fact recognized as the basis of our
electoral system in every English county. The Labour Statutes proved as
ineffective as of old in enchaining labour or reducing its price. A hundred
years after the Black Death the wages of an English labourer was sufficient
to purchase twice the amount of the necessaries of life which could have
been obtained for the wages paid under Edward the Third. The incidental
descriptions of the life of the working classes which we find in Piers
Ploughman show that this increase of social comfort had been going on even
during the troubled period which preceded the outbreak of the peasants, and
it went on faster after the revolt was over. But inevitable as such a
progress was, every step of it was taken in the teeth of the wealthier
classes. Their temper indeed at the close of the rising was that of men
frenzied by panic and the taste of blood. They scouted all notion of
concession. The stubborn will of the conquered was met by as stubborn a
will in their conquerors. The royal Council showed its sense of the danger
of a mere policy of resistance by submitting the question of
enfranchisement to the Parliament which assembled in November 1381 with
words which suggested a compromise. "If you desire to enfranchise and set
at liberty the said serfs," ran the royal message, "by your common assent,
as the King has been informed that some of you desire, he will consent to
your prayer." But no thoughts of compromise influenced the landowners in
their reply. The king's grant and letters, the Parliament answered with
perfect truth, were legally null and void: their serfs were their goods,
and the king could not take their goods from them but by their own consent.
"And this consent," they ended, "we have never given and never will give,
were we all to die in one day." Their temper indeed expressed itself in
legislation which was a fit sequel to the Statutes of Labourers. They
forbade the child of any tiller of the soil to be apprenticed in a town.
They prayed the king to ordain "that no bondman nor bondwoman shall place
their children at school, as has been done, so as to advance their children
in the world by their going into the church." The new colleges which were
being founded at the Universities at this moment closed their gates upon
villeins.

[Sidenote: Religious reaction]

The panic which produced this frenzied reaction against all projects of
social reform produced inevitably as frenzied a panic