The horrors of the Black Death had rudely disturbed the joy and prosperity of the English people. No greater contrast can be imagined than that between the condition of England in 1347, when the people revelled in the enjoyment of peace and of a luxury unknown before, and England in the beginning of 1350. More than half the people had died of the plague; even amongst the cattle the mortality had been very great. The looms stood silent for want of weavers; the harvests lay rotting on the fields for want of labourers; sheep and oxen wandered half wild over the country because there was no one to tend them. The country pulpits remained silent. The people as well as their sheep were without shepherds. All suits and pleadings in the King's Bench, and all sessions of Parliament, ceased for two years. War was impossible. France was decimated by the plague as much as England, and a truce for two years was concluded between the two countries.
The population soon recovered its losses. The nobles had suffered comparatively little by the plague, and soon returned to their luxurious amusements. Preachers and moralists might declaim against the extravagances of fashion and dress, and say that the plague had been sent as a scourge from God, but the nobles clung to their fashions all the same. It was the people who had suffered by the plague, and felt its effects. Wheat was scarce, the price of provisions was exorbitantly high, and yet the law was striving to diminish wages. The life of the agricultural labourer in those days was at best very wretched. The articles of diet were few. The people lived on salt meat half the year. They had neither potatoes, carrots, nor parsnips; their only vegetables were onions, cabbages, and nettles. Spices were quite out of the reach of the common people. Sugar was a costly luxury. We can hardly realize the dreariness of the long winter nights in the dark and ill-ventilated huts, from which the smoke escaped as best it could. The people must have spent much of their time in darkness, as candles were too dear for them to buy.
But wretched as his surroundings might be, the labourer was not without intelligence. It was his ambition to send one of his sons to the university, that he might become a priest. So general was this custom that Parliament petitioned Edward III. to prohibit it, because the landlords feared that thus they might lose useful labourers. The distress of the peasantry under the Statute of Labourers, and the tyranny and oppression of their landlords, soon led them to form combinations among themselves for the defence of their own rights. These combinations were maintained by subscriptions of money. We learn that the labourers gathered themselves together in "great routs, and agreed by such confederacy to resist their lords." These combinations paved the way for the revolt under Richard II. The agricultural labourers throughout the country could communicate with one another by means of preachers who wandered over the country, and who, being men of the people themselves, shared the interests of their class.
In attempting to form any true idea of the condition of the lower orders of society in those times, of their hardships and grievances, we are much aided by the poem of William Langland, called the Vision of Piers the Plowman. Langland himself was an obscure man, of whom little certain is known. He seems to have been born about 1332, and to have been a secular priest. Three versions of his poem exist, the first written in 1362, the last about 1380. It is a long poem written in the old alliterative metre, that is, the rhyme is at the beginning, not at the end of the words. From a literary point of view the poem possesses little charm; its great interest lies in the light it throws on the social condition of the times.
Langland is an austere reformer. He is not like Chaucer, who likes to look on the bright side of things, and to take a genial view even of men's failings and sins, and make fun of them. He wishes to make men better by showing them their sin in its darkest colours, and pointing out the contrast between it and the virtue they ought to attain to. The poem is one long testimony against the sins of the rich, against the sins of all who do not work. If Chaucer has any distinct wish at all to make men better, he only tries to do it by making their sins ludicrous. In Langland's poem we never lose sight of the moral; the poet has no other purpose in writing than moral teaching. What he wishes to teach is simply this, that all men must work, though the work must differ in kind according to the rank of the worker. The knight's duty is to guard the Church from "wasters," and help the farmer by killing the hares, foxes, and wild birds. The ladies are to sew chasubles, to spin wool and flax, to clothe the naked, and to help all those who work worthily. If men will not work otherwise, hunger must make them do so. There are to be no beggars; even hermits must seize their spades and dig.
The dinner provided for the labourers after they have worked, shows us what the peasants had to live on in those days. Piers says he had no geese nor pigs, only cheese, curds, cream, oatcake, and loaves of beans and bran; and for vegetables, parsley, leeks, and cabbages. Besides these the poor people bought peascods, beans, apples and cherries, to feed hunger with. These were the things on which they must subsist till harvest time; then they would have better food, and good ale too.
Langland tells us that the people were beginning to be discontented with this kind of food. The beggars would eat only the finest bread; the labourers grew dainty, and were not content even with penny ale and a piece of bacon, but wanted fresh flesh and fried fish, and grumbled about their low wages.
Langland is very bitter against the indulgences granted by the priests for men's sins. A man can only obtain pardon by good works. The merchants must trade fairly, must repair hospitals and broken bridges, must dower maidens and aid poor scholars. He is more severe upon the lawyers than upon almost any other class; they take bribes, and will never speak unless you give them money first; only those who plead the cause of the poor, and do not need to be bought, can be saved. With crushing severity he dwells continually upon the sins of the clergy, and, like Wiclif, wishes for the return of the apostolical purity of the Church. The pestilence, he says, came simply as a punishment for men's sins. The whole poem is full of allusions to the questions of the day, and the severity of its criticisms is relieved by no playfulness, hardly by a single touch of humour.
In the form of his poem, Langland has followed the fashionable poets of his day, and has adopted the machinery of a dream. All that he tells us passed before him in a vision. Some few touches show that he too was not wanting in some growing sense of the beauties of nature, particularly in the opening of the poem, when he tells us that he wandered on the Malvern Hills on a May morning. When weary of wandering, he laid himself down
"Under a broad bank, by a burn's side;
And as I lay, and leaned, and looked in the waters,
I slumbered in a sleeping, it sounded so merrily."