wealth work them woe.  God do bote, for now is time.”  In the rude jingle of these lines began for England the literature of political controversy:  they are the first predecessors of the pamphlets of Milton and of Burke.  Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants:  their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice; their scorn of the immorality of the nobles and the infamy of the court; their resentment at the perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.

[Sidenote:  The Peasant Rising]

From the eastern and midland counties the restlessness spread to all England south of the Thames.  But the grounds of discontent varied with every district.  The actual outbreak began on the 5th of June at Dartford, where a tiler killed one of the collectors of the poll-tax in vengeance for a brutal outrage on his daughter.  The county at once rose in arms.  Canterbury, where “the whole town was of their mind,” threw open its gates to the insurgents who plundered the Archbishop’s palace and dragged John Ball from his prison.  A hundred thousand Kentishmen gathered round Walter Tyler of Essex and John Hales of Malling to march upon London.  Their grievance was mainly a political one.  Villeinage was unknown in Kent.  As the peasants poured towards Blackheath indeed every lawyer who fell into their hands was put to death; “not till all these were killed would the land enjoy its old freedom again,” the Kentishmen shouted as they fired the houses of the stewards and flung the rolls of the manor-courts into the flames.  But this action can hardly have been due to anything more than sympathy with the rest of the realm, the sympathy which induced the same men when pilgrims from the north brought news that John of Gaunt was setting free his bondmen to send to the Duke an offer to make him Lord and King of England.  Nor was their grievance a religious one.  Lollardry can have made little way among men whose grudge against the Archbishop of Canterbury sprang from his discouragement of pilgrimages.  Their discontent was simply political; they demanded the suppression of the poll-tax and better government; their aim was to slay the nobles and wealthier clergy, to take the king into their own hands, and pass laws which should seem good to the Commons of the realm.  The whole population joined the Kentishmen as they marched along, while the nobles were paralyzed with fear.  The young king—­he was but a boy of sixteen—­addressed them from a boat on the river; but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of Archbishop Sudbury to allow him to land kindled the peasants to fury, and with cries of “Treason” the great mass rushed on London.  On the 13th of June its gates were flung open by the poorer artizans within the city, and the stately palace of John of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses of the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze.  But the insurgents, as they