withdrawal and dispersion of the peasant armies with their charters of emancipation gave courage to the nobles.  Their panic passed away.  The warlike Bishop of Norwich fell lance in hand on Litster’s camp, and scattered the peasants of Norfolk at the first shock.  Richard with an army of forty thousand men marched in triumph through Kent and Essex, and spread terror by the ruthlessness of his executions.  At Waltham he was met by the display of his own recent charters and a protest from the Essex men that “they were so far as freedom went the peers of their lords.”  But they were to learn the worth of a king’s word.  “Villeins you were,” answered Richard, “and villeins you are.  In bondage you shall abide, and that not your old bondage, but a worse!” The stubborn resistance which he met showed that the temper of the people was not easily broken.  The villagers of Billericay threw themselves into the woods and fought two hard fights before they were reduced to submission.  It was only by threats of death that verdicts of guilty could be wrung from Essex jurors when the leaders of the revolt were brought before them.  Grindecobbe was offered his life if he would persuade his followers at St. Albans to restore the charters they had wrung from the monks.  He turned bravely to his fellow-townsmen and bade them take no thought for his trouble.  “If I die,” he said, “I shall die for the cause of the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to end my life by such a martyrdom.  Do then to-day as you would have done had I been killed yesterday.”  But repression went pitilessly on, and through the summer and the autumn seven thousand men are said to have perished on the gallows or the field.

Chapter IV
Richard the second
1381-1400

[Sidenote:  Results of the Peasant Revolt]

Terrible as were the measures of repression which followed the Peasant Revolt, and violent as was the passion of reaction which raged among the proprietary classes at its close, the end of the rising was in fact secured.  The words of Grindecobbe ere his death were a prophecy which time fulfilled.  Cancel charters of manumission as the council might, serfage was henceforth a doomed and perishing thing.  The dread of another outbreak hung round the employer.  The attempts to bring back obsolete services quietly died away.  The old process of enfranchisement went quietly on.  During the century and a half which followed the Peasant Revolt villeinage died out so rapidly that it became a rare and antiquated thing.  The class of small freeholders sprang fast out of the wreck of it into numbers and importance.  In twenty years more they were in fact recognized as the basis of our electoral system in every English county.  The Labour Statutes proved as ineffective as of old in enchaining labour or reducing its price.  A hundred years after the Black Death the wages of an English labourer was sufficient to purchase twice the amount of the necessaries of life which could have