The time, however, was yet unripe for such far-reaching changes as the peasants demanded. The circumstances and incidents of their revolt have been admirably described by Mr. Trevelyan, and lately in more detail by Prof. Oman; and its main events are prominent in all our histories; probably no rebellion of such magnitude was ever so sudden in its origin or its end; all was practically over in a single month. Discontent had, of course, been seething for years; yet even so definite a grievance as the Poll Tax of 1381 could not have raised half England in revolt within a few days, but for a sense of power and a rough discipline among the working-classes. For more than a century the men who were now so wronged had been compelled to keep arms, to learn their use, and to muster periodically under captains of twenties and captains of hundreds. For a whole generation Edward III. had proclaimed, at frequent intervals, that he could not meet his enemies without a fresh levy from town and country; and, under a system which allowed the purchase of substitutes, such levies fell heaviest on the lower classes. What was more natural than that these same lower classes should muster now to free the King from his other enemies—and theirs too, as they thought—incapable, bloodsucking ministers and unjust landlords? They had only to turn out as on a muster and march straight upon London, each village contingent picking up others on the way; and this is exactly what they did.[247] The chroniclers definitely record their order even in disorder; it was removed by a whole horizon from the contemporary Jacquerie in France, in which the peasants rose like wild beasts, with no ideas but plunder, lust, and revenge. These English rebels resisted manfully at first all temptation to plunder among the rich houses of London. “If they caught any man thieving, they cut off his head, as men who hated thieves above all things”—such is the testimony of their bitter enemy Walsingham. When they gutted John of Gaunt’s palace, nothing was kept of the vast wealth which it contained; all things were treated as accursed, like the spoils of Jericho. The rioters were loyal to the King, had a definite policy, and aimed at making treaties in due form with their enemies. They “had among themselves a watchword in English, ‘With whome haldes you?’ and the answer was, ‘With Kinge Richarde and the true comons.’” “They took [Chief Justice Belknap] and made him swear on the Bible.” At Canterbury “they summoned the Mayor, the bailiffs and the commons of the said town, and examined them whether they would with good will swear to be faithful and loyal to King Richard and to the true commons of England or no.” “The commons, out of good feeling to [the King], sent back word by his messengers that they wished to see him and speak with him at Blackheath.” At Mile End they were arrayed under “two banners, and many pennons,” drew out willingly into two lines at Richard’s bidding, and made an orderly bargain with him. In the final meeting at Smithfield, “the king and his train ... turned into the eastern meadow in front of St. Bartholomew’s ... and the commons arrayed themselves on the west side in great battles.” After Tyler’s death, again, they followed at Richard’s command into Clerkenwell fields, where they were presently surrounded partly by the mercenary troopers of Sir Robert Knolles, but mainly by the citizen levies, “the wards arrayed in bands, a fine company of well-armed folks in great strength.” The very suddenness of their collapse is not only perfectly explicable under these circumstances, but it is just what we might expect in a case where the conflicting parties have learnt, under some sort of common discipline, the priceless lesson of give and take, and can see some reason in each other’s claims; the Cronstadt Mutiny is the latest example of this, and perhaps not the least instructive.[248] Their main claims had been granted by the King, and, in proportion as the rioters were loyal and orderly at heart, in the same proportion they must have seen clearly that Wat Tyler’s fate had been thoroughly deserved. No wonder that they cowered now before the King and his troops, and dispersed peaceably to their homes. Even Walsingham’s satirical account of their arms, with due allowance for literary exaggeration, is exactly what the most formal documents would lead us to expect. “The vilest of commons and peasants,” he says; “some of whom had only cudgels, some rusty swords, some only axes, some bows that had hung so long in the smoke as to be browner than ancient ivory, with one arrow apiece, many whereof had but one wing.... Among a thousand such, you would scarce have found one man that wore armour.”[249] Compare this with the actual muster-roll of a Norwich leet, a far richer community than these villages from which most of the rebels came (Conesford, A.D. 1355). Out of the 192 mustered, 33 wear defensive armour; 7 only are archers (an unusually small proportion, of course); 44 turn out with knife, sword, and bill or hatchet; 108 have only two weapons, which in nine out of ten cases consist of knife and cudgel. The rioters, of course, would in most cases have come from this lowest class; and in reading through the Norwich lists one seems to see the very men who followed after John Ball. “Thomas Pottage, with knife and cudgel”; “William Mouse, with knife and cudgel”; “Long John, with knife and cudgel”; “Adam Piper and Robert Skut, with knife and bill”; “John Cosy, Hamo Garlicman, Robert Rubbleyard, John Stutter, Roger Dauber, William Boardcleaver, William Merrygo, Nicholas Skip, Alice Brokedish’s Servant,”—all with knife and cudgel again. Gower’s mock-heroic catalogue of the rioters’ names in the first book of his “Vox Clamantis” is not so picturesque as these actual muster-rolls.
