These effeminate fashions actually led to a Statute of Dress in 1363, in which also the lower class are forbidden to ape their betters. It is perhaps to these hangers-on of wealth that Langland refers in his bitter lines:
“Right so! ye rich, ye robeth that be rich | and helpeth them that helpeth you, and giveth where no need is. | As who so filled a tun of a fresh river | and went forth with that water to woke with Thames. | Right so! ye rich, ye robe and feed | them that have as ye have, them ye make at ease.”
But, as for the poor, Avarice considers them fair game:
“I have as moche pite of pore men as pedlere hath of cattes, | that wolde kill them if he cacche hem myghte, for covetise of their skynnes.”
In London the preaching clergy are accused of pandering to the avarice of the rich:
“And were mercy in mean men no more than in rich | mendicants meatless might go to bed. | God is much in the gorge of these great masters, | but among mean men his mercy and his works. | Friars and faitours have found such questions, | to plese with proud men sithen the pestilence tyme, | and prechers at Saint Poules, for pure envye of clerkis, | that folke is nought firmed in the feith ne fill of their goodes. | ... Ne be plentyous to the pore as pure charitye wolde, | but in gayness and in glotonye forglotten her goode hem selve, | and breken noughte to the beggar as the Boke techeth.”
The friars had lost altogether the enthusiasm of their early days:
“And how that friars followed folk that was rich, | and folk that was poor at little price they set; | and no corpse in their kirk-yard nor in their kirk was buried, | but quick he bequeath them aughte or should help quit their debts.”
As for the monks, the same might have been said of them before; but now more land had been thrown into their possession by the mortality:
“Ac now is Religion a ryder, a rowmer bi streetes,
A leader of love-days, and a lond-buyer,
A pricker on a palfrey fro manere to manere,
An heap of houndes at his ers, as he a lord were.
And but if his knave kneel, that shall his cup bringe,
He lowreth on hym, and axeth hym who taught hym curtesye.”