d
rent, though still high, was becoming, on the whole, less intolerable.

But the drain of the French war, and the peculation in public funds
brought about the final upheaval which completed what the Black Death
had begun. The capricious and unfairly graduated poll-tax of 1381 came
as a climax, and roused the Great Revolt of that year, a revolt
carefully engineered and cleverly organised, which yet for the demands
it made is a striking testimony to the moderation, the good sense, and
also the oppressed state of the English peasant.

The fourfold petition presented to the King by the rebels was:

(1) The abolition of serfdom.

(2) The reduction of rent to 4_d._ per acre.

(3) The liberty to buy and sell in market.

(4) A free pardon.

Compare the studiously restrained tone of these articles with the
terrible atrocities and vengeance wreaked by the Jacquerie in France,
and the no less awful mob violence perpetrated in Florence by the
Ciompi. While it shows no doubt in a kindly light the more equitable
rule of the English landholder, it remains a monument, also, of the
fair-mindedness of the English worker.

In the towns much the same sort of struggle had been going on; for the
towns themselves, more often than not, sprang up on the demesne of some
lord, whether king, Church, or baron. But here the difficulties were
complicated still further by the interference of the Guilds, which in
the various trades regulated the hours of labour, the quality of the
work, and the rate of remuneration. Yet, on the other hand, it is
undoubted that, once the squalor of the earlier stages of urban life had
been removed or at least improved, the social condition of the poor,
from the fourteenth century onwards, was immeasurably superior in the
towns to what it was in the country districts.

The quickening influence of trade was making itself felt everywhere. In
1331 the cloth trade was introduced at Bristol, and settled down then
definitely in the west of England. In the north we notice the beginnings
of the coal trade. Licence was given to the burgesses of Newcastle to
dig for coal in 1351; and in 1368 two merchants of the same city had
applied for and obtained royal permission to send that precious
commodity "to any part of the kingdom, either by land or water." Even
vast speculations were opening up for English commercial enterprise,
when, by cornering the wool and bribing the King, a ring of merchants
w