increasing their wealth and power at the expense of those below, the craftsmen and labourers were nowise behindhand in championing the liberties they had so hardly won. At the end of the fourteenth century (1381-1400), serfdom and villenage were practically done away in England. The great risings of Wat Tyler and Flannoc (1381), though put down at the moment by treachery and false promises, really secured freedom for the mass of the people. Such an insurrection as the Peasants' War did not arise My from the trifling cause commonly put forward.* The priest John Ball had genuine grievances to point to and definite reforms to propose when he addressed his stirring speeches to tens of thousands of his stalwart countrymen. Thus was he in the habit of addressing Tyler's followers in support of great social and political principles :— friends, things cannot be well for us in this England of ours, nor ever will, until all things shall be in common; when there shall be neither lord nor vassal, and all grades shall be levelled; when the nobles shall be no more masters than we. How ill have they treated us! and why do they thus keep us in bondage? Are not Adam and Eve their ancestors as well as ours? What can they show, and what reason can they give, why they should be more masters than we? except, maybe, because they make us labour and work for them to spend. They are clothed in velvets and rich stuffs, trimmed with ermine and other furs, whilst we are forced to wear coarse cloth. They have wines, spices, and nice bread, whilst we have only rye and straw refuse; if we drink it must be water. They have grand houses and homesteads, but we must face wind and rain as we labour Professor Thorold Rogers is undoubtedly right in his remarks as to the effect of the Peasants' War. Though the rising itself was defeated, the people practically won. in the open; yet our labour it is which keeps up their luxury. We are called slaves; and if we fail at our tasks we are flogged; and we have no king to complain to, nor anyone who will hear us and do justice. Let us go to the king, who is young, and remonstrate with him on our slavery, telling him we must have it otherwise, or we ourselves shall find the remedy. If we wait on him in a body, all those who come under the title of slaves, or are held in bondage, will follow us in hope of being free. When the king sees us we shall get a favourable answer, or we must seek ourselves to amend our lot.”* Attempts were in fact being made, not only to reduce the wages of day labourers by enforcing anew the statute of King Edward III, in relation to payments to hinds and craftsmen, and to maintain the serfs who still existed in their degraded position, but to bring back the old forced labour, which had been gradually commuted for money payments. Throughout the country districts of England there were now established hundreds of thousands of yeomen and lifeholders, who had freed themselves from the more galling trammels of feudalism, and any such attacks upon their hard-won rights or the rights of the free labourers, met with a stout resistance. The tenants on the feudal estates, whether small or large, * It is well to show that the idea of socialism is no foreign importation into England. Tyler, Cade, Ball, Kett, More, Bellers, Spence, Owen, read to me like sound English names: not a foreigner in the whole batch. They all held opinions which our capitalist-landlord House of Commons would denounce as direct plagiarisms from "continental revolutionists." We islanders have been revolutionists however, and will be again, ignorant as our capitalists are of the history of the people. Edmund Burke, with his fine sophistical Whiggery, of course sneered at coarse, vigorous John Ball. But then, so far as we know, Ball did no sell himself to the nobles as Burke did. had also as good a right and title to their lands, subject to the dues which they paid to the lords or the church, as the nobles, the clergy, or the king had to theirs. Competition for farms in our modern sense was unknown. The relations between the various parties interested were in the main personal, and these continued even when the main fabric of feudalism was falling into decay. Such a body of tillers of the soil produced their crops as a whole for the use of their own people. Farming with a view to profit alone was only just beginning. Though England at this time exported its superfluity of grain, wool, and hides after the people had been well fed, well clothed, and well shod, only a few large landed proprietors carried on this business with a direct view to commercial gain. The mass of the small farmers worked on their land in much the same spirit as the early settlers on the eastern coast of North America, or, as some farmers do to-day in the Western States, though with even less idea of exchanging the greater part of their crops. Their methods of tillage were rude, but they continued to get out of the soil an excellent subsistence for themselves and their families, as well as for the hinds who ordinarily fed at the yeoman farmer's own table. Holding the land, having the implements and the produce alike at their disposal, subject only to certain payments whose amount was well established, such people were free in every sense, economical and personal. No man could call upon them to work, none to fight save of their own freewill and consent; they had at hand the means for feeding, clothing, and housing themselves and their families without being beholden to any. All records of the time go to show what a fine, vigorous folk were these independent small farmers of the fifteenth century. The longer these favourable conditions continued, the sturdier and more independent became these people who were the backbone of the country. We can see how quickly even in our own time good food and healthy surroundings improve the character of a population, how misery and squalor fade away under sound economical conditions for the mass of the people.* This happy state of things for the English farmers lasted about four generations, and we need feel no surprise at the admirable result for England as a whole. The country labourers in regard to diet, clothing, and house-room were little worse off than the yeomen and farmers themselves. Indeed, the line between the two was not easy to draw. A small farmer would work, at the high wages then current, for his richer neighbour, for the lord, the priory, or the state, side by side with the hind who at other times might be in his own employ. For the labourer himself owned land, and worked upon it for the support of himself and his family. From the produce of several acres he could obtain sufficient to render him a very independent bargainer for the use of his vital force on other men's business. Each labourer's cottage had land attached to it, and he lived, it may be said, almost rent free. After the abolition of villenage, the small money payment that might be due was a trifling percentage compared with what his labour could procure for him in wages, food, and clothing from work on his own land or work for * The children of our worn-out workpeople transplanted to Canada and New Zealand become magnificent specimens of the human race, far exceeding their parents in weight and stature. This I have often observed myself. The children on board the training-ships when well fed and well clad grow also into fine lads enough, though taken from very bed conditions of life in our cities. others. He was a wage-earner for the most part when it suited it him to be so by no means a wage-earner at the disposal of the employing class in return for the bare means of subsistence his life through. For in addition to the land which he held with his cottage, there lay around every hamlet and village, there were to be seen on the outskirts of every country town, large stretches of common land on which the labourers might depasture their cattle, sheep, pigs, or geese. There were few, indeed, who could not avail themselves of this right of common property. Rates of wages by themselves show this. In all periods, in all countries, and under all systems of society there is but one test of the well-being of the great mass of the people,—that is, what can a man get in food, clothing, and housing in return for a day's or a week's work? It matters not whether he gets this return directly or indirectly, provided he is master of his own body and is assured of steady employment. In the fifteenth century, then, the English country labourer with his cow, his sheep, or his geese on the common, and his four-acre patch at least round his cabin, received no less than 4d. a day without food. If fed at the farmer's own table, he got from 2d, to 24d. But this same 4d. a day for plain unskilled labour could buy something worth having in those times.* Less than eighteen days' work would purchase the *The prices of diverse sorts of provisions and fresh Achates spent in the priory of Southwick from A° 2 R. Henry V. to the end of 2 Henry VI. taken forth of an old parchment book written at the time : Wheat, at 4s. and 5s. 4d. the qr., betwixt both. Malt, from 3s. 4d. to 5s. Barley, from 3s. 2d. to 4s. 10d. Salt, qr. 4s. Oxen and bulls, 12s. to 16s. |