[Sidenote:  Misery of England]

The Peace of Bretigny set its seal upon Edward’s glory.  But within England itself the misery of the people was deepening every hour.  Men believed the world to be ending, and the judgement day to be near.  A few months after the Peace came a fresh swoop of the Black Death, carrying off the Duke of Lancaster.  The repressive measures of Parliament and the landowners only widened the social chasm which parted employer from employed.  We can see the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance both to the reactionary efforts which were being made to bring back labour services and to the enactments which again bound labour to the soil in statutes which strove in vain to repress the strikes and combinations which became frequent in the towns and the more formidable gatherings of villeins and “fugitive serfs” in the country at large.  A statute of later date throws light on the nature of the resistance of the last.  It tells us that “villeins and holders of land in villeinage withdrew their customs and services from their lords, having attached themselves to other persons who maintained and abetted them, and who under colour of exemplifications from Domesday of the manors and villages where they dwelt claimed to be quit of all manner of services either of their body or of their lands, and would suffer no distress or other course of justice to be taken against them; the villeins aiding their maintainers by threatening the officers of their lords with peril to life and limb as well by open assemblies as by confederacies to support each other.”  It would seem not only as if the villein was striving to resist the reactionary tendency of the lords of manors to regain his labour service but that in the general overturning of social institutions the copyholder was struggling to make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to be recognized as proprietor of the demesne he held on lease.

[Sidenote:  John Ball]

A more terrible outcome of the general suffering was seen in a new revolt against the whole system of social inequality which had till then passed unquestioned as the divine order of the world.  The Peace was hardly signed when the cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the words of “a mad priest of Kent” as the courtly Froissart calls him, who for twenty years to come found audience for his sermons in spite of interdict and imprisonment in the stout yeomen who gathered round him in the churchyards of Kent.  “Mad” as the landowners held him to be, it was in the preaching of John Ball that England first listened to a declaration of the natural equality and rights of man.  “Good people,” cried the preacher, “things will never be well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen.  By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we?  On what grounds have they deserved it?  Why do they hold us in serfage?  If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how