XIV.-ENGLISH POPULAR UPRISINGS IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

By DR. GEORGE KRIEHN,

OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

149

ENGLISH POPULAR UPRISINGS IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

By GEORGE KRIEHN.

A series of popular upheavals marked the close of the middle ages in central and western Europe. These movements were popular even to a more marked extent than modern revolutions; the lower classes arose almost to a man. They swept away their masters, and it seemed as if unheardof reforms were about to be inaugurated. But only for a moment! Certuries have elapsed since then, yet even now the demands of the patriot leaders have not been fully realized. Partly by treachery, partly by force of arms, the mediæval revolutions were suppressed. Their events were forgotten, or, worse still, only recorded to be condemned, to become a favorite theme of eighteenth-century historians against the deadly sin of rebellion. Not until our own times have they begun to receive a part of the attention they merit. And yet they were of no small influence on the society they strove to reform; the rising in 1381 gave the death-blow to English serfdom; the Jacquerie destroyed many a stronghold of oppression in France; a thousand flaming castles and monasteries lighted the march of the German peasants in their great struggle for liberty in 1524-25.

Such important factors in history deserve special investigation for their own sake. To Americans they should be of particular interest. Our national existence began with a revolution; what subject could be more noteworthy to us than former rebellions of our ancestors, unsuccessful though they were? What analogies do they present to modern revolutions? The study of mediæval agrarian and labor troubles may perhaps aid us to solve our own.

Of all such disturbances the English are probably the most instructive, because they were of common occurrence, more successful, and of more lasting influence on social conditions.

It is somewhat remarkable that comparatively little has been done in this field, especially when we consider the importance generally conceded it by the foremost English historians.*

Whilst studying abroad the author first directed his attention to the study of mediæval revolts, having written his graduating thesis on one of them, the English rising in 1450.+ Upon his return to America these studies were further prosecuted under the kind encouragement of Prof. Herbert B. Adams, and partly embodied in a course of lectures to the graduate students of the Johns Hopkins University on Popular Uprisings in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centu ries. A further work on the English Popular Revolt in 1381 will soon appear. The reader is referred to these investigations for such new or dissenting views as will be expressed in this paper.

The

It is a commonplace that our ancestors were comparatively free in the days of Cæsar and Tacitus, but that they lost this primitive freedom in course of time. At first the freemen were the greater part, the ruling body of the German tribes; by the year 1000 the masses of the English people were serfs without any legal rights against their masters. Once the land had belonged to the village communities and to the nation; now lords, prelates, and kings owned almost every acre. once free Saxon was bound to the soil of the manor. belonged to the class termed villains, and held the normal holding of about 30 acres, he must work two or three days weekly for his lord throughout the year, to say nothing of other obligations and taxes scarcely less onerous. If a cottier, holding a smaller plot, his duties were somewhat lighter. He had only one protection against oppression and misrule, the custom of the manor, as had been the use from time immemorial.

If he

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a change took place in the condition of the peasantry. England passed from the natural husbandry to the money basis; the labor service of the serf was commuted into rent. The villain became a yeoman, or rent-paying freeholder; the cottier a free agricultural laborer. During the fourteenth century a number of chanced events aided this transformation. I refer especially

*Stubbs' Constitutional History, 11, 449-50; Thorold Rogers' History of Agriculture and Prices, Oxford, 1866, 1, 79–95.

+ English Rising in 1450, Strasburg, 1892.

Johns Hopkins University Circulars, May, 1893, p. 80 sq.

to the great plague in 1349, the famous black death, which made Europe and the Orient like to a vast charnel-house. Onethird of the population of England perished. Whole villages were swept away.

Of course labor became scarce. Sheep wandered about without shepherds to heed them; vast tracts of land lay untilled for want of men to plow. Wages rose and rents fell. The prices of all the necessaries of life increased in proportion and no man could subsist on small pay. Yet little were the wants of the masses considered by the landholding parliament, the very first proceeding of which was to enact the well-known statute of laborers, a measure that, under brutal penalties, compelled the workman to demand no higher wages than before the plague. The people's answer was defiance; in country and town peasants and artisans formed regular trades-unions. against it. Forbidden by the government, they maintained their organizations in secret. Yeoman or villain, cottier or laborer, craftsman or apprentice: all gladly gave to the common

cause.

But parliament was blind and deaf to public discontent. It reenacted the statute, enforcing all its clauses with increased severity. It continued to raise heavy taxes for the needs of the French war, resorting to unheard of poll taxes, which exasperated the people beyond measure. At last a brutal levy occasioned the first dangerous outbreaks in 1381.

The contemporary accounts of the events of 1381 were written by monks and other churchmen who had lost and suffered through the rebellion. Hence their narratives are very one sided. Thomas of Walsingham, historian of the royal abbey St. Albans, gave us the longest account in his Chronica Majora.* The works of Henry of Knighton and of the monk of Eversham are of importance, as is that of the fanciful, unreliable Sir Jean Froissart. John Stowe's Annales are invaluable on account of their detailed narratives and the author's faithfulness in copying contemporary sources. The

*This work is now lost, but has been preserved in two works that reproduced it almost verbally: Thomas of Walsingham's Historia Anglicana, ed. Riley, London, 1863, and the Chronica Anglica, ed. Thompson, London, 1874, both in the Rolls Series.

+ Published by Roger Twysden, Historia Anglicanae scriptores decem, London, 1652.

Historia vitæ et regni Ricardi II, Angliæ regis, a monacho quodam de Eversham consignata, ed. Th. Hearnius Oxonie, 1729.