While these statutes if obeyed would have rendered existence by labour almost impossible, wheat at this time averaging 7s. the quarter, the people managed to obtain such high wages, that Parliament in 1363 passed another Act to restrain the sumptuousness of their apparel! Carters, ploughmen, plough-drivers, ox-herds, neat-herds, shepherds, pig-drivers, deyes and all other attendants on cattle, threshers and other labourers employed in husbandry were to use no other cloth than what was called blanket or russet of the value of 12d. a yard, and to wear linen girdles suitable to their condition. The same statute restrained their diet.
Notwithstanding facts patent to all but the wilfully blind, Parliament confirmed the Statute of Labourers by several subsequent Acts, relying perhaps on a clause by which it hoped to entangle its subjects' consciences: labourers were to be sworn twice a year to observe these impossible regulations.[1]
What wonder that such legislation produced in pious men a horror of oaths, and in the more daring a reckless contempt of all law. Eden tells us many became staff-strikers and wandered in parties of two, three, and four from village to village; others became "sturdy rogues," and infested the kingdom with frequent robberies. Iniquitous laws are the chief authors of crime.
This was the state of things when Langland composed his second edition of Piers Plowman, and the rising tide of discontent is pictured in the Prologue, where he introduces the fable of the rats and mice holding a council to protect themselves against the ravages of the cat; the rats and mice being the town and country labourers, or perhaps the husbandmen and the labourers. Langland describes the lords as treating their people in such a way "that us loathed the lyf." The object of the council was to find out "if they might by any wit their lords' will withstand."
Whether Langland meant to spur the people by representing them as infirm in purpose and in courage I cannot say, but as a matter of fact they were quite the opposite. They had evidently made up their minds they would submit to these tyrannies no longer. They began to refuse their customary services, and the
- ↑ Re-enacted 7 Henry IV., c. xvii., refusal incurred three days in the stocks, which every town or seigniory was to provide under fine of a hundred shillings.
