the Saxon day, having no political rights, were simply household servants or hired laborers, or at best rentpaying tenants of land not their own. After the conquest, however, the Norman lords and their lawyers saw little difference between the two classes, and both tend to blend into the one class of serfs. All depended upon the lord, whose manor-house was the centre of the village, with the court in the hall, where justice was rendered and the estate administered, and the gallows outside for the extreme penalty. The lord's demesne, the home-farm, was close at hand, cultivated by the villeins or serfs of the manor; so they paid their labor-rent for their holdings. They gathered their lord's harvest, ploughed and sowed for him, or provided his store of wood. All but the lowest serfs were at liberty, when work for the lord was done, to till their own holdings. The laborers must work for the lord throughout the year. These were at the bottom of the scale; for the absolute slave, to be found in the earlier period, had now disappeared. It was the duty of the lord's bailiff to exact from the villeins the proper amount of service; on the other hand, there was a reeve or foreman of the manor, chosen by the tenants themselves, who represented their interests and rights.

Rise of the farmers and

At length this system of tenure was disturbed. The lord would let his manor to a tenant, and the rent paid by the tenant was called the feorm; hence farm and farmer. This prac- the free latice had a great indirect influence in breaking the feudal tie between the lord and the villein. An intermediate class - these farmers comes up between the great proprietors and their dependents.

borers.

The rise of the farmer class was presently followed by that of still another, the free laborers. The influence of the Church helped to some extent to free the serf from land and lord. A year and a day in a chartered town, if the fugitive meantime were unclaimed, enfranchised him. Labor-service, too, at last, could be commuted for money. This the lords. at first were glad to allow, for it gave them ready cash. Even the King, Edward III, on the royal estate, was glad to sell to his villeins freedom from their obligations. Thus out of feudalism, came up the yeoman, and his appearance modified the whole social condition of the country. On a multitude of manors, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the lords, instead of the old feudal method, cultivated their estates by means of paid laborers, receiving money-rent from free tenants in place of actual work by half-enslaved villeins.

Now, however, intervened what, for that generation, was a terrible calamity. In 1348, the Black Death sweeping from the Levant across Europe, fell upon England, carrying off more than one-half of its population. Of the three or four million inhabitants at the beginning, scarcely enough were left to keep the country in many parts from reverting to wilderness. The villages suffered well-nigh as severely as the cities, until much of the land became almost a desert. At once the price of labor rose enormously; and land-holders, and in the towns the master-craftsmen, were threatened with ruin. Forthwith, Parliament passed the Statute of Laborers, an enactment The Statute fully in the interest of the proprietary class, of Laborers. which forced every poor man "to serve the

employer who shall require him to do so for the same wages as two years before the plague." It was also sought to bind the laborer again to the soil; he was forbidden to quit the parish where he had lived, in search of better wages, even though he had bought his enfranchisement. It was probably impossible to enforce the law; but the high-placed were most persistent, and the statute was repeatedly re-enacted. The harboring in towns of those who had been serfs was vigorously put down; a stop was set to the commutation of labor-service for money; manumissions and exemptions were cancelled on the ground of informality; finally, runaway laborers, when caught, were branded upon the forehead with a hot iron. In the country, many who had once been villeins, but who had commuted the personal service due from them by money-payment, had become men of position and substance. These finding their dear-bought freedom questioned, lent a powerful support to the cause of those just enfranchised. Strikes and combinations disturbed everywhere borough and shire. The serf was winning his freedom, while those who had been masters were trying hard to force him back into dependence. Those days are far behind us; but here in free America that ancient struggle for liberty, and the heroes who fought and died to secure it, ought not to be unknown. The cause was the same as that for which our own fathers bled and died; its champions were the prototypes of the names we most revere. Without doubt, a certain license entered into the doctrines which their leaders taught, and violence sometimes characterized their conduct. When has it been otherwise in times of

revolution?

Their cause was in great part just; and it was fought for not only with much bravery, but in the main with true forbearance and wisdom.

The peasant rebellion.

The priest, John Ball, preaching to thousands of the stout men of Kent, descendants of the ceorls who had been the vanguard of Harold at Hastings, and still always foremost when England was in danger, gave utterance to ideas sometimes extravagant, but often full of natural equity. "Good people," he cried, "things will never go well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we, oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labor, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and our toil that these men hold their state."

Parliament, although in these very years it was boldly curbing the tyranny of the rulers as never before, became reactionary through fear of the widespread levelling and socialistic doctrines. As before it had legislated in the interests of the rich in passing the Statute of Laborers, so in 1380, by

1 Froissart: Translation of Thomas Johnes, Chap. LXXIII, etc.

the imposition of a heavy poll-tax, which ground harshly the faces of the poor, England was set on fire from end to end. The homely rallying cries that passed from man to man have sometimes been preserved. "John Ball," ran one, "greeteth you all, and doth for to understand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might, will and skill, God speed you every dele." "Jack Miller," said the summons of another leader, "asketh help to turn his mill aright. He hath grounden small, small; the King's son of Heaven he shall pay for all." "Jack Carter," declared another, "prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun." "Falseness and guile," said Jack Trewman, "have reigned too long, and truth hath been set under a lock, and falseness and guile reigneth in every stock. True love is away that was so good, and clerks for wealth work them woe. God do bote for now is time." In these rude cries and songs, says Green,1 we have the forerunners of the fiercely just invectives of Milton and Burke, instinct like the latter fulminations with a longing for right rule and plain justice, with a scorn for the immorality of the nobles and the infamy of the court, and a terrible resentment at the perversion of the law.

Formidable insurrections broke out. The rebels of Kent and Sussex marched upon London with such boldness and in such multitudes that op- Bearing of position to them seemed impossible. Rich- Richard II. ard II, lately crowned, a boy of fifteen, made a speech from a boat in the Thames to the crowd on the banks. The youth in these days bore himself with

1 Short History of the English People, p. 250, etc.