is literally true that often the living could scarce bury the dead; for example, more than one case occurred where all the inhabitants of a monastery were cut off, or every member of a large family died, so that there was none left to inherit the land.

We have especially to look at the effects of this in the rural districts. It is plain that labour would become very hard to get; and, further, Rise in Wages. since at the height of the plague men were so terrified that they left the harvest to rot ungathered in the fields, corn became scarce. This caused a rise in prices; and as prices rose, and labourers were few, we should be prepared to find a rise in wages also. In fact, this is what happened. Wages rose sharply.

This all hit the land-owners hard. To begin with, many of their tenants were dead, some without leaving Difficulties of heirs; and so they lost the payments for the Lords. commuted service which these had owed. Further, what had paid for a day's labour in the days before the Black Death would no longer pay it after the rise in wages. It was a common complaint that whereas a woman's labour had cost 1⁄2d. a day, now it cost 2d. or 3d. Hence ruin stared the lord in the face if he had to receive at the old rates and pay at the new ones.

Something clearly had to be done; and as the landowners were strong in Parliament, we shall find their policy in tracing what Parliament did. The first idea. was to check this rise in wages, which seemed to them ruinous. No injustice was intended, because Parliament meant to check the rise in prices also; if prices remained the same, it was argued, there was no need for wages to rise. It seems very strange to us to think of Parliament meddling in such matters at all,

but there was nothing strange to men of the day. Every trade had its craft gild, which fixed the price at which its wares should be sold. Parliament was only attempting to do for the country what the craft gilds did in the towns.

The task, however, was too big. Parliament made a series of laws called the Statutes of Labourers, by which all labourers were ordered to take the Statutes of old rate of wages, under pain of imprison- Labourers. ment, branding with a hot iron, slavery, and even death. But even these ferocious penalties could not make men obey the laws. The rise in prices went on: men could not live on the old wages; and yet lords could not afford to see their estates uncultivated. Thus many lords were tempted to break the very laws that were intended to protect them, by offering the higher wages which Parliament had prohibited.

The policy of trying to put the clock back failed; it was bound to fail. Yet a party of the land-owners, untaught by their first failure, tried to go Revival of still further back. Wages, they felt, were Serfdom. at the root of the trouble; but there had been a time when no wages were paid or needed, when all paid services, and the land was cultivated by serfs. Why not revive this? It seemed easy; all that was needed was to refuse the commutation payments, and make the serfs pay services once more.

This policy was worse than the other. Men who have partly gained freedom will not consent to lose what they have won. Soon all the pea- Peasant Revolt. sants were infuriated with their lords. A poll-tax which pressed far more on the poor than it did on the rich caused their smouldering discontent to break into flame. In 1381 risings broke out in East Anglia and in all the counties near London.

The Kentish peasants, with Wat Tyler as leader, reached London. Richard II. met them boldly at Smithfield. There was need of courage, for the city was in the hands of the mob, and the day before, rioters, pouring into the Tower of London, had murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Treasurer, who had proposed the hateful poll-tax. As Wat Tyler approached, the Mayor of London, thinking he meant to insult and perhaps attack the king, cut him down. The mob were bending their bows to fire on the royal party, when Richard rode forward and cried to them, "I will be your leader”, and by fair words and promises got them to disperse quietly. These promises were not kept. The rioters, by burning manor-houses to destroy the records of the serfdom, and hanging lawyers as being the persons who made these deeds, and generally acting in a brutal way, made it impossible to treat them mildly. So the king employed force, and put down the Peasant Revolt with great severity.

Thus injustice had led to violence, as it often does, and neither party had gained. In few cases were the lords able to force their serfs to pay services again; on the other hand, many rioters were hanged, and the rebels did not get the abolition of serfdom which they had demanded.

Since labour could not be obtained at the old rates, nor services re-exacted without danger of violence and Land Let murder, it was necessary to pay the new on Lease. rates, or to do with less labour. Some lords granted land on lease to tenants for a rent, giving them stock as well as land. Thus the tenant had to find the labour; the lord was free of the difficulty. Here we have the beginnings of the modern farmer, a person who stands between the labourer and the

Others, however, met the difficulty in

Sheep-farming.

So, many lords

land-owner. another way. There was a great demand at the time for wool, and English wool was then the best that could be had. started sheep-farming instead of arable farming. It paid better, because less labour was needed. Many labourers were required for a large arable farm; but when it was laid down in grass one or two shepherds could tend all the sheep on it.

Depopulation.

Thus sheep-farming led to many men being out of employment; and as under the old system the serfs' small patches of land were often mixed up with the wide farms of the land-owner, now the latter came to wish to evict the serfs and take their land for sheep-farms. He enclosed also the waste or common land on which the serfs had pastured their cattle, and this, too, made it hard for the serfs to keep their holdings. Thus the land-owners who had at first struggled to keep their serfs, ended by trying to drive them off altogether. No doubt great misery was often caused by this depopulation. Something of the same kind has been seen in our own day in the Highlands, where the crofters have been turned out to give place to sheep-farms and deerforests. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Parliament tried to stop this process of enclosure for sheep-farms, but without much result.

Thus in the end the effects of the Black Death caused serfdom to disappear. By the time of Elizabeth it was at an end. But it was not that the peasants obtained freedom by their revolt. Upon the whole, the revolt only made their chains tighter. Yet by degrees the labour of serfs came to be no longer required; and lords granted freedom easily, since serfdom was no longer worth keeping.

XIV.-WYCLIF AND THE LOLLARDS.

More than a hundred years before Martin Luther began his dispute with the Roman Church which ended in the Reformation, England had seen churchman start on a very similar career. The story of John Wyclif and his followers, the Lollards, shows clearly that England was not at all satisfied with the authority of the pope long before the time came when the nation broke away from the Roman authority, and the Church in England became National and Protestant.

The interference of the pope in English affairs, even when this interference was only in affairs of Dislike of the Church, had always been disliked. In the Pope. Edward III.'s reign this feeling of dislike became very strong. Men saw a great deal of money being sent to Rome as taxes, and they did not think it right that they should pay it; they saw, too, a great many foreigners who were appointed by the pope holding rich livings, deaneries, and high posts in the Church, and they would have preferred that Englishmen should have these posts. They saw a few churchmen, each holding many livings, and perhaps never going near some of them, and they contrasted the fine clothes and crowds of servants of these men with the poverty of the parish priests. It seemed to them that these rich churchmen neglected their duty, and thought more of the good things of this world than it was right for them to do. "God", they said, "gave his people to be pastured, not to be shaven and shorn." And so the idea got about that some change and reform was needed. We must not think that all, or even the greater part of the