"How many amiable young persons," said a noted writer of that period, "breakfasted with their friends in the morning, who, when evening came, supped with their ancestors!" In Bristol and some other English cities, the mortality was so great that the living were hardly able to bury the dead; so that all business, and for a time even war, came to a standstill.
245. Effect of the Plague on Labor, 1349.
After the pestilence had subsided, it was impossible to find laborers enough to till the soil and shear the sheep. Those who were free now demanded higher wages, while the villeins, or serfs (S113), and slaves left their masters and roamed about the country asking for pay for their work, like freemen.
It was a general agricultural strike, which lasted over thirty years. It marks the beginning of that contest between capital and labor which had such an important influence on the next reign, and which, after a lapse of more than five hundred years, is not yet satisfactorily adjusted.
Parliament endeavored to restore order. It passed laws forbidding any freeman to ask more for a day's work than before the plague. It gave the master the right to punish a serf who persisted in running away, by branding him on the forehead with the letter F, for "fugitive." But legislation was in vain; the movement had begun, and statutes of Parliament could no more stop it than they could stop the rolling of the ocean tide. It continued to go on until it reached its climax in the peasant insurrection led by Wat Tyler, under Edward's successor, Richard II (S251).
246. Beginning of English Literature, 1369-1377.
During Edward's reign the first work in English prose may have been written. It was a volume of travels by Sir John Mandeville, who had journeyed in the East for over thirty years. On his return he wrote an account of what he had heard and seen, first in Latin, that the learned might read it; next in French, that the nobles might read it; and lastly he, or some unknown person, translated it into English for the common people. He dedicated the work to the King.
Perhaps the most interesting and wonderful thing in it was the statement of his belief that the world is a globe, and that a ship may sail round it "above and beneath,"—an assertion which probably seemed to many who read it then as less credible than any of the marvelous stories in which his book abounds.
William Langland was writing rude verses (1369) about his "vision of Piers the Plowman," contrasting "the wealth and woe" of the world, and so helping forward that democratic outbreak which was soon to take place among those who knew the woe and wanted the wealth. John Wycliffe (S254), a lecturer at Oxford, attacked the rich and indolent churchmen in a series of tracts and sermons, while Chaucer, who had fought on the fields of France, was preparing to bring forth the first great poem in our language (S253).
247. The "Good Parliament" (1376); Edward's Death.