SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY of murder and manslaughter perpetrated in the neighbourhood of the town." The knights of the shire carry war into each others' manors. One of them hurls a justice from his bench at Ipswich. Seven other free-lances entrenched in the parish church defy the law at Stowmarket." The justices are fined heavily for extortion, but make terms with the Exchequer." The Abbot of Bury, besieged by his Suffolk tenants, cannot collect his rents in Northampton- shire. His bailiffs, when they attempt to exalt the alewives of Mildenhall in the tumbril, have to fly for their lives. Between the regular and secular clergy there is constant and bitter feud." The monks are accused of ' con- sorting with notorious criminals, and of committing rape, adultery, highway robbery, perjury, simony, and usury.* The social discontent of the peasant and artisan class finding expression for the first time through widespread organization in a simultaneous rising in support of a common programme — it is this no doubt that gives the events of 1381 their permanent historical interest. But that this had little relation to the flood of violence let loose by the rising will be evident to any- one who studies the narrative given by Mr. Powell of what happened in East Anglia.®' If we subtract from the total of local disturbances in Suffolk all those that were due to a desire to pay off old scores and family feuds, all those that originated in the action of knights, esquires, and well-to-do gentry (like Thomas Sampson, whom we shall hear of later) ; if we allow for the ill- feeling generated in the recent dispute about the appointment of a new abbot, and in the long-drawn contest between the abbey and the town of Bury; and finally, if we take account of the natural indignation aroused against the ministers of state and their local officials by the exaction of the poll-tax — there will remain very little lawlessness to be laid to the charge of the strictly agrarian movement. That movement itself was not the fruit of any sudden fit of perversity on the part either of lords or of peasants, but was due to more gradual and general causes. For more than two centuries the wealth and population ™ of the country, in spite of war and pestilence, had been steadily increasing. The soil produced more, and the growth of an industrial population raised the value both of food and of raw material. Under this stimulus to improved methods of rural economy the old communal arrangements were gradually abandoned in practice, though the legal form associated with them long sur- vived. Status was giving way to contract. A social stability resting on a wasteful uniformity of custom was being displaced by the irregularities and uncertainties which inevitably accompany enterprise and competition. The typical mediaeval holding of from fifteen to thirty acres was being absorbed into larger farms or broken into smaller holdings. The number of labourers with two or three acres had greatly increased. The condition of the labourer " Hist. MSS. Com. Ref>. ix, App. i, 226 ; Suff. Arch. Inst, xii, 192-3- « Cal. Pat. 1338-40, p. 273 ; l34°-3, P- 313- «Ibid. 1340-3, p. 316; 1343-5, p. 156; 1340-3, pp. 207-8. , ,„ „ c V - ^ =' Ibid. 1334-8, pp. 35, 44, 207. " Mem. of St. Edmunds (Rolls Ser.), ui, 65. ^' E. Powell, The Rising in East Jnglia, 9-25, 103. " This would seem an inevitable inference from all the local evidence. The poU-tox of 1377 was levied on 2,445 persons in Bury, 1,507 in Ipswich, and on 58,610 in the rest of Suffolk. If we multiply these figures by 2, and compare them with those of Domesday multiplied by ; (a very rough method of comparison), the increase indicated is only 25 per cent. It is possible some of the persons enumerated in Domesday appear twice. 653
