John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers/Chapter 14
JOHN WYCLIF.
ENGRAVED BY E. FINDEN, FROM A PORTRAIT ATTRIBUTED TO ANTONIO MORO; NOW AN HEIRLOOM IN THE RECTORY OF WYCLIF-ON-TEES.
CHAPTER XIV.
WYCLIF'S POOR PRIESTS.
HOUGH much that is interesting and comparatively new remains to be said about the Peasants' Revolt in the fourteenth century, we have no more to do with it in the present volume than may be necessary to show how much or how little John Wyclif contributed to bring it about, and in what manner it affected his own life and the development of his ideas. In this sense it is at least as important as any other chapter of events in the history of the early reformation; for there can be no doubt that the panic produced amongst the governing classes by the uprising of the serfs was for the religious reformers a final check to the hope of speedy victory.
That Wyclif was in some degree, however indirectly, responsible for the popular discontent is probably quite as true as the charge of direct complicity and encouragement is ludicrously false. It was alleged against him by his enemies that he deliberately prepared the way for an outbreak, and that certain of his utterances on lordship, and on the rights of subjects as against their rulers, were distinctly subversive in their character. If these utterances had been written and spoken in English, instead of Latin, there would have been a great deal more force in the accusation. But, even as it was, the doctrine was there; it had been written and preached; every disciple of Wyclif, and every Poor Priest to whom he gave his commission, had learned it, was proud of it, and would naturally teach it on the village greens and on the roadside. The germs would spread and grow in fertile soil; the crop would inevitably spring up, grow rank, and whiten to the harvest. Is anything gained by denying that principles which would justify revolution in one order of government must be held to justify it in another, and that Wyclif himself did not simply argue from divine to civil government, but drew his inferences from the general to the particular, and claimed that the Church might correct the Pope because the nation might justly correct its own leaders?
It was afterwards stated that John Ball, on the eve of his execution, declared that he and his friends had been misled by the teaching of Wyclif and his followers. Even if it were so—and we may see reason by and by to regard this statement with particular caution so far as Ball is concerned—it maybe fully admitted that the teaching of the Wycliffites must have 'helped to breathe spirit and resolution into the rural classes. It is well that this accusation should be taken out of the mouths of Wyclif's enemies, who not only gave him the treatment of a malefactor in his lifetime but burned his bones and corroded his memory when he was dead; but it is better still that the admission should come frankly from the mouths of his friends, who can have no object in denying that he was both a reproach and a danger to the authorities of his day.
Wyclif taught, as we have seen, that the ultimate power and authority resided in the people at large. "The right to govern depends upon good government; there is no moral constraint to pay tax or tithe to bad rulers, either in the Church or in the State; it is permitted to put an end to tyranny, to punish or depose unjust rulers, and to resume the wealth which the clergy have diverted from the poor." No further argument would be needed to justify starving peasants in refusing to pay an oppressive poll-tax, when their only means of paying it was to take the food out of the mouths of their wives and children. Wyclif may not have expected that the seed which he sowed would bear fruit in this particular fashion, and with such raw haste. On the other hand, he was not a man of delays and misgivings, wherever he was clear and convinced in matters of principle. It is true that he recognised the necessity of caution, and more than once exposed the folly of precipitate action—as on the noteworthy occasion when he declined to advise the abolition of Peter's pence. But there are times when the day of caution seems to have passed, and nothing but immediate action is likely to serve the turn. It is hardly possible to doubt that in ecclesiastical affairs, at any rate, Wyclif believed that such a time had arrived. He might have been a Cranmer, a Knox, not to say a Cromwell, if the opportunity had arisen for him to strip the corrupted Church of her meretricious robes and jewels. He would have done it. He would have helped John of Gaunt to do it, with the supreme confidence of an honest man that only in this way could the Church once more deserve her majestic title as the bride of Christ.
