[Sidenote:  The Poll-Tax]

If John of Gaunt was fallen from his old power he was still the leading noble in the realm, and it is possible that dread of the encroachments of the last Parliament on the executive power drew after a time even the new advisers of the Crown closer to him.  Whatever was the cause, he again came to the front.  But the supplies voted in the past year were wasted in his hands.  A fresh expedition against France under the Duke himself ended in failure before the walls of St. Malo, while at home his brutal household was outraging public order by the murder of a knight who had incurred John’s anger in the precincts of Westminster.  So great was the resentment of the Londoners at this act that it became needful to summon Parliament elsewhere than to the capital; and in 1378 the Houses met at Gloucester.  The Duke succeeded in bringing the Lords to refuse those conferences with the Commons which had given unity to the action of the late Parliament, but he was foiled in an attack on the clerical privilege of sanctuary and in the threats which his party still directed against Church property, while the Commons forced the royal Council to lay before them the accounts of the last subsidy and to appoint a commission to examine into the revenue of the Crown.  Unhappily the financial policy of the preceding year was persisted in.  The check before St. Malo had been somewhat redeemed by treaties with Charles of Evreux and the Duke of Britanny which secured to England the right of holding Cherbourg and Brest; but the cost of these treaties only swelled the expenses of the war.  The fresh supplies voted at Gloucester proved insufficient for their purpose, and a Parliament in the spring of 1379 renewed the Poll-tax in a graduated form.  But the proceeds of the tax proved miserably inadequate, and when fresh debts beset the Crown in 1380 a return was again made to the old system of subsidies.  But these failed in their turn; and at the close of the year the Parliament again fell back on a severer Poll-tax.  One of the attractions of the new mode of taxation seems to have been that the clergy, who adopted it for themselves, paid in this way a larger share of the burthens of the state; but the chief ground for its adoption lay, no doubt, in its bringing within the net of the tax-gatherer a class which had hitherto escaped him, men such as the free labourer, the village smith, the village tiler.  But few courses could have been more dangerous.  The Poll-tax not only brought the pressure of the war home to every household; it goaded into action precisely the class which was already seething with discontent.  The strife between labour and capital was going on as fiercely as ever in country and in town.  The landlords were claiming new services, or forcing men who looked on themselves as free to prove they were no villeins by law.  The free labourer was struggling against the attempt to exact work from him at low wages.  The wandering workman was being seized and branded