252.  Demans of the Rebels; End of the Rebellion.

The insurrectionists demanded of the King that villeinage (S113) should be abolished, and that the rent of agricultural lands should be fixed by Parliament at a uniform rate in money.  They also insisted that trade should be free, and that a general unconditional pardon should be granted to all who had taken part in the rebellion.

Richard promised redress; but while negotiations were going on, Walworth, mayor of London, struck down Wat Tyler with his dagger, and with his death the whole movement collapsed almost as suddenly as it arose.  Parliament now began a series of merciless executions, and refused to consider any of the claims to which Richard had shown a disposition to listen.  In their punishment of the rebels, the House of Commons vied with the Lords in severity, few showing any sympathy with the efforts of the peasants to obtain their freedom from feudal bondage.

The uprising, however, was not in vain, for by it the old restrictions were in some degree loosened, so that in the course of the next century and a half, villeinage (S113) was gradually abolished, and the English laborer acquired that greatest yet most perilous of all rights, the complete ownership of himself.[1]

[1] In Scotland, villeinage lasted much longer, and as late as 1774, in the reign of George III, men working in coal and salt mines were held in a species of slavery, which was finally abolished the following year.

So long as he was a serf, the peasant could claim assistance from his master in sickness and old age; in attaining independence he had to risk the danger of pauperism, which began with it,—­this possibility being part of the price which man must everywhere pay for the inestimable privilege of freedom.

253.  The New Movement in Literature, 1390 (?).

The same spirit which demanded emancipation on the part of the working classes showed itself in literature.  We have already seen (S246) how, in the previous reign, Langland, in his poem of “Piers Plowman,” gave bold utterance to the growing discontent of the times in his declaration that the rich and great destroyed the poor.

In a different spirit, Chaucer, “the morning star of English song,” now began (1390?) to write his “Canterbury Tales,” a series of stories in verse, supposed to be told by a merry band of pilgrims on their way from the Tabard Inn in Southwark, London, to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury (S170).

There is little of Langland’s complaint in Chaucer, for he was generally a favorite at court, seeing mainly the bright side of life, and sure of his yearly allowance of money and daily pitcher of wine from the royal bounty.  Yet, with all his mirth, there is a vein of playful satire in his description of men and things.  His pictures of jolly monks and easy-going churchmen, with his lines addressed to his purse as his “saviour, as down in this world here,” show that he saw beneath the surface of things.  He too was thinking, at least at times, of the manifold evils of poverty and of that danger springing from religious indifference which poor Langland had taken so much to heart.