“The revolt, indeed, was far from being at an end. A strong body of peasants occupied St. Albans. In the eastern counties 50,000 men forced the gates of St. Edmondsbury and wrested from the trembling monks a charter of enfranchisement for the town. Sittester, a dyer of Norwich, headed a strong mass of the peasants, under the title of the ‘King of the Commons,’ and compelled the nobles he had captured to act as his meat-tasters, and to serve him during his repast. But the warlike Bishop of Norwich fell lance in hand on the rebel camp and scattered them at the first shock. The villagers of Billericay demanded from the king the same liberties as their lords, and on his refusal threw themselves into the woods and fought two hard fights before they were reduced to submission.”
For many years there were camps of refuge of these outlawed peasants in forests and upon lonely islands—Englishmen exiles in their own country for the cause of human rights.
The prelates and lawyers gathered around Richard with their sophisms and technicalities, to show him he had done an unlawful thing with his proclamations of emancipation and clemency; the barons backed the constitutional arguments up with fierce threats about this “royal usurpation,” insomuch that Richard within two weeks recalled and canceled all his charters, and let loose the unrestrained arrogance of the nobles on the people. So many and such unwarranted executions took place that Parliament subsequently granted an act of indemnity to the savage perpetrators, who, it says, “made divers punishments upon the said villeins and other traitors without due process of law, but only to appease and cease the apparent mischief.” All manumissions were declared void. But Richard submitted to the Parliament the proposition to abolish slavery if Parliament would lend its sanction. The lords and gentlemen replied, “The serfs are our chattels, and the king can not take our property from us without our consent. And this consent we have never given, and never will give were we all to die in one day.” Had Richard insisted on keeping faith with the lower classes of his subjects, had he placed his crown and life in the scale against human slavery, he would have gone into history as the Great Emancipator of Englishmen, or as Freedom’s Greatest Martyr. Either destiny was preferable to the ignominious end he did meet. He was a man for an emergency, but not a statesman for one of the world’s great crises. But in a boy of sixteen were not his conduct and his attempt at a great deed wonderful?
It is a curious thing to reflect on that Abraham Lincoln, in a government of constitutional law and in a position of very limited powers, could with a stroke of the pen decree emancipation, while Richard, a ruler of almost absolute powers in an age of ill-defined authority and much lawless administration, could not take the chains off one of his subjects.
At this distance it is difficult to determine just how much influence the only servile uprising of England had upon the emancipation of her serfs. It at least stamped a wholesome dread of the laboring classes into the selfish souls of the nobles, a dread that had much influence on the contentions of succeeding reigns, and raised the common people in importance. Slavery did not disappear for over two centuries; “Good Queen Bess” got her much gain by selling her subjects for slaves in the West Indies. But if “they never die who perish in a good cause,” the blood of Walter the Tyler aided the cause of human liberty, and he ought to be canonized as one of her martyrs, instead of being treated as the violent and bloody rioter that most historians make him.
[To be continued.]
Anecdotes in Sermons.—The fashion which once prevailed of introducing historical anecdotes into addresses from the pulpit, is illustrated by the following extract from a sermon by the martyr Bishop Ridley: “Cambyses was a great emperor, such another as our master is; he had many lord-deputies, lord-presidents, and lieutenants under him. It is a great while ago since I read the history. It chanced he had under him, in one of his dominions, a briber, a gift-taker, a gratifier of rich men; he followed gifts as fast as he that followed the pudding; a hand-maker in his office, to make his son a great man; as the old saying is, ‘Happy is the child whose father goeth to the devil.’ The cry of the poor widow came to the emperor’s ear, and caused him to flay the judge quick, and laid his skin in his chair of judgment, that all judges that should give judgment afterward should sit in the same skin. Surely it was a goodly sign, a goodly monument, the sign of the judge’s skin. I pray God we may once see the sign of the skin in England.”