CHAPTER V

THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT OF 1381, AND THE SUBSEQUENT PROSPERITY OF THE WORKING CLASSES

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

§ 2. THE COMING OF THE FRIARS. WIKLIF—Such indeed was the teaching that Wiklif promulgated, and it was carried throughout all England by that great association of wandering friars which he founded under the title of the “poor priests.” These men were like the {76} mendicant friars who had come to England a century before to work in the poorer parts of the English towns; only Wiklif’s priests generally wandered out into the isolated and remote country villages, and spread abroad the independent doctrines and the revolutionary spirit of the times. Spending their lives in moving about among the “upland folk,” as the country people were called, clad in coarse, undyed brown woollen garments, they won the confidence of the peasants, and what is more, helped them to combine in very effectual trade unions. They acted as treasurers for the common funds of these peasants’ unions, and served as messengers between those in different parts of the country, having passwords and a secret language of their own. Their preaching was similar to that of the celebrated priest of Kent, John Ball, who for twenty years before the great rising (1360–80) openly spoke words like these: “Good people, things will never be well in England so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? They have leisure and fine houses: we have pain and labour, and the wind and rain in the fields. And yet it is of us and our toil that these men hold their estate.” These searching questions as to the rights of the lords, and the bold but true statement that it was the villeins and labouring classes who supported—and paid for—their high estate, came closely home to the peasants. They were encouraged too by the independent religious views of the Lollards, and it is said that half England held their views. And this independence of social and religious tenets was hardly calculated to make the villeins bear {77} with equanimity the exactions of their lords after the Great Plague.

§ 3. THE RENEWED EXACTIONS OF THE LANDLORDS—For it must be remembered that the Great Plague did not immediately emancipate the villeins, or cause the land-owners to give up farming on their own account. The process, of course, took a few years, and in these few years the land-owners made desperate efforts to avoid paying higher wages than formerly for labour. As it had now become costly, they insisted more severely upon the performance by their tenants of such labour-dues as were not yet commuted for money payments. They even tried to make those tenants who had emerged from a condition of villeinage to a free tenancy, return back to villeinage again, with all its old labour-dues and casual services. If a man could not prove by legal documentary evidence that he held his land in a free tenancy, the land-owner might pretend he was a villein tenant, and subject to all a villein’s services, although these services might long ago have been commuted for a money rent without any legal formality. There is much reason to believe, moreover, that they abused their power of inflicting “amercements,” or fines, upon their tenants in the manor courts for trivial breaches of duty. So at least Wiklif and the author of Peres the Plowman tell us. The villeins naturally resisted this attempt to make a retrograde movement, which would force them back into the old bondage from which they had redeemed themselves; the free tenants supported them, for they knew their turn would come next if the serfs failed; and the labouring classes eagerly joined the movement also, in hopes of getting rid of the vexatious Statutes of Labourers.

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§ 4. THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT—The crisis came in 1381, and was perhaps precipitated by the oppressive manner in which the poll-tax was collected. But the poll-tax itself was not the real cause of the revolt. The rising had long been foreseen, and arrangements had been duly made among the peasants’ unions by the poor priests, their agents and messengers, who formed the connecting links between all the labour organizations of the land. A sudden rising took place, as unanimous as it was unanticipated, throughout all England, from Scarborough to Kent and Devon. Almost simultaneously the peasants showed their combined strength, and a large body of them under Wat Tyler marched upon London. It is well known how they met the young King Richard II. at Mile-end, and demanded of him the petition which shows the real meaning of the movement: “We will that you free us for ever, us and our lands,” they asked; “and that we be never named or held as villeins.” “I grant it,” said the king, with regal diplomacy, and the peasants believed him. But they very soon learned how vain a thing it is to put one’s trust in princes, for after the peasant armies in the various parts of England had quieted down, and the Essex men, among others, claimed the fulfilment of his royal promise, Richard openly broke faith. “Villeins you were,” said the king, “and villeins you are. In bondage shall you abide, and that not your old bondage, but a worse!” Fortunately this never happened. Although suppressed, the rising was practically successful, for it had shown the power of the combination of labour, in the great strife between labour and capital. A few of the ringleaders were imprisoned and executed, among them being several priests. The {79} authorities of course blustered, and swore they would never give in. Equally of course they did give in; no further attempts were made to exact labour-dues or corvées; and within a generation or so villeinage or serfage became practically extinct; and the villeins became known as copyholders or tenants by custom.