Where the State was concerned apart from the Church, Wyclif evidently recognised that he had not the same warrant to lay down a law of conduct for his fellow-creatures. In any case he did not press his arguments with the same force and directness. They went just as much to the root of the matter for one form of government as for another; but Wyclif displayed a reserve and a reticence when speaking of the existing civil organisation which were not apparent when he spoke of the Christian community.
In a volume like the present it would be out of place to examine in detail the scheme of the two Latin works which Wyclif wrote in middle life on The Lordship of God and on Civil Lordship. The reader who will be satisfied with an abstract of these treatises—which are based in large measure, as has already been indicated, on the works of Marsiglio, Ockham, and Fitzralph—may be referred to the account which has been given of them by Mr. R. L. Poole (Wycliffe and Movements for Reform).
It is in the Civil Lordship that we should look for Wyclif's more deliberate views on the relations of government and the governed; and it is there, in fact, that we find the most direct statement of what has been called his "subversive doctrine." He considers two distinct phases of lordship, the natural and the civil, the latter being essentially based upon the former. Like other writers of his age on kindred subjects, he takes his illustrations and his parallels from the feudal system, and especially from the mutual relation of lordship and service, upon which the whole edifice of that system rests. In natural or religious lordship he finds the grand peculiarity that the lord paramount is the only absolute lord, of whom each individual holds directly, and to whom alone every individual owes his service. But civil lordship, as Mr. Poole interprets his argument, is "transitory and liable to modification according to the changes of human society. It becomes therefore to Wycliffe a matter of slight importance what particular form of government be adopted in any given country, since its only claim to excellence depends upon its relation with 'natural lordship,' in other words with the precepts of religion."
Yet the Reformer's ideal is certainly not what we should understand under the name of theocracy. Logically followed out, his argument would land us in a sort of communism, practical enough, perhaps, if all mankind had first attained to counsels of perfection.
Kings, then, are responsible to the lord paramount from whom they derive their lordship; but they are lords only in as much as they are stewards for God, and by virtue of their service. And their service is due not only to God but to their fellow-men. As all things are God's, they cannot belong to the steward more than to anyone else, and, so far as there is any property in them, they must belong in common to all. Wyclif, says Mr. Poole, "had not yet learned the effect of his doctrine in practical life, as displayed in the rebellion of 1381; but he seems conscious of the danger of excusing by implication desultory attempts of this nature, when he warns his hearers against resort to force except it be likely to put an end to tyranny."
The reasoning of these Latin treatises, however, was too subtle and too academic to reach the minds of the serfs, except as interpreted to them in their own language; and the interpretation probably went in some cases beyond the intention of the original text. The arguments just cited are clearly not the conclusions of a visionary, but rather the opportunism of a reasonable man, who desired the gradual development of the State, and not asocial cataclysm. Wyclif did not fear a revolution in the Church itself. He doubtless thought that it would be highly beneficial; but there is nothing to show that he desired or even anticipated a national revolution in the political order of things. If, notwithstanding this, the tendency of his teaching was towards such a revolution, who will say that he was personally and morally responsible for the evils which attended the Peasants' Revolt?
The question is of so much importance, both in the history of the period and in the biography of Wyclif, that it would be misleading to go on to the details of this Revolt without making some further effort to appreciate the relations of the Reformer himself, and of his disciples and interpreters, towards the men who actually rebelled and revolted against the intolerable conditions of their existence.
