The Rise of the Democracy Part 4

The only two principles that are apparent in the age-long struggles for political freedom in England, that are recognised and acknowledged, are: (1) That that which touches all shall be approved by all; (2) that government rests on the consent of the governed. Over and over again these two principles may be seen at work.

CHAPTER III

POPULAR INSURRECTION IN ENGLAND

GENERAL RESULTS OF POPULAR RISINGS

Popular insurrection has never been successful in England; a violent death and a traitor's doom have been the lot of every leader of the common people who took up arms against the Government. The Civil War that brought Charles I. to the scaffold, and the Revolution that deposed James II. and set William of Orange on the throne, were the work of country gentlemen and Whig statesmen, not of the labouring people.

But if England has never seen popular revolution triumphant and democracy set up by force of arms, the earlier centuries witnessed more than one effort to gain by open insurrection some measure of freedom for the working people of the land.

No other way than violent resistance seemed possible to peasants and artisans in the twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, if their wrongs were to be mitigated and their rulers to be called to account.

Langton and Simon of Montfort had placed some check on the power of the Crown, had laid the foundations of political liberty, and marked the road to be travelled; but the lot of the labouring people remained unheeded and voiceless in the councils of the nation. What could they do but take up arms to end an intolerable oppression?

WILLIAM FITZOSBERT, CALLED LONGBEARD, 1196

The first serious protest came from the London workmen in the reign of Richard I.; and FitzOsbert, known as Longbeard, was the spokesman of the popular discontent.

The King wanted money, chiefly for his crusades in Palestine. He had no inclination to personal government, and the business of ruling England was in the hands of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, the justiciar or King's lieutenant. Richard left England for Normandy in 1194, and returned no more. England to him was a country where money could be raised, a subject-province to be bled by taxation. Archbishop Hubert did his best to satisfy the royal demands; and though by his inquisitions "England was reduced to poverty from one sea to the other"--it is estimated that more than 1,000,000 was sent to Richard in two years--the King was left unsatisfied. The nation generally came to hate the Archbishop's taxation, the Church suffered by his neglect, and he was finally compelled to resign the justiciars.h.i.+p.

It was the London rising, under FitzOsbert's leaders.h.i.+p, that directly caused Archbishop Hubert's retirement, and FitzOsbert is notable as the first of the long line of agitators.

The political importance of the capital was seen in the reigns of c.n.u.t and William the Conqueror. It was conspicuous on the arrival of Stephen in 1135, and its influence on national politics lasted till the middle of the nineteenth century.[33]

By its charter London had the right of raising taxes for the Crown in its own way, and in 1196 the method proposed by the Corporation provoked the outbreak. "When the aldermen a.s.sembled according to usage in full hustings for the purpose of a.s.sessing the taxes, the rulers endeavoured to spare their own purses and to levy the whole from the poor" (Hoveden).

The poorer citizens were voteless, and the plan of the aldermen was to levy the tallages per head, and not in proportion to the property of the inhabitants. This meant, practically, that the whole, except a very small fraction of the sum to be raised, must be paid by the working people.

Thereupon FitzOsbert protested, and the people rose in arms against the demand.

FitzOsbert was an old crusader, and he was something of a lawyer and a powerful speaker. Not a rich man by any means, FitzOsbert was yet a member of the city council when, "burning with zeal for justice and fair play, he made himself the champion of the poor." To his enemies he was a demagogue and disreputable--so Ralph de Diceto, Dean of St. Paul's at that time, described him. To others of more popular sympathies he was heroic and died a martyr's death. Across the centuries he is seen as "an agitator"--the first English agitator, the first man to stand up boldly against the oppression of the common people. This palpably unjust taxation of the poor was intolerable to FitzOsbert.

Fifteen thousand men banded themselves together in London under an oath that they would stand by each other and by their leader; and FitzOsbert, after a vain journey to Normandy to arouse Richard's attention to the wrongs of his subjects, bade open defiance to the justiciar and his tax-gatherers.

For a time the Archbishop's men were powerless, but weakness crept in amongst the citizens, and the aldermen were naturally on the side of const.i.tuted authority. FitzOsbert's success meant a readjustment of taxation quite unpalatable to the City Fathers.

In the end FitzOsbert was deserted by all but a handful of his followers and fled with them for sanctuary to the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. Pursued by the officers of the law, FitzOsbert climbed up into the tower of the church, and to fetch him down orders were given to set the church on fire. This was done, and the only chance of life that now remained for the rebels was to get out of the church and cut their way through the ranks of their enemies.

At the church door FitzOsbert was struck down, and his little company quickly overpowered.

Heavily chained, and badly wounded, FitzOsbert was carried off to the Tower, to be tried and sentenced to a traitor's death without delay.

A few days later--it was just before Easter--FitzOsbert was stripped naked, and dragged at the tail of a horse over the rough streets of London to Tyburn. He was dead before the place of execution was reached, but the body, broken and mangled, was hung up in chains under the gallows elm all the same; and nine of his companions were hanged with him.

