Some fifteen hundred of them were put to death. The peasants resisted
stubbornly, but they were put down. The jurors refused to bring the
prisoners in guilty, until they were threatened with execution
themselves. The king and council, in the end, seemed willing to
compromise with the peasantry, but the land-owners refused compliance.
Their serfs were their property, they said, and could not be taken from
them by king or parliament without their consent. "And this consent,"
they declared, "we have never given and never will give, were we all to
die in one day."
Yet the revolt of the peasantry was not without its useful effect. From
that time serfdom died rapidly. Wages continued to rise. A century after
the Black Death, a laborer's work in England "commanded twice the amount
of the necessaries of life which could have been obtained for the wages
paid under Edward the Third." In a century and a half serfdom had almost
vanished.
Thus ended the greatest peasant outbreak that England ever knew. The
outbreak of Jack Cade, which took place seventy years afterwards, was
for political rather than industrial reform. During those seventy years
the condition of the working-classes had greatly improved, and the
occasion for industrial revolt correspondingly decreased.
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