Of the exact manner and degree in which Wyclif impressed his own personality, socially and religiously, on the poorest of his fellow-countrymen throughout his laborious life, whether as parish priest in his three successive livings or as a man of wide sympathies and self-sacrificing benevolence, we have unfortunately very little direct evidence. It is true that we cannot require much evidence of this kind for the mere purpose of proof, when those who think least favourably of his actions are most disposed to magnify their influence with the common people. All that we know of this single-minded devotee of truth and "Goddis law" (the term became a symbol and watchword of the Wycliffites[1]) points one way as to his absolute superiority to personal aims and self-seeking. It was one of the central points of his teaching that not a penny should be taken from the trust-funds of the Church, which are the patrimony of the poor, either for "covetise of priests" or to support the pomp of Rome. He steadfastly refused to be a pluralist; and even if he supplied his necessities from the proceeds of his benefices at Fillingham, Ludgarshall, and Lutterworth—which is doubtful—we may be sure that he spent all the remainder upon his parishioners. He could not have preached the doctrine of poverty as he did whilst lavishing on himself what he did not need for his sustenance. If he had been inconsistent on that one point, above all others, his enemies would have made England ring with it, and the books of the friars, which denounce him so fiercely on the score of his heresy, would have abounded in gibes and sneers at his hypocrisy.
The fact that Wyclif was King's chaplain, and occupied a position as lecturer or professor of divinity at Oxford, at the same time that he held a living in the Church, is nothing to the contrary of what has been stated above. The ordinary pluralist took his two or more benefices, his two or more prebends simultaneously, as favours or rewards, though he was rarely capable of performing all the corresponding duties, and was generally content to hold sinecure orifices. Wyclifs chaplaincy and lectureship, however they may have been paid, could not be enjoyed without the full performance of stipulated work. Clearly the absence of a country rector for part of the year in London, and another part of the year at Oxford, especially in those days of slow travelling, must have interfered to some extent with his parish duties; but we know that Wyclif maintained assistants on whom he could rely, men whom he trained to preach and to translate the Bible, as well as to explain and illustrate it by precept and example.
Chaucer's picture of the secular priest may well have been thought of and mentioned in connection with Wyclif; and as we are trying to realise what he must have been to his poorest neighbours, and what his Poor Priests must have been to the serfs through his influence, it cannot be idle to recall the picture here. Might it not be reasonable to suppose that the old Rector of Lutterworth, but recently dead when the Canterbury Tales were completed, had unwittingly sat for the portrait of the "good man of religion"? We may recognise here the moral lineaments of Wyclif's character—apart from his controversies and logomachies—at least as confidently as we can see the actual features of his face in the Denbigh portrait.
"A good man was ther of religioun,
And was a pore Persoun of a toun;
But riche he was of holy thought and werk.
He was also a lerned man, a clerk,
That Christes gospel truly wolde preche;
His parischens devoutly wolde he teche ...
But rather wolde he geven out of dowte
Unto his pore parischens aboute,
Of his offrynge, and eek of his substance.
He cowde in litel thing han suffisance ...
This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf,
That ferst he wrought, and after that he taught.
Out of the gospel he the wordes caught,
And this figure he added yet therto—
That if gold rust, what shulde yron do?
For if a Prest be foul, on whom we trust,
No wonder is a lewed man to rust ...To drawe folk to heven by fairnesse,
By good ensample, was his busynesse.
But it were eny person obstinat,
What so he were of high or low estat,
rtim wolde he snybbe sharply for the nones ...
... Christes lore, and his apostles' twelve,
He taught, and ferst he folwed it himselve."
As to Wyclif's political sympathies with his poorest fellow-countrymen there is no question. He protests strongly in his later writings against abuses and oppressions to which Englishmen were exposed, such as the inequality of the law, the venality of the lawyers, the falsification of legal documents, the subornation of perjury, the perversion of justice, the manifold extortions and fraudulent enforcement of serfdom and labour. It has been urged that he was secured as a popular champion in 1381, and that his greater popularity from this time forward was due to a political (as well as a religious) new departure in the year just named. At any rate the actual revolt of the peasants may well have stimulated his political sympathies.
