than those
which had preceded, in dress, in ceremonies, in buildings; foreign
luxuries were known enough to excite an eager demand among the higher
ranks, and yet so scarce as to yield inordinate prices; while the
landholders were, on the other hand, impoverished by heavy and unceasing
taxation. Hence it is probable that avarice, as commonly happens, had
given birth to oppression; and if the gentry, as I am inclined to
believe, had become more attentive to agricultural improvements, it is
reasonable to conjecture that those whose tenure obliged them to
unlimited services of husbandry were more harassed than under their
wealthy and indolent masters in preceding times.

The storm that almost swept away all bulwarks of civilized and regular
society seems to have been long in collecting itself. Perhaps a more
sagacious legislature might have contrived to disperse it: but the
commons only presented complaints of the refractoriness with which
villeins and tenants in villenage rendered their due services;[415] and
the exigencies of government led to the fatal poll-tax of a groat, which
was the proximate cause of the insurrection. By the demands of these
rioters we perceive that territorial servitude was far from extinct; but
it should not be hastily concluded that they were all personal villeins,
for a large proportion were Kentish-men, to whom that condition could
not have applied; it being a good bar to a writ de nativitate probanda
that the party's father was born in the county of Kent.[416]

After this tremendous rebellion it might be expected that the
legislature would use little indulgence towards the lower commons. Such
unhappy tumults are doubly mischievous, not more from the immediate
calamities that attend them than from the fear and hatred of the people
which they generate in the elevated classes. The general charter of
manumission extorted from the king by the rioters of Blackheath was
annulled by proclamation to the sheriffs,[417] and this revocation
approved by the lords and commons in parliament; who added, as was very
true, that such enfranchisement could not be made without their consent;
"which they would never give to save themselves from perishing all
together in one day."[418] Riots were turned into treason by a law of
the same parliament.[419] By a very harsh statute in the 12th of Richard
II. no servant or labourer could depart, even at the expiration of his
service, from the hundred in which he lived