mbers, William Walworth and John Philpot, as a standing
committee to regulate its expenditure. The successor of this Parliament in
the following year demanded and obtained an account of the way in which the
subsidy had been spent.

[Sidenote: Discontent of the people]

The minority of the king, who was but eleven years old at his accession,
the weakness of the royal council amidst the strife of the baronial
factions, above all the disasters of the war without and the growing
anarchy within the realm itself, alone made possible this startling
assumption of the executive power by the Houses. The shame of defeat abroad
was being added to the misery and discomfort at home. The French war ran
its disastrous course. One English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a
second sunk by a storm; and a campaign in the heart of France ended, like
its predecessors, in disappointment and ruin. Meanwhile the strife between
employers and employed was kindling into civil war. The Parliament, drawn
as it was wholly from the proprietary classes, struggled as fiercely for
the mastery of the labourers as it struggled for the mastery of the Crown.
The Good Parliament had been as strenuous in demanding the enforcement of
the Statute of Labourers as any of its predecessors. In spite of statutes,
however, the market remained in the labourers' hands. The comfort of the
worker rose with his wages. Men who had "no land to live on but their hands
disdained to live on penny ale or bacon, and called for fresh flesh or
fish, fried or bake, and that hot and hotter for chilling of their maw."
But there were dark shades in this general prosperity of the labour class.
There were seasons of the year during which employment for the floating
mass of labour was hard to find. In the long interval between harvest-tide
and harvest-tide work and food were alike scarce in every homestead of the
time. Some lines of William Langland give us the picture of a farm of the
day. "I have no penny pullets for to buy, nor neither geese nor pigs, but
two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oaten cake, and two loaves
of beans and bran baken for my children. I have no salt bacon nor no cooked
meat collops for to make, but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbage
plants, and eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare to draw afield my dung
while the drought lasteth, and by this livelihood we must all live till
Lammas-tide [August], and by that I hope to have harvest in my cro