It is no more possible to fix a precise date for the first commissioning of Wyclif's Priests than it is to say when the earliest of his extant English sermons was preached, or when he began to translate the New Testament. It has already been said that the plan of some of his Sunday Gospel sermons is such as to suggest that they were mere skeletons prepared for the use of the disciples whom he sent forth to the byways of England, to win the souls of the poorest hinds, and to tear away the veil of ignorance or prejudice which had hitherto hidden the Scriptures from them. His complete version, as we know, occupied the last few years of his life, but we cannot say when the first manuscript of his first translation began to be copied out and distributed. It seems to be a reasonable belief that the earlier copies were made for his first missionary priests, and that these missionaries—volunteers, it may be, who asked nothing better than to put his precepts into practice—set out from Oxford, or Lutterworth, before anything like a systematic mission could be said to exist.
There is no ground to suppose that Wyclif intended or desired to create an Order, in any sense of the term. He had seen too much of the perversion of good intentions of that sort to allow him to entertain such a design. But unless the mission of the Priests had been in some measure systematic, it is unlikely that his contemporaries, friends and enemies alike, would have mentioned it as one of the salient facts of his career.
It is easy to believe that Oxford supplied Wyclif with many an enthusiast willing to don the sheep-skin and sandals, and to abandon all—ease and culture and genial companionship for his regimen of apostolic poverty. It is indeed impossible not to believe that such a cause, at such a moment, attracted scores of men in that home and nursery of fervent enthusiasms, which for seven hundred years has never failed to furnish either pioneers for a hazardous enterprise or leaders for a forlorn hope. But undoubtedly a certain number of the Poor Priests were humble and unlettered men, who had been 
LUTTERWORTH CHURCH.
PARTLY CONTEMPORANEOUS WITH WYCLIF.
touched by the fire of their master's zeal in his rural home at Lutterworth. Their plain speech and lack of refinements would be amongst their most hopeful qualifications for the task entrusted to them. They went forth to speak and associate with their kind, clad in a distinctive robe of undressed wool, brown and rough as the russet apples in their homely garden plots, relying for food and shelter on the good-will of their hearers, forbidden to thrive by their calling like the mendicants of an Order that was no longer poor, and rich only in their knowledge of the word of God, or haply in the possession of a roll of Scripture in their mother-tongue, and a few of their master's sermons.
The monks and friars and secular clergymen who came at times to listen to these uncouth wayfarers, and to deride their appearance and their ignorance before the simple folk whom they had gathered together, applied to them a term of contempt which had long been in use on the continent for religious fanatics of the humbler sort. The English "loller" of Langland's day was, indeed, a mere loafer and idler, not necessarily religious, or a babbler of any kind. Thus, in the Vision of Piers Plowman—
All that have their health
And their eyen-sight,
And limbs to labour with.
And use the loller's life,
Live against God's law,
And love of holy church."
"Lollard" and "loller" in fact, did not mean quite the same thing, though the words descended from a common ancestor. The English loller was a sturdy beggar who lived on his fellow-men, and in this sense the term would have suited many of the mendicant friars—"great lubbers and long, that loth were to swynke," as Langland calls them. But the foreign congener of the loller was a religious enthusiast who seems to have obtained his nickname from the friars themselves—a fourteenth-century ante-type of the modern revivalist, or Salvation Army preacher, who would have nothing to say to the regular Orders. An authority quoted by Ducange, referring to the year 1309, speaks of "quidam hypocritæ gyrovagi, qui Lollardi sive Deum-laudantes vocabantur." The Praise-Gods of Wyclif's time accepted and kept the name for themselves, and have been known to history as Lollards ever since.
Sundry references are found in Wyclif's later works—as in the Trialogus and the De Ecclesia—to the institution of the Poor Priests.
