up into cloth became so great as materially to injure the business of the wool-exporting Merchants of the Staple. The imported Flemings had not deprived English weavers of work which they were doing, but taught them to make the better cloths for which the English had hitherto been wholly dependent on importers.

In connection with the kings, it may be well at this point to explain the relations of the Jews, Lombards, and other capitalists to the Crown and to commerce at Moneythis period. Importing modern conceptions into lenders. the medieval world, we should naturally be inclined to assume that the functions of the modern financier were similarly discharged by similar agencies six hundred years ago. But the Jews and the Lombard bankers were not occupied in financing business men who wanted cash temporarily in order to enlarge the sphere of their operations. The merchant in such cases sought a partner in his venture, who shared the profits and the risks. Commercial ethics forbade the moneyed man to lend his money on security, and in addition to the security to demand a profit on the transaction, If he was secured for the recovery of his money in due time, he had no right to ask anything more. If he took the full risk of loss he was entitled to the full share of profit, but then he was acting not as a banker, but as a partner. The Church proscribed the whole business of lending money for the sake of gain as immoral, and public opinion endorsed the attitude of the Church.

Thus money-lending on secured investments had no part in the commercial methods of the time. The borrowers were not merchants, but princes, nobles, or other persons who found themselves suddenly called upon to meet a heavy demand in bullion with which they were insufficiently provided. In financing of this kind the lenders pretty obviously ran very considerable risks, since kings and magnates were not easy to coerce. Thus Edward III., who never had enough money for his wars, was obliged on one occasion to make a sort of midnight flitting from Flanders on account of his

The Jews.

debts; and at another time he actually ruined the great Florentine house of the Bardi, from whom he had borrowed huge sums which he did not repay. Thus there was a moneylending business carrying big risks and perhaps disproportionately large profits; but it was not a commercial business. Down to the reign of Edward I. it was a business which in England was almost entirely in the hands of the Jews, who were the great accumulators of bullion. The Jews were not in any sense free citizens; they were aliens who were permitted to live in the country under the royal protection, despised and hated by the Christian population-whose sentiments they returned with interest-partly on account of their religion, and partly because their main occupation, their main method of accumulating wealth, was one generally forbidden both by public opinion and by the authority of the Church to good Christians. But they were a convenience to the monarchy as a source not of revenue, but of immediate supply in times of exigency. Edward I., however, expelled the Jews from the country. Their existence as a distinct caste did not fit in with the principles of national unity on which Edward was working. They had the option of relinquishing their caste and adopting the habits and the ethics of the Christian community among which they lived, but this they declined to do; they were not serving any useful position in the State apart from their convenience to the Crown, and in ejecting them Edward had the approbation of the entire Christian community. For the time being their business passed in the main to the Lombard merchants, who inherited a certain portion of the popular ill-feeling towards the Jews; but in course of time, as developing commerce brought about not merely increased wealth but the accumulation of treasure in the hands of English merchants, the treasure acquired a new commercial importance, the legitimacy of money-lending at interest and the benefits derived from it were gradually recognised, and the business passed into the hands of the English themselves.

town

to the

CHAPTER VII

THE RURAL REVOLUTION

THE fourteenth century was marked by a crisis in the history of the rural population of England. The crisis consisted, so to speak, of two parts, a great pestilence and a great revolt; and the second part is usually explained as the outcome of gross oppression and of a belated reactionary movement on the part of landowners. As the commonly accepted view is not in exact accord with that which is taken in these pages, a somewhat fuller detail will be required in the treatment of the narrative. The course of the rural movement between the Conquest and the close of the thirteenth century may be summarised as follows.

The Conquest found the country distributed generally, though not quite completely, into manorial estates which for the most part corresponded to the vills, once After the known as tuns or towns. The occupiers of the Conquest. manorial lands, with rare exceptions, looked upon themselves as freemen. At the same time the great bulk of them were obliged to render agricultural service to the lord of the manor in the form of regular week-work as well as of periodical additional work. Still, it is apparent that already in many cases services had been commuted for payments in money or in kind, in a greater or less degree, following no common rule. Setting aside the small actually servile population, these occupiers were ranged in two groups which we classify as free and unfree, mainly because the unfree corresponded roughly to those who at a later stage were in a condition of serfdom, bound to the soil, and known by the name of villeins, the name which Domesday Book had already applied to the larger

portion of the group. The distinction, however, between these free and unfree groups did not at that time turn on the nature of the services or the alternative payments rendered to the lords, but, so far as Domesday Book was concerned, was merely a fiscal distinction between those whose lords paid the danegeld for their land, and those who paid it for themselves.

of Services.

But after a century or so had passed, it had become recognised law that the great bulk of these occupiers were now in a condition of serfdom, bound to the soil, and liable to claims on the part of the lord which were of a degrading character. That change was probably the outcome of the pressure which the conquering Norman barons were practically able to bring to bear on the occupiers of their manorial estates. Some of those originally classified as free had dropped into the ranks of the villani, and were now merged among the villeins. On the other hand, many of those whom Domesday had classified as villani, and in Kent practically Commutation the whole of them, had succeeded in resisting the pressure, and were now admittedly freemen, not villeins, and not liable to degrading conditions of service. Generally, but not necessarily, the freemen were exempt from week-work. Still a man might be free and yet liable to week-work, and he might be a villein and yet be exempt from week-work, because under the Plantagenets the process of commutation, of substituting payment for agricultural service, went steadily on, to the mutual advantage both of lords and of villeins; and the more easily, with the increased employment of coin as a medium of exchange, and the substitution of payment in cash for payment in kind. Correspondingly, with the diminution of compulsory labour services, paid labour increased, and the classes of smaller villeins turned into wage-earning labourers. In the sense that the paid labourer is a freeman as compared with the forced labourer, and that the man who pays money for his holding is more free than he who pays service, there was a great development of freedom under the Plantagenet rule;

but this was not an emancipation from the technical serfdom which in our view had really come into being under the Norman kings. It did not remove that dividing barrier between the freeman and the villein which became recognised after the Conquest. Still, it tended to a less rigid exaction of the lord's technical claims, pointing to a gradual complete emancipation as the outcome of a customary laxity. When the middle of the fourteenth century was approaching, the villeins had become for the most part free in practice from week-work, and were making a fixed payment in lieu of it, though often without such formal contracts as would deprive the lord of the right to insist on the return to the earlier practice in the apparently very unlikely event of his wishing to do so. The country was prosperous, and men earned good wages when measured by the cost of food.

We may here observe the great military importance to England of the course which the rural development had taken. Most of the land in the country was The either demesne land or land held in villeinage, Yeomanry. but a substantial proportion was held by the free tenants, small farmers who differed from the villeins simply in the fact that they were free. The yeomen provided military material which was practically non-existent in France, and they supplied the military arm to which the Plantagenets owed most of their victories. Scutage enabled the English kings to hire troops instead of being dependent on feudal levies, and the English yeomanry, how, history has not yet explained to us, were the one class who had developed the skilled use of the long-bow, a form of artillery which gave to English forces the same sort of advantage that troops armed with the modern rifle would have against enemies armed with matchlocks. The long-bow does not appear to have come into use till the end of the thirteenth century; it remained an English monopoly; it won every decisive victory of the Plantagenets except that of Poictiers; and England owed it to her unique breed of free farmers.

When Edward III. began his French wars, the day did not