The very people who had fallen away from their leader in the day of his need now counted FitzOsbert for a saint, and pieces of his gibbet and of the bloodstained earth underneath the tree were carried away and treasured as sacred relics. It was alleged that miracles were performed when these relics were touched--so wide was now the popular reverence for the dead champion of the poor.

Archbishop Hubert put a stop to this devotion by ordering sermons to be preached on FitzOsbert's iniquities; and an alleged death-bed confession, containing an account of many evil deeds, was published. It is likely enough that an old crusader had plenty of sins to answer for, but FitzOsbert's one crime before the law was that he had taught the people of London to stand up and resist by force of arms the payment of taxes--taxes levied with gross unfairness in popular judgment.

The monks of Canterbury, to whom the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside belonged, had long had their own quarrels with Archbishop Hubert, and on this firing of their church, and the violation of sanctuary, they appealed to the King and the Pope--Innocent III.--that Hubert should give up his political work and attend exclusively to his duties as Archbishop. Both the Pope and the great barons were against him, and in 1198 Archbishop Hubert was compelled to resign the judiciars.h.i.+p.

THE PEASANT REVOLT AND ITS LEADERS, 1381

The great uprising of the peasants in 1381 was a very different matter from the local insurrection made by FitzOsbert. Two centuries had pa.s.sed, and in those centuries the beginnings of representative government had been set up and some recognition of the rights of the peasantry had been admitted in the Great Charter.

The Peasant Revolt was national. It was carefully prepared and skilfully organised, and its leaders were men of power and ability--men of character.

It was not only a definite protest against positive evils, but a vigorous attempt to create a new social order--to subst.i.tute a social democracy for feudal government.[34]

The old feudal order had been widely upset by the Black Death in 1349, and the further ravages of pestilence in 1361 and 1369. The heavy mortality left many country districts bereft of labour, and landowners were compelled to offer higher wages if agriculture was to go on. In vain Parliament pa.s.sed Statutes of Labourers to prevent the peasant from securing an advance. These Acts of Parliament expressly forbade a rise in wages; the landless man or woman was "to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood two years before the pestilence." The scarcity of labour drove landowners to compete for the services of the labourer, in spite of Parliament.

Discontent was rife in those years of social change. The Statutes of Labourers were ineffectual; but they galled the labourers and kept serfdom alive. The tenants had their grievance because they were obliged to give labour-service to their lords. Freehold yeomen, town workmen, and shopkeepers were irritated by heavy taxation, and vexed by excessive market tolls. All the materials were at hand for open rebellion, and leaders were found as the days went by to kindle and direct the revolt.

John Ball, an itinerant priest, who came from St. Mary's, at York, and then made Colchester the centre of his wanderings, spent twenty years organising the revolt, and three times was excommunicated and imprisoned by the Archbishop of Canterbury for teaching social "errors, schisms, and scandals," but was in no wise contrite or cast down.

Chief of Ball's fellow-agitators were John Wraw, in Suffolk, Jack Straw, in Ess.e.x--both priests these--William Grindcobbe, in Hertford, and Geoffrey Litster, in Norfolk. In Kent lived Wat Tyler, of whom nothing is told till the revolt was actually afire, but who at once was acknowledged leader and captain by the rebel hosts.

From village to village went John Ball in the years that preceded the rising, organising the peasants into clubs, and stirring the people with revolutionary talk. It was the way of this vagrant priest to preach to the people on village greens, and his discourses were all on the same text--"In the beginning of the world there were no bondmen, all men were created equal."[35] Inequalities of wealth and social position were to be ended:

"Good people, things will never go well in England, so long as goods be not kept in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom men call lords greater folk than we? If all come from the same father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride?

"They are clothed in velvet, and are warm in their furs and ermines, while we are covered in rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread, and we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the wind and rain in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state.

"We are called slaves; and if we do not perform our services, we are beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who wishes to hear us and do us justice."

The poet, William Langland, in "Piers Plowman," dwelt on the social wrongs of the time; Ball was fond of quoting from Langland, and of harping on a familiar couplet:

"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?"

Besides the sermons, some of the rhymed letters that John Ball sent about the country have been preserved:

"John Ball, Priest of St. Mary's, greets well all manner of men, and bids them in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, to stand together manfully in truth. Help truth and truth shall help you.

"John Ball greeteth you all, And doth to understand he hath rung your bell.

Now with right and might, will and skill, G.o.d speed every dell.

John the Miller asketh help to turn his mill right: He hath ground small, small: The King's Son of Heaven will pay for it all.

Look thy mill go right, with its four sails dight.

With right and with might, with skill and with will, And let the post stand in steadfastness.

Let right help might, and skill go before will, Then shall our mill go aright; But if might go before right, and will go before skill, Then is our mill mis-a-dight."

Sometimes it is under the signature of John Trueman that John Ball writes:

"Beware ere ye be woe; Know your friend from your foe; Take enough and cry "Ho!"

And do well and better and flee from sin, And seek out peace and dwell therein-- So biddeth John Trueman and all his fellows."