The process by which the villein became a hired labourer is obscure and an attempt was made to check it by the Statute of Labourers at the time of the Black Death.  This was followed by the peasant’s revolt of 1382, which corresponded to the far worse horrors of the French Jacquerie.  Sharply though this was suppressed, the real object of the rising seemed to have been accomplished.  Of the period of the Wars of the Roses it is here sufficient to say that it established the principle embodied in a statute of Henry VII. that obedience to the de facto government is not to be punished on the ground that government is not also de jure.

V.—­Europe

In spite of the Teutonic incursion, Latin remained the basis of language as it survived in Italy, France, and Spain.  But the pursuit of letters was practically confined to the clergy and was by them employed almost exclusively in the interests of clerical authority.  To this end a multitude of superstitions were encouraged; superstitions which were the cause of not a few strange and irrational outbursts of fanaticism.  The monasteries served indeed a useful purpose as sanctuaries in days of general lawlessness and rapine; but the huge weight of evidence is conclusive as to the general corruption of morals among the clergy as among the laity.  The common diversion of the upper classes, lay and clerical, when not engaged in actual war, was hunting.  An extended commerce was impossible when robbery was a normal occupation of the great.

Gradually, however, a more orderly society emerged.  Maritime commerce developed in two separate areas, the northern and western, and the Mediterranean.  The first great commerce in the north arises from the manufacture in Flanders of the wool exported from England.  And in the fourteenth century England herself began to compete in the woollen manufacture.  The German free manufacturing towns established the Great Hanseatic League; but maritime commerce between the Northern and Southern areas was practically non-existent till the fifteenth century, by which time English ships were carrying on a fairly extensive traffic in the Mediterranean.  In that area the great seaports of Italy, and in a less degree, of Catalonia and the French Mediterranean seaboard, developed a large commerce.  Naturally, however, the law which it was sufficiently difficult to enforce by land was even more easily defied on the sea, and piracy was extremely prevalent.

Governments as well as private persons were under a frequent necessity of borrowing, and for a long time the great money lenders were the Jews.  They, however, were later to a great extent displaced by the merchants of Lombardy, and the fifteenth century witnesses the rise of the great bankers, Italian and German.

The structure and furniture of all buildings for private purposes made exceedingly little provision for comfort, offering an extreme contrast to the dignity of the public buildings and the sublimity of ecclesiastical architecture.