§ 5. THE CONDITION OF THE ENGLISH LABOURER—After this great insurrection came what has been termed the golden age of the English labourer, and it lasted all through the fifteenth century. Food was cheap and abundant; wages were amply sufficient. True, the employers of labour still tried, by various petitions and Acts (e.g. 7 Henry IV., 4 Henry V., 23 Henry VI., 11 Henry VII.), to enforce the Statute of Labourers, but they were practically unsuccessful, and prosperity was progressive and continuous till the evil days of Henry VIII. The wages of a good agricultural labourer, before the Plague, had been £2, 7s. 10d. per year as an average, including the labour of his wife and child; after the Plague his wages would be £3, 15s., and the cost of his living certainly not more than £3, 4s. 9d. An artisan, working 300 days a year, would get, say, £3, 18s. 1⁠½d. before 1348, and after that date £5, 15s. 7d., which was so far above the cost of maintenance as to give him a very comfortable position. His working day, too, was not excessive, while the fixed rents of the time were very low. These low rents were also one great cause of the prosperity of the new yeoman, or tenant farmer class (p. 73) that had arisen after the collapse of the capitalist land-owners in consequence of the Plague. This class remained for at least two centuries the backbone of English agriculture.

§ 6. DRAWBACKS—There were, however, a few drawbacks in this “golden age,” as various critics have told {80} us. The ordinary hardships of human life were in many respects greater than they are now—disease was more deadly, and the risks of life more numerous; but from this very fact the extremes of poverty and wealth were less widely distinguished and less acutely felt; and, although it cannot be asserted that people did not occasionally die of want in very bad times, yet the grinding and hopeless poverty just above the verge of actual starvation, so often prevalent in the present time, did not belong to mediæval life. The chief hardships to be encountered were in the winter, for, owing to the absence of winter roots, stock could only be kept in limited quantities, and the only meat procurable was that which had been previously salted. It is certain that much of mediæval disease is traceable to the excessive use of salted provisions. The houses, also, were rudely built of mud, clay, or even wattled material, for brickmaking was a lost art, and stone was only used for the manor-houses and the dwellings of the wealthy. But food was abundant and cheap. The cost of living was not more than one-tenth of what it is at the present day. Three pounds of beef could be bought for a penny; a pig cost about fourpence; beer was only a halfpenny a gallon. Employment was fairly constant and regular, and in addition to their wages, labourers still possessed the valuable old manorial common rights of common pasture and forest.

§ 7. THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES—So things went on happily after the Great Revolt, and in the days of the fourth and fifth Henries. The brilliant, but useless, French victories of the latter monarch were paid for partly by the prosperous middle and lower classes, and {81} partly by the French themselves; and very costly they were. England was still mainly agricultural, but manufactures were growing. Though wool was still exported, much was being worked up in the towns and villages. Artisans earned about 3s. a week, which would certainly be worth more than 30s. a week at present. Industry, as will be remembered, was organized in the craft gilds, and apparently the gild system was a success till its restrictions in towns began to cramp the growing manufactures. The fifteenth century was a period of prosperity and content, in spite of both civil and foreign wars; and even the wasteful reign of Henry VI., with its unsuccessful war with France, and huge subsidies to Rome, though it made the Government unpopular and caused widespread national discontent and occasional insurrections in Kent and Wiltshire, did not materially injure the general prosperity. The king himself, however, was nearly bankrupt. The Wars of the Roses which followed (1455–86) did not affect the country at large, being fought in a series of much exaggerated skirmishes by small bodies of nobles and their followers. They ended in the very desirable consummation of the ruin of the remnants of the feudal aristocracy, and at the same time opened a further path for the influence of the industrial classes, whose favour Henry VII. had the wisdom to court, and in return was supported by them in his policy of weakening the power of the great barons. He encouraged commerce, and aided the prosperity of his kingdom, thereby amassing for his own treasury considerable wealth. In his reign the feudal system was dying out, the nation prospered, and the Middle Ages came to a close in a wealthy and industrious England (A.D. 1500). {82}

But before the next century was completed part of the nation was impoverished, the labourers were degraded and despoiled, and a long legacy of pauperism and misery was bequeathed to the country by the wastefulness and extravagance of Henry VIII.

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PERIOD IV

FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE EVE OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (1509–1760)