The danger of such speeches, which touched the acts {278} and even the thoughts of the great men of the kingdom, became menacing anew under Richard II, and in the first years of his reign the following statute was enacted, reinforcing that of 1275:
“Item, Of devisors of false news and reporters of horrible and false lyes, concerning prelates, dukes, earls, barons, and other nobles and great men of the realm, and also concerning the chancellor, treasurer, clerk of the privy seal, steward of the king’s house, justices of the one bench or of the other, and of other great officers of the realm about things which by the said prelates, lords, nobles, and officers aforesaid were never spoken, done, nor thought . . . whereby debates and discords might arise betwixt the said lords or between the Lords and the Commons, which God forbid, and whereof great peril and mischief might come to all the realm, and quick subversion and destruction of the said realm, if due remedy be not provided: it is straitly defended upon grievous pain, for to eschew the said damages and perils, that from henceforth none be so hardy to devise, speak, or to tell any false news, lyes, or other such false things, of prelates, lords, and of other aforesaid, whereof discord or any slander might rise within the same realm; and he that doth the same shall incur and have the pain another time ordained thereof by the statute of Westminster the first.”[381] In vain: two years later broke out the revolt of the peasants, and the depositions of the rebels when brought before the judge leave no doubt as to the part played by wayfarers in the carrying of political news from one county to another.
The mason John Cole, of Lose, in the parish of Maidstone, Kent, turns informer, betrays twenty-seven of his companions, giving their names (some proved innocent), and saving his own head. Their plan was to make the otherwise unpopular John of Gaunt, king of England, {279} on the mere report that he had freed his “natives.” The rebels had decided to send to him in order to ascertain, and if the news proved true, to depose his nephew young Richard II. The report had been brought to the city of Canterbury by pilgrims, peregrini, arriving from the North, obviously to worship at the shrine of St. Thomas.[382]
In mediæval France during the endless wars, and the brief intervals between them, the roads were held by plundering brigands: labourers or knights by birth. Soldiers, the dregs of the lowest or highest classes, considered the rest of society as their devoted prey, the highway resounded with the noise of arms, the peasant fled. Troops originally equipped for the defence of the land attacked without scruple all whom they thought less strong than themselves and worth robbing. Such people “turned French,” as Froissart puts it, and “turned English” according to the interest of the moment.
The vagrants threatened with the stocks by the English law were of another kind, and whatever the number of brigands among them these were not the majority; the peasants mostly sympathized with, instead of fearing, them. Thus the English revolt was not a desperate enterprise; it was conducted with extraordinary coolness and practical sense. The insurgents showed a calm {280} consciousness of their strength which strikes us, and struck much more the anxious knights in London; they went with their eyes open, and, if they destroyed much, they wished also to reform. It was possible to treat and come to an understanding with them; truth to say, the word and pledge given them will be broken, and the prison, the rope and the block will quickly put an end to the revolt; but whatever the Lords and Commons sitting at Westminster may say,[383] the new bonds will not have the tenacity of the old ones, and a great step towards freedom, one with which the continent has nothing comparable, will have been made.
In France, the beast of burden, ill-nourished, ill-treated, fretted by the harness, trudged wearily along with shaking head, wan eye and a halting gait; his sudden bolts only caused new loads to be added to his fardel, and that was all; centuries were to pass before the day of accounting came and, in blood too, the account would be settled.
PART III RELIGIOUS WAYFARERS
