of the war, which rendered the existing taxes insufficient, gave the House a fresh hold on the Crown.  While granting a new subsidy in the form of a land and property tax, the Commons restricted its proceeds to the war, and assigned two of their members, William Walworth and John Philpot, as a standing committee to regulate its expenditure.  The successor of this Parliament in the following year demanded and obtained an account of the way in which the subsidy had been spent.

[Sidenote:  Discontent of the people]

The minority of the king, who was but eleven years old at his accession, the weakness of the royal council amidst the strife of the baronial factions, above all the disasters of the war without and the growing anarchy within the realm itself, alone made possible this startling assumption of the executive power by the Houses.  The shame of defeat abroad was being added to the misery and discomfort at home.  The French war ran its disastrous course.  One English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a second sunk by a storm; and a campaign in the heart of France ended, like its predecessors, in disappointment and ruin.  Meanwhile the strife between employers and employed was kindling into civil war.  The Parliament, drawn as it was wholly from the proprietary classes, struggled as fiercely for the mastery of the labourers as it struggled for the mastery of the Crown.  The Good Parliament had been as strenuous in demanding the enforcement of the Statute of Labourers as any of its predecessors.  In spite of statutes, however, the market remained in the labourers’ hands.  The comfort of the worker rose with his wages.  Men who had “no land to live on but their hands disdained to live on penny ale or bacon, and called for fresh flesh or fish, fried or bake, and that hot and hotter for chilling of their maw.”  But there were dark shades in this general prosperity of the labour class.  There were seasons of the year during which employment for the floating mass of labour was hard to find.  In the long interval between harvest-tide and harvest-tide work and food were alike scarce in every homestead of the time.  Some lines of William Langland give us the picture of a farm of the day.  “I have no penny pullets for to buy, nor neither geese nor pigs, but two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oaten cake, and two loaves of beans and bran baken for my children.  I have no salt bacon nor no cooked meat collops for to make, but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbage plants, and eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare to draw afield my dung while the drought lasteth, and by this livelihood we must all live till Lammas-tide [August], and by that I hope to have harvest in my croft.”  But it was not till Lammas-tide that high wages and the new corn bade “Hunger go to sleep,” and during the long spring and summer the free labourer and the “waster that will not work but wander about, that will eat no bread but the finest wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest ale,” was a source of social and political danger.  “He grieveth him against God and grudgeth against Reason, and then curseth he the King and all his council after such law to allow labourers to grieve.”  Such a smouldering mass of discontent as this needed but a spark to burst into flame; and the spark was found in the imposition of fresh taxation.