that he was above all an Italian. In the close relations of the country gentleman to the burgess class, England found a powerful solvent which hindered her towns from crystallising themselves apart, as the towns of Italy had crystallised themselves, or from clinging for support, like the towns of France, to the arbitrary government of the king, in order to free themselves from the brutalities of the feudal landowners around.

It must never be forgotten that the form taken by the House of Commons was the effect, not the cause. Long before there was a House of Commons at all, the ancestors of the knights of the shire of the reign of Edward III. had fought side by side at Lewes with the ancestors of the citizens of London who sent their representatives to Parliament in the same reign.

Such

a union was of advantage to both classes. The burghers brought an acquaintance with trade which was of the utmost value at a time when the battle of the constitution was fought out on questions mainly relating to commercial imposts, whilst the knights of the shire gave a vigour to resistance which mere citizens could never have offered. It is of the utmost importance that strength in argument should clothe itself in effective strength, if necessary, in battle. It is ill to reason with the master of thirty legions, and it is the fate of cities which stand alone to discover that neither arts nor commerce nor civic virtue can avail for ever to resist the nasters of the wide fields which stretch away beyond the horizon outside their walls. In the House of Commons the masters of the streets and lanes made common cause with the masters of the fields. The knights of the shire furnished the effective strength that was needed, and were consequently the most honoured members of the assembly on them fell the weight and the glory of speaking, as well as of acting in defence of all, and not merely in defence of their own peculiar privileges.

CHAP.

V.

$7. Unity

of the

Nation.

CHAP.
V.

The early years of Edward's reign were years of constant progress on the part of the House of Commons, $8. Grow- interrupted no doubt by times of retrogression. Edward ing Strength of promised concessions, and then withdrew them.

the Com

mons.

§ 9. Chivalry.

He

mingled cajolery and flattery with positive falsehood. Step by step, however, the Commons grew in influence. The great lords of the Upper House found their account in having the knights and burgesses on their side. protest against injustice and wrong was often no more than a protest. But it was repeated again and again till a sense of right was created which would in the end gain the mastery over the wrong.

After all, however, the leading power in England was still the baronage. Edward's French wars indeed were rendered possible by the support which he received from other classes; but they were waged in accordance with the ideas, and with due respect for the interests of the feudal and more especially the military class. So far as that class was animated by any special idea, it was by the idea of chivalry. Chivalry was to the medieval warrior very much what monasticism was to the medieval churchman. It placed before him his own mode of life, in the best and highest light of which it was capable. The rough and often brutal warrior learned that selfrestraint and respect for others were higher than prowess in the field. The Black Prince showed himself nobler in humbly waiting upon a captive king than when he won his spurs by his charge at Crecy. In some respects the ideal of honour and courtesy was higher than the ideal of the monk. It was less entirely introspective, less concerned with separating those who entertained it as a class apart from others, more of a bond attaching man closely to his fellow-creatures. But in other respects it was a lower ideal. The code of honour was always more arbitrary, more concerned with outward actions, and less

with inward purity and uprightness than the code of monastic virtues.

In the Middle Ages too the code of honour was subject to special limitations which were most injurious to its development. Courtesy finds all the more scope for its excellence when exercised by the rich towards the poor, or by the strong towards the weak. But in the fourteenth century the community of feeling necessary to the development of courtesy did not reach to all classes of the population. The nation, the growth of which we have been slowly tracing, was by no means co-extensive with the population of the kingdom. Even the House of Commons, which was pushing its way to a share of power, was comparatively an aristocratic body. The labouring population in town and country had no share in its exaltation. Even the citizens, the merchants and tradesmen of the towns, looked down upon those beneath them without trust or affection. To the warrior knight the labouring man was but an instrument of service to whom no courtesy was due, and who, in war, might be pillaged or plundered without pity, when the defeated knight or gentleman would be received to mercy. The course of the French wars deepened this feeling of estrangement. The lot of the labourer in France was lower and more pitiable than in England, and the English victors learned to treat the whole class with more complete disdain from their new experience.

CHAP.

V.

§ 10. The Labourers.

the Plough

inan.

Then came the days of failure and disaster. Expen- § 11. Piers sive habits, acquired when booty was easily got, were hard to throw off, and the demands made on the labourer, when the baron or the knight returned discomfited from the war in which he had learned the evil lesson of cruelty to the poor, were certain to be higher than they had ever been before. The feeling of the

CHAP.

V.

§ 12. The Black

Death and

the Peasants' Revolt.

lower classes was roused against their oppressors. Gradually there had been growing up a literature of satirical songs directed against the vices of the rich. The author of 'Piers the Ploughman' now stepped forward to weigh the clergy, the nobles, the traders, and the knights in the balance, and to find them wanting. True industry and true innocence, he declared, were to be found in those alone whose lives were spent in manual labour. This poem was the sharp reply to the romances of chivalry and to chronicles like those of Froissart, in which the rich and the noble were depicted in the brightest colours, and in which life appeared to be one long holiday. Assuredly the picture drawn was highly exaggerated. But it revealed the great fact of the time-the fact that the consolidating work of earlier days needed to be carried on further still, and that the limits of the nation were not yet comprehensive enough for the task that lay before it.

If the demands of the landowners were higher, the position of the peasants for resistance was stronger than it had been before. The condition of the serfs or villeins had been one of improvement for some time past. Some of them had been set free and had given rise to a class of labourers working like the modern labourer for his hire. If the great part of the peasants were still bound to the soil, and if they were unable to leave the landlord's estate without their landlord's leave, most of them had changed the uncertain tenure of their cottages and of the plots of ground around them for one which was more definite. Instead of being called on to plough and sow at their master's direction, they had some fixed work to do, some ascertained labour rent to give, or, in the majority of cases, a fixed money rent to pay in commutation for the labour rent. Suddenly an event occurred which made all past progress seem small. The Black

Death swept over Europe, that devastating scourge to which neither the cholera of our own days, nor the plague of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, can afford a parallel. At least one half of the population, it can hardly be doubted, disappeared before its ravages. The relations between the landowning and the labouring classes were at once altered by the blow. Whatever number may have perished out of the families of the landowners, there were sure to be kinsmen left to gather the inheritance of those who were gone. There would be a new face at the head of the table in the hall of the manor house, a new exacter of service and of rent. In the cottage the change would work in a very different fashion. Where there had been two labourers before there would be but one now, and the same amount of work would have to be done. Men who worked for pay would feel it hard that they did not have more pay when their services were in greater request, and men who paid rent in labour without receiving pay at all would feel it harder than ever that they did not receive money for the work of their hands which had now become twice as valuable as it had been before. Nor is it unlikely, though it is not absolutely certain, that an attempt was made by the lords to enforce the service of labour in the large number of instances in which it had been tacitly permitted to fall into desuetude in consideration of the payment of rent. Other grievances of the labouring classes came to swell the tide of agitation, and before Richard II. had been long upon the throne the peasants were ready to join in an active opposition to the propertied classes, of which the main cry was one for the entire abolition of villenage. In 1381 they burst out into open insurrection. But they were not strong enough to gain their ends. The upper classes were too strong in organisation to be overwhelmed by an un

CHAP.

V.