"It seems to be a meritorious thing," he says in one place, "to associate good priests together, since Christ, the pattern of every good work, did likewise. But when they ask for alms let these priests be particularly cautious in these three respects. First, let them move from place to place, and not become established (hceredati), for they are not confirmed without regard to their good behaviour. But if they live worthily and uprightly, let them enjoy temporal gifts in moderation. Secondly, let their number, their locality, and the time of their appointment be well considered, for both excess and deficiency in these points introduce an occasion of error, according 
THE PRIESTS' DOORWAY, LUTTERWORTH CHURCH, THROUGH WHICH WYCLIF'S BODY WAS TAKEN.
to the opinion of discreet men. Thirdly, let them be given to the duties which befit the priesthood, for want of habitude as well as indolence unfits men for this work; and it is not every occupation, as the keeping of a booth, or hunting, or devotion to games or to chess, which is becoming to a priest, but studious acquaintance with God's law, plain preaching of the word of God, and devout prayerfulness." Especially they should be good preachers, for in this way Christ conquered his kingdom; "but let him who does not preach publicly exhort in private. . . . And if anyone is specially skilled in training priests on this model, he has a power which comes of God, and possesses merit through grace when he accomplishes such a work."
However obnoxious the Poor Priests, and the independent Lollards, of whom John Ball was a type, may have been to the secular and religious clergy, they were far from being universally unpopular amongst the higher classes. Walsingham says, and there is no reason to doubt him, that "lords and the highest men in the land, as well as many of the people, supported them in their preaching, and favoured those who taught erroneous conclusions—and very naturally, since they assigned such great authority to laymen, even the authority to deprive ecclesiastics and religious corporations of their temporalities."
Courtenay refers to them in a letter to the Carmelite friar Peter Stokys of Oxford, in 1382, as "wolves in sheep's clothing," sons of perdition, preaching their false conclusions under a cloak of great sanctity. No name was too bad for them in the mouths of regulars and seculars alike, especially after the Revolt. So long as the bishops and monks had no charge to bring against them except one of unsound doctrine, the men of that comparatively liberal age paid little attention to the ecclesiastical censure; but so soon as suspicion and prejudice attached to them in connection with the outbreak of the peasants, the Archbishop was able to deal them some shrewd and effective blows. Nevertheless we shall see that the later English Lollards—that is, Wyclif's Poor Priests and their converts—were stronger than their persecutors, more enduring than the Wycliffite school at Oxford, and sufficiently pertinacious to bridge the darkness of the fifteenth century with an unbroken line of light.
We have been at such pains to establish the connection between the early Reformation and the Peasants' Revolt that we may have lost sight for a moment of the main and prevailing causes of this half-abortive revolution. But if anyone could be found in those days capable of maintaining that Wyclif and his disciples were primarily responsible for the Revolt, it would be enough to ask in reply what would have been likely, and indeed certain, to happen at the close of the fourteenth century even if the last of the Schoolmen, the first of the English Reformers, had never written, preached, or lived. Assuredly we might account for and justify the rising—as every historian worthy of attention has held it to have been justified—without bringing Wyclif into the reckoning at all. Let us consider for a brief space what were the principal causes of the outbreak which alarmed all England at this important and most interesting crisis—an outbreak which, if organisation had been possible, and if competent leaders had been forthcoming, might have still more deeply modified the whole future history of the country, even if it had not then and there set up a durable commonwealth on a broad basis of enfranchisement.
First and foremost amongst these causes must be reckoned the obsolescence and gradual decay of the feudal system, owing not so much to the Anglo-French dynastic wars—which were but one chapter of a long story—as to certain natural and logical developments of feudalism, sure to take place sooner or later, and already in operation when the fourteenth century began. Feudalism could not endure more than a century or two, at any rate in its original form, in any country not perfectly secure against the risk of foreign wars. It arose out of anarchy and general insecurity, and was the best attainable device for supplying the two great needs of humanity under such conditions, protection for the weak and military aid for the ruler. But its deterioration as a system began at the very moment of its establishment, and sprang from the same causes which had called it into existence. Moreover this deterioration proceeded most rapidly in a country where feudalism had been imposed on a subject race by their conquerors. The combination of the weak gradually made them strong, and the dependence of the rulers on the lower grades, both for men-at-arms and for supplies of money, gradually made them weak.
