningly by the wit of the new lawyer class, lay
stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained other and hardly
less formidable documents than these. Untroubled by the waste of war, the
religious houses profited more than any other landowners by the general
growth of wealth. They had become great proprietors, money-lenders to their
tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom they had banished from their land.
There were few townsmen of St. Edmund's who had not some bonds laid up in
the abbey registry. In 1327 one band of debtors had a covenant lying there
for the payment of five hundred marks and fifty casks of wine. Another
company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors on a bond for ten
thousand pounds. The new spirit of commercial activity joined with the
troubles of the time to throw the whole community into the abbot's hands.
We can hardly wonder that riots, lawsuits, and royal commissions marked the
relation of the town and abbey under the first two Edwards. Under the third
came an open conflict. In 1327 the townsmen burst into the great house,
drove the monks into the choir, and dragged them thence to the town prison.
The abbey itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar
frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the
kitchen, all disappeared. The monks estimated their losses at ten thousand
pounds. But the townsmen aimed at higher booty than this. The monks were
brought back from prison to their own chapter-house, and the spoil of their
registry, papal bulls and royal charters, deeds and bonds and mortgages,
were laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the mob they were forced
to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of a gild to the town as well as
of free release to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the ruined
house. But all control over town or land was gone. Through spring and
summer no rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the
abbey did not dare to show their faces in the streets. News came at last
that the abbot was in London, appealing for redress to the court, and the
whole county was at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the
thought of revived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law, poured
into the streets of the town. From thirty-two of the neighbouring villages
the priests marched at the head of their flocks as on a new crusade. The
wild mass of men, women, and children, twenty thousand in all, as men
guessed, rushed again on the abbey, and for four November days the work of
destruction went on unhindered. When gate, stables, granaries, kitchen,
infirmary, hostelry had gone up in flames, the multitude swept away to the
granges and barns of the abbey farms. Their plunder shows what vast
agricultural proprietors the monks had become. A thousand horses, a hundred
and twenty plough-oxen, two hundred cows, three hundred bullocks, three
hundred hogs, ten thousand sheep were driven off, and granges and barns
burned to the ground. It was judged afterwards that sixty thousand pounds
would hardly cover the loss.
Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, the appeal of the
abbot against this outrage was promptly heeded. A royal force quelled the
riot, thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to Norwich;
twenty-four of the chief townsmen with thirty-two of the village priests
were convicted as aiders and abettors of the attack on the abbey, and
twenty were summarily hanged. Nearly two hundred persons remained under
sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged on in the
King's Courts. At last matters ended in a ludicrous outrage. Irritated by
repeated breaches of promise on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses
seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed and bound him, and
carried him off to London. There he was hurried from street to street lest
his hiding-place should be detected till opportunity offered for shipping
him off to Brabant. The Primate and the Pope levelled their
excommunications against the abbot's captors in vain, and though he was at
last discovered and brought home it was probably with some pledge of the
arrangement which followed in 1332. The enormous damages assessed by the
royal justices were remitted, the outlawry of the townsmen was reversed,
the prisoners were released. On the other hand the deeds which had been
stolen were again replaced in the archives of the abbey, and the charters
which had been extorted from the monks were formally cancelled.
The spirit of townsmen and villeins remained crushed by their failure, and
throughout the reign of Edward the Third the oppression against which they
had risen went on without a check. It was no longer the rough blow of sheer
force; it was the more delicate but more pitiless tyranny of the law. At
Richard's accession Prior John of Cambridge in the vacancy of the abbot was
in charge of the house. The prior was a man skilled in all the arts of his
day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists
pronounced him superior to Orpheus, to Nero, and to one yet more
illustrious in the Bury cloister though obscure to us, the Breton
Belgabred. John was "industrious and subtle," and subtlety and industry
found their scope in suit after suit with the burgesses and farmers around
him. "Faithfully he strove," says the monastic chronicler, "with the
villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he owned
specially as his "adversaries," but it was the rustics who were to show
what a hate he had won. On the fifteenth of June, the day of Wat Tyler's
fall, the howl of a great multitude round his manor-house at Mildenhall
broke roughly on the chauntings of Prior John. He strove to fly, but he was
betrayed by his own servants, judged in rude mockery of the law by villein
and bondsman, condemned and killed. The corpse lay naked in the open field
while the mob poured unresisted into Bury. Bearing the prior's head on a
lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng at last reached
the gallows where the head of one of the royal judges, Sir John Cavendish,
was already impaled; and pressing the cold lips together in mockery of
their friendship set them side by side. Another head soon joined them. The
abbey gates were burst open, and the cloister filled with a maddened crowd,
howling for a new victim, John Lackenheath, the warder of the barony. Few
knew him as he stood among the group of trembling monks, but he courted
death with a contemptuous courage. "I am the man you seek," he said,
stepping forward; and in a minute, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son!
Monk! Traitor!" he was swept to the gallows, and his head hacked from his
shoulders. Then the crowd rolled back again to the abbey gate, and summoned
the monks before them. They told them that now for a long time they had
oppressed their fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that
in the sight of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and
charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many which
were demanded they swore they could not find. A compromise was at last
patched up; and it was agreed that the charters should be surrendered till
the future abbot should confirm the liberties of the town. Then, unable to
do more, the crowd ebbed away.
A scene less violent, but even more picturesque, went on the same day at
St. Albans. William Grindecobbe, the leader of its townsmen, returned with
one of the charters of emancipation which Richard had granted after his
interview at Mile-end to the men of Essex and Hertfordshire, and breaking
into the abbey precincts at the head of the burghers, forced the abbot to
deliver up the charters which bound the town in bondage to his house. But a
more striking proof of servitude than any charters could give remained in
the millstones which after a long suit at law had been adjudged to the
abbey and placed within its cloister as a triumphant witness that no
townsman might grind corn within the domain of the abbey save at the
abbot's mill. Bursting into the cloister, the burghers now tore the
mill-stones from the floor, and broke them into small pieces, "like blessed
bread in church," which each might carry off to show something of the day
when their freedom was won again. But it was hardly won when it was lost
anew. The quiet withdrawal and dispersion of the peasant armies with their
charters of emancipation gave courage to the nobles. Their panic passed
away. The warlike Bishop of Norwich fell lance in hand on Litster's camp,
and scattered the peasants of Norfolk at the first shock. Richard with an
army of forty thousand men marched in triumph through Kent and Essex, and
spread terror by the ruthlessness of his executions. At Waltham he was met
by the display of his own recent charters and a protest from the Essex men
that "they were so far as freedom went the peers of their lords." But they
were to learn the worth of a king's word. "Villeins you were," answered
Richard, "and villeins you are. In bondage you shall abide, and that not
your old bondage, but a worse!" The stubborn resistance which he met showed
that the temper of the people was not easily broken. The villagers of
Billericay threw themselves into the woods and fought two hard fights
before they were reduced to submission. It was only by threats of death
that verdicts of guilty could be wrung from Essex jurors when the leaders
of the revolt were brought before them. Grindecobbe was offered his life if
he would persuade his followers at St. Albans to restore the charters they
had wrung from the monks. He turned bravely to his fellow-townsmen and bade
them take no thought for his trouble. "If I die," he said, "I shall die for
the cause of the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to end my life
by such a martyrdom. Do then to-day as you would have done had I been
killed yesterday." But repression went pitilessly on, and through the
summer and the autumn seven thousand men are said to have perished on the
gallows or the field.
