of the royal name and power even in days when parliamentary
institutions had been long in existence, and were supposed to act
as a check on the crown. To legalize his arbitrary acts Duke
John dared to summon the estates together, after he had issued
stringent orders to the sheriffs to exclude his enemies and return
his friends when the members for the Commons were chosen. He
obtained a house of the complexion that he desired, and having
a strong following among the peers actually succeeded in undoing
all the work of 1376. No sign of trouble or rebellion followed,
the opposition being destitute of a fighting leader. March had
left the realm; Bishop Wykeham showed an unworthy subservience
by suing for pardon through the mediation of Alice
Perrers. Only Bishop Courtenay refused to be terrorized; he
chose this moment to open a campaign against the duke’s ally,
John Wycliffe, who was arraigned for heresy before the ecclesiastical
courts. His trial, however, ended in a scandalous fiasco.
Lancaster and his friend Lord Percy came to St Paul’s, and so
insulted and browbeat the bishop, that the proceedings degenerated
into a riot, and reached no conclusion (Feb. 19).
Courtenay dared not recommence them, and Lancaster ruled
as he pleased till his father, five months later, died. Deserted
Death of Edward III.
by his worthless courtiers and plundered on his death-bed
by his greedy mistress, the victor of Sluys and
Creçy sank into an unhonoured grave. It was a relief
to the nation that he was gone. Yet there was a general
feeling that chaos might follow. If Lancaster should justify
the malevolent rumours that were afloat by making a snatch
at the crown, the last state of the realm might be worse than the
first.
Duke John, however, was a better man than his enemies supposed. He was loyal to the crown according to his lights, and showed a chivalrous self-denial that had hardly been expected from him. He saluted his little nephew as Richard II. king without a moment’s hesitation, though he was aware that with the commencement of a new reign his own dictatorship had come to an end. The princess of Wales, in whose hands the young Richard II. was placed, had never been his friend, and was surrounded by adherents of her deceased husband, who belonged to the constitutional party. Disarmed, however, by the duke’s frank submission they wisely resolved not to push him to extremes, and the first council which was appointed to act for the new monarch was a sort of “coalition ministry” in which Lancaster’s followers as well as his foes were represented. For that very reason it was lacking in strength and unity of purpose, and proved lamentably incapable of dealing with the problems of the moment.
Of these the most pressing was the renewal of the French war; the truce had expired a few weeks before the death of Edward III., and the new reign began with a series of military disasters. The French fleet landed in great force in Sussex, burnt Rye and Hastings and routed The French war. the shire levies. Simultaneously the seneschal of Aquitaine was defeated in battle, and Bergerac, the last great town in the inland which remained in English hands, was captured by the duke of Anjou.
The first parliament of Richard II. met in October under the most gloomy auspices. It showed its temper by taking up the work of the “Good Parliament.” Lancaster’s adherents were turned out of the council; the persons First parliament of Richard. Reforms. condemned in 1376 were declared incapable of serving in it; Alice Perrers was sentenced to banishment and forfeiture, and the little king was made to repudiate the declaration whereby his uncle had quashed the statutes of 1376 by declaring that “no act of parliament can be repealed save with parliament’s consent.” John of Gaunt bowed before the storm, retired to his estates, and for some time took little part in affairs of state.
Unfortunately the new government proved wholly unable either to conduct the struggle with France successfully or to pluck up courage to make a humiliating peace—the only wise course before them. The nation was too proud to accept defeat, and persevered in the unhappy attempt to reverse the fortunes of war. An almost unbroken series of petty disasters marked the first three years of King Richard. The worst was the failure of the last great devastating raid which the English launched against France. Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III., took a powerful army to Calais, and marched through Picardy and Champagne, past Orleans, and finally to Rennes in Brittany, but accomplished nothing save the ruin of his own troops and the wasting of a vast sum of money. Meanwhile taxation was heavy, the whole nation was seething with discontent, and—what was worst—no way was visible out of the miserable situation; ministers and councillors were repeatedly displaced, but their successors always proved equally incompetent to find a remedy.
This period of murmuring and misery culminated in the Great Revolt of 1381, a phenomenon whose origins must be sought in the most complicated causes, but whose outbreak was due in the main to a general feeling that the realm The Great Revolt of 1381. was being misgoverned, and that some one must be made responsible for its maladministration. It was actually provoked by the unwise and unjust poll-tax of one shilling a head on all adult persons, voted by the parliament of Northampton in November 1380. The last poll-tax had been carefully graduated on a sliding scale so as to press lightly on the poorest classes; in this one a shilling for each person had to be exacted from every township, though it was provided that “the strong should help the weak” to a certain extent. But in hundreds of villages there were no “strong” residents, and the poorest cottager had to pay his three groats. The peasantry defended themselves by the simple device of understating the numbers of their families; the returns made it appear that the adult population of England had gone down from 1,355,000 to 896,000 since the poll-tax of 1379. Thereupon the government sent out commissioners to revise the returns and exact the missing shillings. Their appearance led to a series of widespread and preconcerted riots, which soon spread over all England from the Wash to the Channel, and in a few days developed into a formidable rebellion. The poll-tax was no more than the spark which fired the mine; it merely provided a good general grievance on which all malcontents could unite. In the districts which took arms two main causes of insurrection may be differentiated; the first and the most widespread was the discontent of the rural population with the landowners and the Statute of Labourers. Their aim was to abolish all villein-service, and to wring from their lords the commutation of all manorial customs and obligations for a small rent—fourpence an acre was generally the sum suggested. But there was a simultaneous outbreak in many urban districts. In Winchester, London, St Albans, Canterbury, Bury, Beverley, Scarborough and many other places the rioting was as violent as in the countryside. Here the object of the insurgents was in most cases to break down the local oligarchy, who engrossed all municipal office and oppressed the meaner citizens; but in less numerous instances their end was to win charters from lords (almost always ecclesiastical lords) who had hitherto refused to grant them. But it must not be forgotten that there was also a tinge of purely political discontent about the rising; the insurgents everywhere proclaimed their intention to destroy “traitors,” of whom the most generally condemned were the chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury, and the treasurer, Sir Robert Hailes, the two persons most responsible for the levy of the poll-tax. Often the rebels added the name of John of Gaunt to the list, looking upon him as the person ultimately responsible for the mismanagement of the war and the misgovernment of the realm. It must be added that though the leaders of the revolt were for the most part local demagogues, the creatures of the moment, there were among them a few fanatics like the “mad priest of Kent,” John Ball, who had long preached socialist doctrines from the old text:
| “When Adam delved and Eve span Who was then the gentleman?” |
and clamoured for the abolition of all differences of rank, status and property. Though many clerics were found among the rebels, it does not seem that any of them were Wycliffites, or that