When this inevitable process had set in, the decay of feudalism was a mere question of time. The lord paramount had to sell his authority fragment by fragment for the service which he required; the mesne lords passed from the attitude of guaranteeing protection to that of relying on those who fought, worked, and paid for them. The ultimate essentials of human society—the valour, the sinews, the taxes of the multitude—assured for them the final mastery. That seems to be the central law of historical development, under every species of government from the highest to the lowest; and to struggle against it—save for purposes of delay—is as futile as it is puerile. Before the end of the thirteenth century, Englishmen had seen this process in active operation. De Montfort and his friends may not have been philosophers, and may not have felt the full significance of their acts; but at the moment when they created a new instrument of government out of the English Commons they were giving effect to the fundamental law, under which the power of feudalism was now rapidly dwindling away.
It has been pointed out that the growth of the farming and merchant classes, the expansion of the towns, the increasing powers of chartered governments and guilds—successively effects and causes of feudal decay—brought into existence a middle class of new-rich men, whether rising from below or descending from the classes of barons and knights. City men like the Fitzwarrens, Fitzwalters, Whittingtons, Philipots, and Walworths, and their parallels in the sea-ports and manufacturing towns, gradually amassed wealth, and, when opportunity offered, bought up the interests of such of the older barons and knights as were compelled to part with their estates and manors. They bought, of course, the villeins and serfs together with the land, or at any rate they bought the power to exact service from these weakest units of the population. The amount and kind of service due from each, or the rent paid in lieu of service, was set forth in the transferred title-deeds, which were proof and evidence of hereditary servitude. The villeins, free labourers, and smaller farmers who had gradually risen above the class of serfs, whether by redemption or by free grant of immunity, often continued for a long time to render some acknowledgment to the lord of the manor, in the shape of work or its equivalent; and a sentiment of personal loyalty would maintain the custom of this acknowledgment even in cases where it had ceased to be legally due. But when the baron or manorial lord had brought himself into difficulties, by luxury, travel, war, or chivalry, and his estate had been sold to a new-comer, sentiment had no more to say in the matter, and the subordinate folk stood towards the stranger on their legal or moral rights. The feudal link was in these instances finally severed, and only the serfs and the more subservient labourers remained thus closely addicted to the soil.
Towards the middle of Edward's reign the serf, the villein, the large manor-farmer himself, eager to establish complete independence, or occasionally fired by mere ambition or greed, was ready for the first opportunity of cancelling every record of service; and the chance of doing this simply, safely, and effectively was one of the more immediate inducements of the great mobilisation of 1381.
Beyond the causes already mentioned which had tended to weaken the barons and knights, and to strengthen the labouring classes, there was one which did not come into operation much before the middle of the fourteenth century, when its effect was sudden, remarkable, and decisive. This was the notable decrease of the population, brought about by two entirely distinct occurrences—war and plague. In estimating the effect of these occurrences, statistics are not wholly to be relied on. There were no means in those days of taking them exactly, or there is no evidence that the available means were scrupulously employed. The whole tendency of the time would be towards wild exaggeration. The word "million" in the mouth of a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century chronicler must be taken as an easy approximation, not as a verified figure. It has been said that more than half the population of England perished by the plague in 1348–1350 a statement which is certainly not proved by the partial computations made for London, Bristol, and Norwich. The question, however, need not be argued here. It is enough for the purpose to allow that the repeated visitations of the Black Death, the worst of which occurred in the years just mentioned, in 1361–1362, 1368, and 1374, supplemented by the French and Scottish wars, made great havoc throughout the country, and in the more unfortunate districts very seriously diminished the population.