These, then, were the men before whose face Gower describes his fellow-landlords as lurking like wild beasts in the woods, feeding on grass and acorns, and wishing that they could shrink within the very rind of the trees; the men who a day or two later surged like a sea round Chaucer’s tower of Aldgate, until some accomplice unbarred the gate. Chroniclers note with astonishment the paralysis of the upper classes all through this revolt, or at least until Wat Tyler’s death; and though Richard revoked his Royal promise of freedom, and bloody assizes were held from county to county until the country was sick of slaughter, and Parliament re-enacted all the old oppressive statutes, yet the landlords can never entirely have forgotten this lesson. Professor Oman, in his anxiety to kill the already slain theory that the Revolt virtually put an end to serfdom, seems hardly to allow enough for human nature; but Mr. Trevelyan sums the matter up in words as just as they are eloquent: “[The Revolt] was a sign of national energy, it was a sign of independence and self-respect in the medieval peasants, from whom three-quarters of our race, of all classes and in every continent, are descended. This independent spirit was not lacking in France in the 14th century, but it died out by the end of the Hundred Years’ War; stupid resignation then took hold of burghers and peasantry alike, from the days when Machiavelli observed their torpor, down to the eve of the Revolution. The ancien régime was permitted to grow up. But in England there has been a continuous spirit of resistance and independence, so that wherever our countrymen or our kinsmen have gone, they have taken with them the undying tradition of the best and surest freedom, which ‘slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.’”[250]
This chapter could not be complete without at least a passing allusion to the general uncleanliness of medieval life, even in a city like London, where there was some real attempt at organized scavenging of the streets, and where the laws commanded strictly “he that will keep a pig, let him keep it in his own house.”[251] Four great visitations of the bubonic plague occurred in Chaucer’s lifetime; the least of them would have been enough to mark an epoch in modern England. The sixty years of his life are exceptional, on the other hand, in their comparative freedom from severe famine; but there hung always over men’s lives the shadow of God’s hand—or rather, as they too often felt, of Satan’s. During the great storm of 1362 “beasts, trees and housen were all to-smit with violent lightning, and suddenly perished; and the Devil in man’s likeness spake to men going by the way”; and a good herald who watched the march past of the rioters in 1381 “saw several Devils among them; he fell sick and died within a brief while afterwards.”[252]
It has often been noted how little Chaucer refers either to this Revolt or the Great Pestilence; but the multitude interested him comparatively little. He felt with the pleasures and pains of the individual poor man; but with regard to the poor in bulk, he would only have shrugged his shoulders and said “they are always with us.” His Griselda is own sister to King Cophetua’s beggar-maid in the Burne-Jones picture. For all the real pathos of the story, her rags are draped with every refinement of consummate art. We believe in them conventionally, but know on reflection that they are there only to point an artistic contrast. Again, in the “Nuns’ Priest’s Tale” the “poure wydwe, somdel stope in age,” with her smoky cottage and the humble stock of her yard, are just the subdued and tender background which the poet needs for the mock-chivalric glories of his Chanticleer and Partlet. For glimpses of the real poor, the poor poor, we must go to “Piers Plowman.” Here we find them of all sorts, and at the top of the scale the Plowman, the skilled agricultural labourer or almost peasant-farmer—
| “I have no penny, quoth Piers, pullets for to buy, | |
| Neither goose nor griskin; but two green cheeses | [new |
| A few curds and cream, and a cake of oats, | |
| And bread for my bairns of beans and of peases. | |
| And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon; | |
| Not a cockney, by Christ, collops to make, | [egg: eggs and bacon |
| But I have leek-plants, parsley and shallots, | |
| Chiboles and chervils and cherries, half-red ... | [onions |
| By this livelihood we must live till Lammas-time, | |
| And by that I hope to have harvest in my croft, | |
| Then may I dight my dinner as me dearly liketh.” |
Piers speaks here of a bad year; but even his modest comfort required hard work of all kinds and in all weathers. As the Ploughman says in another place—
| “I have been Truth’s servant all this fifty winter, Both y-sowen his seed and sued his beasts, Within and withouten waited his profits. I dike and I delve, I do what Truth biddeth; Some time I sow and some time I thresh, In tailor’s craft and tinker’s craft, what Truth can devise, I weave and I wind, and do what Truth biddeth.”[253] |
THE PLOUGHMAN
FROM THE LOUTERELL PSALTER (EARLY 14TH CENTURY)
In contrast with Piers stands the great crowd of beggars—soldiers discharged from the wars, and sturdy vagrants who fear nothing but labour—“beggars with bags, which brewhouses be their churches,” as the poet writes in the racy style affected in modern times by Mrs. Gamp. The roads were crowded with wandering minstrels “that will neither swink nor sweat, but swear great oaths, and find up foul fantasies, and fools them maken; and yet have wit at will to work, if they would.” Lowest of all (except the outlaws and felons who haunt the thickets and forests) come the professional tramps—