Among the insurgents the largest and most conspicuous body was that of the Kent men; but the Kent men were not villeins. The Kent peasant was a freeman, not bound to the soil, not usually owing agricultural service, but paying a rent. The other insurgents belonged to East Anglia, the counties in which the proportion of free tenants was always comparatively large. In the whole range of counties where villeins were numerous and freemen were rare, Somerset and Hants were the only two which supplied any 'leaders.' If the cruel incidents of villeinage were the main grievance, it is somewhat amazing that the most active of the insurgents should have been stirred entirely not by grievances of their own, but by the melancholy plight of their neighbours, who did not join the insurrection. In London we must suppose, prima facie at any rate, that the hundred and fifty leaders were men whom the ruling authorities had marked down as troublesome A Social characters; in the counties they would be either Revolt. those who were known as agitators, some of them being beneficed clergy, or men who had acted as captains of bands of insurgents. For the forces of the insurgents were not without discipline, and one may at least suspect that they had among them a fair sprinkling of old soldiers acting as officers. But these things do not point to a spontaneous rising of villeins against a tightening of the bonds of villeinage; they point rather to a half-organised social revolt, based more on the grievances of the peasantry and the working-classes in general, whether free or not, than on the grievances of villeins in particular. So with the actions of the insurgents and the demands formulated by them. They all cried out against the polltax. The Essex insurgents, indeed, seem to have been mainly villeins, since their chief demand was that they should no longer be called bond but free.' In sporadic risings, as at St. Albans, they demanded to have their holdings free in such a way as that they might sell them.' There was a general demand that land should be purchasable at a fixed price. There were particular demands for release from the very inconvenient rule which required tenants to grind their corn at the lord's mill. Actual details of villeinage certainly played their part among the grievances of the men of the eastern counties. The eastern men and the Kent men alike were manifestly actuated by a fierce hostility to the great landowners, to the lawyers, and to some of the clergy, of whom others were among the most prominent agitators. It is noticeable also that they professed loyalty to the king, and gave rather striking proof thereof when they actually had Richard in their own hands. What were the actual demands of the Kentish leader, Wat Tyler, it is difficult to say, but they appear to have been concerned, not with the abolition of villeinage, but with a general social reconstruction. Something of the same kind appears to have been in the minds of the insurgents at Norwich, where they invited the captain-general, who had risen from villeindom to knighthood, to join them, promising to 'set him over a third part of the kingdom,' an honour the rejection of which cost him his life. But the whole conclusion forced upon us is that the particular grievances of villeinage, though they were utilised by agitators, were not the real incentive, and that the leaders had very much more revolutionary ends in view, while the bulk of their followers were probably hoping for the establishment of some sort of peasant proprietary. Action of Parliament consisted mainly of members of the landowning class supplemented by substantial burgesses from the towns, and it was naturally not free from class prejudice. Consequently it not only at once repudiated the promises which the king had made against the interests of the landowners, but more than once subsequently attempted to reinforce claims which had fallen into desuetude, though it met with little encouragement from the Crown and the Crown lawyers. But the general effect of the evidence is, that the Peasant Revolt actually made very little difference one way or the other in the history of the gradual emancipation of the villein. Wages and rents were in fact more convenient to landlords, occupiers, and labourers, than fixed labour services. That had made itself manifest long before the Black Death, when forced services The Outcome. were disappearing. Scarcity of labour and high wages caused a temporary set-back which was strengthened by the collision wherein the reaction was victorious over the revolution. But the disorganisation brought about by the great catastrophe of 1348 gradually worked itself out as the population recovered, and again the landowners found that the commutation of services was in their own interest, and that they derived no practical advantage from the directly servile features of villeinage. There was no revolution. But after an interruption of something under half a century, normal economic forces were again in normal working order, and the objectionable incidents of villeinage, with occasional exceptions, became obsolete. Jack Cade's Rebellion in 1450, though Shakespeare has credited it with a good many of the characteristics of the Peasant Revolt, was not in fact agrarian, but political in its motives. But the disappearance of villeinage was rather retarded than accelerated by the insurrection of 1381. But there were other effects of the Black Death. There was a twofold result of the depopulation. Many villein holdings were made vacant and reverted to the Results of the lord of the manor; and the lord of the manor Depopulation. could not get enough labour to keep the arable land on his demesne under tillage. He found, therefore, a strong inducement to consolidate his demesne lands so that portions of them could without inconvenience be utilised for sheep instead of for crops; and thus a movement began for the extension of pasturage at the expense of tillage. No injurious effects were felt, because for a considerable length of time the land that was left for tillage occupied all the available labour, and what was converted into pasturage would probably otherwise have been unproductive. But in course of time the landowner realised, as the wool trade developed, that his wool-growing was highly profitable, and then came further developments of which we shall treat in another chapter. Extent of At this stage, however, we must guard against forming an exaggerated impression of the effective change which took place in agricultural conditions between the thirteenth century and the close of the fifteenth. The main features continued the same. The unit was still the manor with its arable land divided into acre strips, allotted partly to the demesne and partly to the tenant, with demesne land still scattered among the tenants' strips, and tenants' strips still breaking into the comparatively consolidated demesne lands. The meadow-land was still used in common, and the waste land beyond was still common. The arable land was still worked by joint labour. Services disappeared almost, but not altogether, and the occupier for the most part had security of tenure at a quitrent, while most of the old free tenants had probably become actual freeholders. The individual man had become a freeman in the eye of the law, not a bondman, but the practical conditions under which the land gave its produce remained effectively the same. CHAPTER VIII THE LATER PLANTAGENETS Craftsmen Merchants. IN the thirteenth century the merchant was not yet definitely differentiated from the craftsman, nor did the master craftsmen form a class distinct from the workmen or journeymen, who all expected to set up for them- and selves and become masters in their turn. Very little was wanted in the way of capital, because most of the craftsman's business was done to order; he was supplied with the material which he had to work up for his customer; he was not in the habit of keeping an extensive stock for sale, or of purchasing quantities of raw material to be worked up for chance customers. In short, it required very little capital apart from the actual tools of the trade to set up a shop. The prosperous craftsman was normally a burgess and a member of the gild-merchant if he inhabited a chartered town. his craft was one of which there were many members, they probably formed a gild of their own and drew up the regulations specifically applying to their particular craft, procuring the sanction of the gild-merchant for the same. For practical purposes, if not in actual constitution, the craftgild was controlled by the masters who, as members of the gild-merchant, could give legal effect to regulations of the crafts. If During the fourteenth century, differentiation increased, Merchants became separated from craftsmen as wealthier members of the community began to find it Growing Need more profitable to buy with a view to selling. of Capital.. Division grew up between masters and journeymen, as masters learnt to manufacture with a view to selling instead G |