been obtained for the wages paid under Edward the Third.  The incidental descriptions of the life of the working classes which we find in Piers Ploughman show that this increase of social comfort had been going on even during the troubled period which preceded the outbreak of the peasants, and it went on faster after the revolt was over.  But inevitable as such a progress was, every step of it was taken in the teeth of the wealthier classes.  Their temper indeed at the close of the rising was that of men frenzied by panic and the taste of blood.  They scouted all notion of concession.  The stubborn will of the conquered was met by as stubborn a will in their conquerors.  The royal Council showed its sense of the danger of a mere policy of resistance by submitting the question of enfranchisement to the Parliament which assembled in November 1381 with words which suggested a compromise.  “If you desire to enfranchise and set at liberty the said serfs,” ran the royal message, “by your common assent, as the King has been informed that some of you desire, he will consent to your prayer.”  But no thoughts of compromise influenced the landowners in their reply.  The king’s grant and letters, the Parliament answered with perfect truth, were legally null and void:  their serfs were their goods, and the king could not take their goods from them but by their own consent.  “And this consent,” they ended, “we have never given and never will give, were we all to die in one day.”  Their temper indeed expressed itself in legislation which was a fit sequel to the Statutes of Labourers.  They forbade the child of any tiller of the soil to be apprenticed in a town.  They prayed the king to ordain “that no bondman nor bondwoman shall place their children at school, as has been done, so as to advance their children in the world by their going into the church.”  The new colleges which were being founded at the Universities at this moment closed their gates upon villeins.

[Sidenote:  Religious reaction]

The panic which produced this frenzied reaction against all projects of social reform produced inevitably as frenzied a panic of reaction against all plans for religious reform.  Wyclif had been supported by the Lancastrian party till the very eve of the Peasant Revolt.  But with the rising his whole work seemed suddenly undone.  The quarrel between the baronage and the Church on which his political action had as yet been grounded was hushed in the presence of a common danger.  His “poor preachers” were looked upon as missionaries of socialism.  The friars charged Wyclif with being a “sower of strife, who by his serpentlike instigation had set the serf against his lord,” and though he tossed back the charge with disdain he had to bear a suspicion which was justified by the conduct of some of his followers.  John Ball, who had figured in the front rank of the revolt, was falsely-named as one of his adherents, and was alleged to have denounced in his last hour the conspiracy of the “Wyclifites.”