Mediaeval Socialism | Page 8

it too was no doubt here and there arranged for. But for the most part the villein took the law into his own hands, left his manor, and openly sold his labour to the highest bidder.
But at once the governing class took fright. In their eyes it seemed as though their tenants were taking an unfair advantage of the disorganisation of the national life. Even before Parliament could meet, in 1349 an ordnance was issued by the King (Edward III), which compelled all servants, whether bond or free, to take up again the customary services, and forced work on all who had no income in land, or were not otherwise engaged. The lord on whose manor the tenant had heretofore dwelt had preferential claim to his labour, and could threaten with imprisonment every refractory villein. Within two years a statute had been enacted by Parliament which was far more detailed in its operation, fixing wages at the rate they had been in the twentieth year of the King's reign (i.e. at a period before the plague, when labour was plentiful), and also with all appearance of justice determining the prices of agricultural produce. It was the first of a very long series of Acts of Parliament that, with every right intention, but with a really obvious futility, endeavoured to reduce everything to what it had been in the past, to put back the hands of the clock, and keep them back. But one strange fact is noticeable.
Whether unconsciously or not, the framers of these statutes were themselves striking the hardest blow at the old system of tenure. From 1351 the masters' preferential claim to the villeins of their own manor disappears, or is greatly limited. Henceforth the labourers are to appear in the market place with their tools, and (reminiscent of scriptural conditions) wait till some man hired them. The State, not the lord, is now regulating labour. Labour itself has passed from being "tied to the soil," and has become fluid. It is no longer a personal obligation, but a commodity.
Even Parliament recognised that in many respects at least the old order had passed away. The statute of 1351 allows "men of the counties of Stafford, Lancaster, Derby, the borders of Wales and Scotland, &c., to come in August time to labour in other counties, and to return in safety, as they were heretofore wont to do." It is the legalisation of what had been looked at, up till then, askance. The long, silent revolution had become conscious. But the lords were, as we have said, not altogether sorry for the turn things had taken. Groaning under pressure from the King's heavy war taxation, and under the demands which the advance of new standards of comfort (especially between 1370 and 1400) entailed, they let off on lease even the demesne land, and became to a very great extent mere rent-collectors. Commutation proceeded steadily, with much haggling so as to obtain the highest price from the eager tenant. Wages rose slowly, it is true, but rose all the same; and rent, though still high, was becoming, on the whole, less intolerable.
But the drain of the French war, and the peculation in public funds brought about the final upheaval which completed what the Black Death had begun. The capricious and unfairly graduated poll-tax of 1381 came as a climax, and roused the Great Revolt of that year, a revolt carefully engineered and cleverly organised, which yet for the demands it made is a striking testimony to the moderation, the good sense, and also the oppressed state of the English peasant.
The fourfold petition presented to the King by the rebels was:
(1) The abolition of serfdom.
(2) The reduction of rent to 4d. per acre.
(3) The liberty to buy and sell in market.
(4) A free pardon.
Compare the studiously restrained tone of these articles with the terrible atrocities and vengeance wreaked by the Jacquerie in France, and the no less awful mob violence perpetrated in Florence by the Ciompi. While it shows no doubt in a kindly light the more equitable rule of the English landholder, it remains a monument, also, of the fair-mindedness of the English worker.
In the towns much the same sort of struggle had been going on; for the towns themselves, more often than not, sprang up on the demesne of some lord, whether king, Church, or baron. But here the difficulties were complicated still further by the interference of the Guilds, which in the various trades regulated the hours of labour, the quality of the work, and the rate of remuneration. Yet, on the other hand, it is undoubted that, once the squalor of the earlier stages of urban life had been removed or at least improved, the social condition of the poor, from the fourteenth century onwards, was immeasurably superior