These lines, pinned on the carcasses of an enclosing landlord’s flocks and herds, are a fair specimen of their humour. Men may well be merry together, when they have seen hovering over the fields of an English county, though but in a fleeting glimpse, the New Jerusalem where the humble are exalted and the mighty put down; and there is no inconsistency between such mundane gaiety and the long pent up passion which on the lips of a nameless labourer burst into the cry, “As sheepe or lambs are a prey to the wolfe or lion, so are the poor men to the rich men.”[587] There was much lecturing (the matter is easily imagined) at the Oak of Reformation, and not on one side only, for the peasants were tolerant compared with their betters, and a future archbishop was allowed to address the insurgents on the evils of their ways; much laying down of hedges and enclosures; much slaughtering of that beast of iniquity, the man-devouring sheep. There was none of the massacring of unarmed men which both Henry VIII. and Elizabeth ordered without compunction when they thought the times required it, very little of the “making the public good a pretext for private revenge,” against which the insurgents were warned by Parker. Though for months after the final tragedy the badges of the justly-hated Warwick “were not so fast set up but that they were as fast pulled down" from the city walls, the rebels even in the heat of their early triumphs claimed only to be executing the Protector’s Proclamations, and, while indignantly repudiating the name of traitors, showed a complete readiness to negotiate peaceably with the Government. The whole movement was less a rising against the State than a practical illustration of the peasants' ideals, a mixture of May-day demonstration and successful strike embodied in one gigantic festival of rural good fellowship. Its bloody termination was, as far as can be judged, the result of two errors of judgment, one, a pardonable one, on the part of Ket, the other, unpardonable, on the part of a nameless member of the other party.[588] When all was over, and each man reflected after his kind on the great days of Mousehold Heath, what the camp followers, who attach themselves to every popular movement, remembered was that for about a month they had filled their bellies at other people’s expense. "'Twas a merry world when we were yonder, eating of mutton.” But there were some who, as they saw Ket swinging on the gallows before the City gates, were seized with the tumult of pity and hoarse indignation which serves Englishmen, who are not good at revolutions, in place of the revolutionary spirit. “O Kette,” one countryman was heard to say to another, “God have mercy upon thy soul; and I trust in God that the King’s Majesty and his Councell shall be enformed once between this and Midsummer evening, that of their own gentleness thou shalt be taken down and buried, not hanged up for winter store; and set a quietness in the realm, and that the ragged staff shall be taken down of their own gentleness from the gentlemen’s gates in this City, and to have no more King’s arms but one within the City, under Christ.”[589] The Council, in its gentleness, thought otherwise. Ket still creaked in his chains, and in the meantime other gallows were rising for other rebels in Somerset, and Devon, and Cornwall.
What were the aims which at intervals between 1530 and 1560 set half the counties of England in a blaze? Let us look at the peasants' programme more closely. It will help us to see the agrarian problem from the inside. Reduced to its elements their complaint is a very simple one, very ancient and yet very modern. It is that what, in effect, whatever lawyers may say, has been their property, is being taken from them. To be told that social disorders take place because an envious proletariat aims at seizing the property of the rich would seem to them a very strange perversion of the truth. They want only to have what they have always had. They are conservatives, not radicals or levellers, and to them it seems that all the trouble arises because the rich have been stealing the property of the poor. Here is part of a colloquy[590] between Jack of the North beyond the Style, Robin and Harry Clowte, Tom of Trumpington, Peter Potter, Pyrce Plowman, and divers other worthies. As will be seen from the verses, they are birds of night—
Jack. Now for that Slaunder’s sake,
Companye by night I take,
And, with all that I may make,
Cast hedge and ditch in the lake,
Fyxed with many a stake
Though it was never so faste
Yet asondre it is wraste.
* * * * * * *
Harry Clowte. Gud conscience should them move
Ther neighbours quietly to love,
And thus not for to wrynche
The commons styl for to pinch,
To take into their hande
That be other mennes land.
Jack. Thus do I, Jack of the Style,
Now subscrybe upon a tyle.
This I do and will do with all my myght,
For sclaundering me yet do I but right,
For common to common again I restore
Wherever it hath been yet common before.
If agayne they enclose it never so faste
Agayne asondre it shall be wraste.
They may be ware by that is paste
To make it agayne is but waste.”
To take into your hand what is other men’s land, that is the grievance. To restore common to common again, that is the obvious remedy, a remedy which is not seriously opposed to the agrarian policy of most sixteenth century statesmen. But the more far-seeing of the peasants realise what their followers do not, that these troubles which are going on in so many different parts of England cannot be dealt with by isolated bodies of villagers, however good their cause may be. They require the intervention of the Government. How the Government is to intervene they lay down in two documents which are perhaps the only two popular programmes of agrarian reform ever published in England since 1381. The first, contained in two of the articles[591] drawn up at Doncaster in 1536, is short enough:—
“That the lands in Westmoreland, Cumberland, Kendall, Dent, Sedbergh, Furness, and the abbey lands in Mashamshire, Kyrkbyshire, Notherdale, may be by tenant right, and the lord to have, at every change, 2 years' rent for gressum, according to the grant now made by the lords to the commons there. This to be done by Act of Parliament.
“The Statutes for Enclosures and Intacks to be put in execution, and all enclosures and Intacks since the fourth year of Henry VII. to be pulled down, except mountains, forests, and Parks" (a noticeable exception which shows the composite character of the movement. In the South of England the peasant did not spare parks).
The articles[592] signed by Ket, Aldryche, and Cod in 1549 are a much more elaborate affair. Here are the most noteworthy of them:—
“We pray your grace that where it is enacted for enclosing, that it be not hurtful to such as have enclosed saffren grounds, for they be greatly chargeable to them, and that from henceforth no man shall enclose any more.[593]