| “For they live in no love, nor no law they holden, They wed no woman wherewith they dealen, Bring forth bastards, beggars of kind. Or the back or some bone they breaken of their children, And go feigning with their infants for evermore after. There are more misshapen men among such beggars Than of many other men that on this mould walken.” |
But the Great Pestilence had bred yet another class odious to Piers Plowman—strikers, as they would be called in modern English—the men who thought their labour was worth more than the miserable price at which Parliament was constantly trying to fix it under the heaviest penalties. These were they of whom the Commons complained in 1376 that “they contrive by great malice prepense to evade the penalty of the aforesaid Ordinances and Statutes; for so soon as their masters chide them for evil service, or would fain pay them for their aforesaid service according to the form of the said Statutes, suddenly they flee and disperse away from their service and from their own district, from county to county, from hundred to hundred, from town to town, into strange places unknown to their said masters, who know not where to find them.... And the greater part of such runaway labourers become commonly stout thieves, wherefrom robberies and felonies increase everywhere from day to day, to the destruction of the aforesaid realm.”[254] The worst effect of a law which attempted to fix wages everywhere and chain the labourer to one master or one parish, was to drive into rebellion indiscriminately the honest man who wanted to sell his work in an open market, and the idler who was glad to escape in company with his betters. No doubt there was a half-truth in the satire on the pretensions of these labourers for whom the old wages no longer sufficed, and who, in spite of the law, often managed to enforce their claim—
| “Labourers that have no land to live on, but their hands, Deigned not to dine to-day on last night’s cabbage; May no penny-ale please them, nor a piece of bacon, But it be fresh flesh or fish, fried or y-baken, And that chaud and plus chaud for the chill of their maw.”[255] |
But sometimes the law too had its way; and for years before the Great Revolt the countryside swarmed with such Statute-made malefactors, together with those other outcasts so graphically described in Jusserand’s “Vie Nomade” (Pt. II., c. 2).
Meanwhile there lived and died, in the background, the thousands who, for all their honest toil, struggled on daily from hand to mouth, knowing no Bible truth more true than this, that God had cursed the ground for Adam’s sake. These are the true poor—“God’s minstrels,” as they are called in “Piers Plowman”; those upon whom our alms cannot possibly be ill-spent—
| “The most needy are our neighbours, an we take good heed, As prisoners in pits and poor folk in cotes Charged with children and chief lordës rent; That they with spinning may spare, spend they it in house-hire, Both in milk and in meal to make therewith papelots To glut therewith their children that cry after food. Also themselves suffer much hunger, And woe in wintertime, with waking a-nights To rise to the ruel to rock the cradle ... Both to card and to comb, to clout and to wash To rub and to reel, and rushes to peel, That ruth is to read, or in rime to show The woe of these women that woneth in cotes; And many other men that much woe suffren, Both a-hungered and athirst, to turn the fair side outward, And be abashëd for to beg, and will not be a-known What them needeth to their neighbours at noon and at even. This I wot witterly, as the world teacheth, What other men behoveth that have many children And have no chattels but their craft to clothe them and to feed And fele to fong thereto, and few pence taken. There is payn and penny-ale as for a pittance y-taken, Cold flesh and cold fish for venison y-baken; Fridays and fasting-days, a farthing’s worth of mussels Were a feast for such folk, or so many cockles.”[256] |
How many such cottages did Chaucer, like ourselves, pass on his ride to Canterbury? In all ages the sufferings of the very poor have been limited only by the bounds of that which flesh and blood can endure.