It has been urged, and it is doubtless partially true, that this depletion of men improved the condition of the free labourers who were left, and who were now able to command a higher price for their labour. Of course it must have been so in many instances. The figures adduced by Mr. Thorold Rogers in his History of Prices—irrefragable as statistics, but perhaps safer within particular areas than for general application—sufficiently attest the fact. It is hardly necessary to say that nothing like a universal or even a general amelioration of the condition of the poorest classes can have taken place in England in consequence of the shrinking population. Still less could any such amelioration have lasted up to 1380. The evils of plague and war far outweighed their advantages to the survivors. If wages increased, so also did the price of various commodities and necessities of existence; and the attempt of the free labourers to sell their work for anything more than the indispensable requirements of life was promptly met by royal ordinances (on the advice of Parliament) in 1349, 1350, and succeeding years, strictly limiting the remuneration of labour.
Moreover the scarcity of labour was counteracted by the dereliction of farms—and we need not travel from our own generation to appreciate the fact that a large efflux of labourers from the country is not enough of itself to raise the wages of those who remain. The various causes which were at work acted and reacted on each other. Landlords and even clergymen quitted their posts and crowded into the capital. Serfs risked the penalties of outlawry and roamed about in quest of high pay or more abundant food, thus rapidly bringing down the rate of wages even below the price which had been fixed by law. And then the stewards of the manors, in order to check the migration of free labourers as well as of the serfs, committed in many cases the crowning injustice of falsifying their service-rolls, destroying some records and perhaps inventing others, so that the sons of men who had bought their freedom with a price found themselves claimed and held to labour after a life of comparative liberty. It is more than probable that the rural classes were in a worse condition in 1380 than they had been in 1340.
It is only when we keep in mind these various predisposing causes, and consider how long and systematically the English peasant had been prepared for his revolt, that we can appreciate the effect of the taxation laid upon him in the reign of Richard II. In an evil hour, in the first year of Richard's reign, the King's Council determined to raise money by means of a capitation tax—taxa hactenus inaudita, as Walsingham describes it which was graduated according to the position and age of the contributor, down to a minimum of a groat for every child above the age of sixteen. This first poll-tax was proposed in 1377 or 1378, and levied in 1379.[2] It was intensely unpopular, and the amount which it produced was not sufficient to cover the estimate of the King's advisers. In 1380 they repeated the levy, making it still more stringent by lowering the minimum age to fifteen. It was in the midst of this fatal political blundering that John of Gaunt, who seems to have been largely responsible for it, thought it wise, as no doubt it was from his own point of view, to associate the head of the English Church with his financial policy. On the 4th of July, 1379, Archbishop Sudbury was nominated to the Chancellorship; and in accepting this post the unlucky prelate, who had so faithfully adhered to the fortunes of the Duke of Lancaster, signed his own death-warrant. He held office in the Parliament which granted the second poll-tax, and at a subsequent meeting of the King's Council he had the courage to oppose the suggested withdrawal of the tax in face of the resistance of the people. It is clear that he shared with the Duke, and with Sir Robert Hales, the Treasurer, a burden of fierce hatred from the exasperated tax-payers.
Hitherto the taxes had been levied on land, on knight's fees, movables, wool and leather, which affected the serfs not at all, and the free labourers very little. Talliage, indeed, had fallen on the demesne lands as well as on the towns, and this was virtually a poll-tax; but it had scarcely touched the labouring classes. Nevertheless its unpopularity was so great that it had been finally abolished in the reign of Edward. A poll-tax of universal incidence had been proposed before 1377, but never actually levied. The impost in the year 1379 was the first which had fallen directly upon the poorest classes in the realm; and it sufficed to light up the smouldering fire which was only waiting for a wind to puff it into flame.
- ↑ Henry of Knyghton says: "They used such an expression in all their speech, always asserting the law of God, 'Goddislawe.'"
- ↑ The record of dates is a little confusing; but it is useful to remember that a poll-tax in the fourteenth century took longer to collect than an income-tax in the nineteenth, so that the whole field of production might not be covered by the King's officers for a year or more after a particular tax had been authorised. We are expressly told that the tax imposed by Parliament in 1380 was still being collected in June, 1381.